Last month I was in Chicago working with a great group of Art of Hosting practitioners in the Illinois community of practice. We ran a three day Art of Hosting and then did a one day Art of Harvesting workshop with about 40 members of the community of practice in Chicago. The focus of the day was on the art and practice of harvesting.
Our design was simple…we began in circle with a check in around questions and thoughts about harvesting. Those of us on the stewarding team – myself, Teresa Posakony and Kathy Jourdain – spoke a little on our experience and recent thinking in response to what we heard and then we entered a Cafe. In the afternoon we ran a one round Open Space for people to bring harvesting questions to the fore, and to work together on actual projects.
I cracked a good insight about the practice of harvesting and some of that is captured in this terrific newsletter from the group. I’ll write more about this later, but perhaps you’ll be inspired by what Kevin Johnson, Andrea Johnson and Janice Thomson captured from our time together.
This afternoon, Toke Moeller and I are hosting a little session on Art of Hosting basics at a gathering for emerging indigenous leaders. We decided this afternoon to bring real design challenges into the room and we improvised this simple, simple design checklist. In some ways this is the simplest form of the chaordic stepping stones. Here’s how it works.
In my experience good participatory meetings result from good design and preparation. In this diagram the meeting itself is the last thing we design. First we design the bookends: Purpose on the one hand and harvest/action on the other hand. Once we know that, then we can develop an invitation and finally choose processes that bridge the two sides. The meeting itself therefore become the vehicle by which a group of people reach a harvest and wise action ground in a purpose and a deep need.
Purpose
What is the big purpose that we are trying to fulfill?
A meeting that has too small a purpose has no life in it. It just seems to be a mundane thing done for it’s own sake. To design creatively, keep purpose at the centre and ensure that everything you do is aligned with that.
Harvest
What do you want to harvest?
– in our hands ( tangible)?
– in our hearts ( intangible)?
Not every meeting needs to have a report and an action plan, but every meeting does have a harvest. This question is the strategic conversation that helps us focus our time together. We need to think about the shape of the harvest we can hold in our hands (reports, photos, videos, sculptures…) and those we hold in our hearts (togetherness, team spirit, clarity, passion…).
Wise action
How will we make action happen?
– who will help us tune in to the reality of the situation?
How will you keep people together?
It is easy to make a list of to do’s at the end of a meeting and feel like something has been accomplished, but that is a naive approach to change. If action is required get really clear about who needs to be involved to make it happen. Think about who enables action or who can stop it and what resources are required. And if the resources aren’t available or accessible, then make a different action plan.
Also, never forget to make a plan for how people will stay together. If sustainability is important, then strong relationships are important. Building a process that doesn’t enhance relationships does not contribute to sustainability.
Invitation –
What is the inspiring question that will bring people together?
How will we invite people so they know they are needed?
Good participatory gatherings depend on the quality of the invitation. A lazy invitation attracts confused participants. A clear and powerful invitation accompanied by a powerful personal invitation gets participants who are ready and eager for the work. Invitation is a lot of work. It SHOULD be a lot of work. A good invitation process makes the meeting easy.
Meeting
What will you do to make the meeting creative and powerful?
Once we know all of this we can choose a meeting process that helps move from purpose to wise action. We can use pre-existing processes like Open Space or World Cafe or design new ones particular to our needs. Today we are using the group pattern language card deck to inspire creative thinking about meeting design.
If we really want to create a new normal, we shouldn’t settle any longer for boring meetings. If the processes we are using aren’t serving us, or helping us crack the deepest questions that confound us, then we should stop using them and start being more creative and powerful.
This little tool has the feeling of a portable, quick and dirty design checklist, that allows core teams and process designers to get working pretty quickly. Use it and let me know what you learn.
in the Art of Hosting world we put a lot of emphasis on the Art of Harvesting. Locally, Amanda Fenton has been paying attention to this practice a lot and is harvesting tons about hosting and harvesting on her blog, which is worth a regular read.
We’re in an interesting time in our inquiry around harvesting. At the Stantenberg learning Village in Slovenia. Monica Nissén hosted a great session on the chaordic design of harvesting processes and a really useful tool will be developed out of that. But until then, here is some high level summary on where we are with the practice, that I gleaned from an email I sent out to some local folks today.
Basic principles around harvesting from participatory processes include:
- Participatory processes should also have participatory harvests – what is co-created is co-owned.
- Meaning making should be shared.
- Harvests need both artifacts and feedback loops. Artifacts make learning visible and portable and feedback loops making learning useful beyond events. Both need strategic conversations so that needs can be met. these conversations include what media the artifacts need to be in, and how to use our harvests with existing power structures and methods of enacting change in order to maximize impacts.
- Harvesting can be both intentional and emergent. Intentional harvests are the fruits we set out to gather – in this case the report that we know we will be writing. Emergent harvests are the surprises we learn along the way. As these often require different eyes (focused vision for intentional harvests, “soft eyes” to see what is emerging) I often have people take on these distinct roles.
There is lots of work being done in our global community of practice around harvesting. You can find some of that work at the global Art of Hosting site, including our most recent thinking on harvesting. You can also see some of my musings over the years published here.
One of the really interesting things that this harvest inquiry has produced is a process initially developed by Monica Nissén and Mary Alice Arthur called Collective Story Harvest. I use this tool a lot to learn from community stories that can benefit a collective inquiry. But more important than its use as a tool, it actually embodies all of these principles above and is a fantastic training ground for learning to become a skilled practitioner of harvesting.
Next March along with some of my Danish colleagues, we are planning an Art of Harvesting retreat in Copenhagen where we will dive in more fully. We continue to think deeply about how to strategically use harvesting to accelerate the work that happens within powerful processes.
And if you want to learn more right away, consider joining us for the Art of Hosting retreat on Bowen island next month.
SItting here with Geoff Brown and Steven Wright at the World Indigenous Housing Conference here in Vancouver. We are on the back end of what has been a terrific gig.
We were hired by the Aboriginal Housing Management Association of BC to facilitate dialogue at this 800 person international gathering. The sponsor made dialogue a clear priority and after talking about intentions, we arrived on the design of three World Cafes: one in the plenary with everyone present and two in more focused breakout sessions. The first cafe would look at stories of success, the second would think about how to build capacity to support success and the third was focused on institutional development. each one built on the last.
The theme of the conference was “Sharing our Stories, Sharing our Successes.” With that theme to play with, we knew the cafes needed to be about connecting people and ensuring that stories were central to the work. Our first challenge was to think about how to harvest stories and connections quickly from 800 people. We looked at several tech solutions and realized that we needed something simple, unobtrusive and accessible. The ubiquitous tool at hand was the text equipped smart phone. Almost everyone has one, and almost everyone can text. Our basic problem was first how to gather text messages and second how to make meaning from them quickly. Geoff, Steven and I were familiar with Wordle.net which makes a word cloud out of blocks of text, and which I have used in the past to get a visual and intuitive sense of what concepts and words are weighted highly.
So our question became, how can we combine smart phones, text messages and wordle?
Through our networks we found Luke Closs, a local developer/hackerwho put together a simple solution that he called “Text to Cloud.” At the back end he connected Twillio to world using an interface that we could control with commands sent by text message. groups of texts that come in can be tagged and sorted and then sent straight to Wordle for processing. We also enabled the software to produce a CSV output that we can use for other purposes. Luke was great, developing the tool right up to the moment that his daughter was born on Tuesday. Of course, the tool is open source and you can find it on Github, download and install it and use it for yourself.
Armed with Text to Cloud, we began our first cafe by inviting people to text in the name of their tribe of origin. We created an instant wordle that showed who was in the room. That immediately connected people together (and showed we were blessed with Crees!)./ Following that we had people enter into the cafe to start telling stories of successes with listeners paying attention to the factors that made those successes possible. People gathered information on tablecloths and texted in wisdom and insights and by the end of the cafe we had 438 text messages to make meaning from. We had a half hour to do something with all this.
So we sent it all to Wordle and discovered a theme: Building Homes, Building Communities and Building Nations. There were six key areas we needed to think about for capacity building: governance, building, partnerships, community, education and ownership. Steven whipped up a digital mind map which we projected on our screens. We invited people at each table to choose one of the topics and dive into stories of capacity building. In our third cafe, we thought about how institutions can support sustained capacity building.
By the end of the day we were soaking in flip chart paper, but we had some great high level meaning through the Text to Cloud output, the wordles and the developmental nature of the conversation. We retreated to Steven’s room and started trying to figure out how to share what we had learned. We realized early on that there was absolute gold on the flip charts, so we decided to create a presentation that combined what Geoff calls “vox pops” – short pithy and insightful comments – along with longer stories. While Steven created a map to chart the highlights, Geoff and I prepared a slideshow that touches on the headlines. Our plan this afternoon is to call the storytellers up to the stage to share their stories with the audience. They are the true key notes.
This gig has been fun. Our client has been fantastic, we’ve created new tools, connected people doing important work, pushed our own edges and done stuff we’ve never done before, and that we could never have done alone. It was a superb co-creative experience and a great way to spend time with good friends.
I was up north on the weekend, working with a small community that has been driven apart by a large and contentious decision. It doesn’t matter what it was, or what either side wanted – the result is the same result that happens in many small communities: people who are friends and neighbours shouting and fighting with each other.
The team I was working with are trying to reinvent the way this community is engaged. We used a lovely redux of Peter Block’s work to help frame our conversation about design and implementation. A few things stood out for this group with respect to Peter’s work.
Changing the room changes the conversation. We talked a lot about the fact that changing engagement starts in this room and in this moment because this room IS the community. When we dove in about what was missing from the way the community engages it was clear that the ownership piece was the biggest one. As in many community meetings the way people traditionally engage is with passion that is directed outward. There is an expectation that someone else needs to change. We joked about the sentiment that says “I’ll heal only after every else has healed!” It was a joke but the laughter was nervous, because that statement cuts close to the bone. So we DID change the room and decided to hold a World Cafe. gathered around smaller tables, paper in the middle, markers available for everyone to write with…
So how do you begin a meeting with people who are invited to take up the ownership of the outcome? I am not a fan of giving people groundrules, because as a facilitator it puts me in the position of enforcer, and gives people an out for how the behave towards one another. So instead we considered the question of what it looks like when people are engaged. What stood out is how people “lean in” to the centre of the conversation. So the question became, how do we get people to lean in right away and take ownership of the centre?
The solution was simple but was later revealed to have tons of power. At the outset of the cafe as I was introducing the process I gave the following instructions:
“That paper in the middle is for all of you to use, as are the markers. We want you each to record thoughts and insights that other need to hear about. So before we begin I invite you to pick up a marker and write your name in front of you. <people write their names>. Now I want to invite you to answer this question: what is one thing you can do to make sure that this meeting is different? Write your answer beneath your name.”
People took a moment to write their names and their commitments. And they shared them with each other at the table. That is how we began.
The first round of conversation proceeded as usual, but I noticed something very powerful in the second round. When everyone got up and moved around they took a seat in someone else’s place, and often the first thing they did was to read the name and the commitment that was in front of them. Can you imagine coming across the name of someone who you have a disagreement with only to see that they have written “I won’t fight anymore” beneath their name? The core team is now going through all of the tablecloths and making a list of the commitments that people made. Taken on their own, they form a powerful declaration of willingness.
People reported that this was the best meeting the community had in a long time. And it had a lot to do with this tiny intervention of public ownership for the outcomes.