Since 2007 when Monica Nissen, Silas Lusias and I sat down at Phil and Laura Cass’s kitchen table to write up our thinking on the Art of Harvesting I have been a keen student of the art and practice of meaning making, sensing, visualizing and sharing the fruits of our work. We have called this practice the Art of Harvesting and I am as happy as anyone that it has become a big part of our practice.
Increasingly however I notice that the term “harvest” is being used with some imprecision that leads to confusion. For example in meetings people will often say things like “we will do this work and then we will do a harvest.” I have to admit that I am confused by this statement. What is the harvest? Is it simply a two minute silent reflection on the work? Is it a 30 page report? A vidoe? A picture? a collection of post it notes?
I owe this confusion to the fact that in English the word “harvest” is both a noun and a verb. As a verb, it is a beautiful word to describe our practice of “harvesting” just as “hosting” is a beautiful verb. But as a noun it is imprecise and meaningless and sometimes confusing to the process. Newer practitioners ask “what is a harvest?” thinking that it must be a certain thing done in a certain way rather than an agile response to purpose and context.
And so I have adopted a simple practice. While I continue to use the term “harvesting” as a verb, I have tried to stop using it as a noun, and in working with clients, students and apprentices I have stopped them when they use this word as a noun and invited them to tell me WHAT we will be doing, HOW we will be doing and WHY we are doing it. This leads to far better harvesting plans.
For example, instead of a design that says:
1000-1130 World Cafe: two rounds of discussion about our vision, one round of harvest
1130-1145 Final Harvest
We get
1000-1130 World Cafe: two rounds of discussion about our vision, one round on “what are we seeing about where we are going” Harvesting: 1. participants will record insights on post its. 2. Harvest team will group and theme these post its. 3. Graphic recorder will create a mural of the main ideas 4. Videographer will interview participants on these themes to elaborate further
1130-1145 Collective harvesting: Participants take two minutes to silently reflect on the conversation and how it guides their work. Participants then given five miuntes to journal on that topic and host conducts a 10 minute popcorn conversation with the room to allow a few insights to be shared. Tim will make a slam poem and read it out to the group.
Harvesting is important. In fact it is, for me, the most important thing. “We are not planning a meeting, we are planning a harvest, and the meeting serves the harvest.” I invite you to reflect on your use of the term harvesting and bring as much or more precision in your design to this practice. Just as a farmer must till the sol and plant with the final crop in mind. our hosting practice means nothing if we cannot create fruit to accelerate learning, wisdom and powerful results.
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I think there is probably nothing new under the sun. Engagement work has been tried, refined and improved all over the world in the last couple of decades that I wonder if there is anything new we can learn? It does seem to fall into “authentic engagement” and “engagement washing” – if I can coin a couple of phrases. But I haven’t seen radically new thinking or practice for a while.
What we are getting instead is some terrific collections of tools, handbooks and harvests of processes. This .pdf of a Handbook for Civic Engagement prepared for a community process in the United States is an excellent example of the kind of harvesting that is useful. It sums up lessons learned from engagement process, proceeds from practice to inform theory and provides some useful invitations for practice and application. This is an artifact which has emerged out of the space of engagement “praxis” – the gap between theory and practice. I’m interested in tis inquiry at the moment, and stumbling across things like this in my quest to understand what is useful in harvesting from initiatives that sustain the capacity and learning begun in real engagement.
“Engagement washing” initiatives don’t usually leave these kinds of documents in the places where the engagement took place. It should be a hall mark of good practice that process learnings are shared and tools are developed as well as results documented.
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“Tell everyone you know: “My happiness depends on me, so you’re off the hook.” And then demonstrate it. Be happy, no matter what they’re doing. Practice feeling good, no matter what. And before you know it, you will not give anyone else responsibility for the way you feel – and then, you’ll love them all. Because the only reason you don’t love them, is because you’re using them as your excuse to not feel good.”
– Esther Abraham-Hicks
via whiskey river.
Heading to Hahopa today. Hahopa is an idea. It is a place of the heart and the imagination which is rooted in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth principle of “teaching and learning with love and kindness.” You might say that it is a place of grace, an ideal place where we can ground our happiness in an experimental way of being.
Hahopa is the dream of my friend Pawa Haiyupis. Pawa’s full name is Pawasquacheetl which means “she gives in the feast with the energy of bees coming out of a hive.” For years she has wanted to give the world a place where Nuu-Chah-Nulth teachings can be offered to anyone who feels that they are useful. Inspired by our friends at Kufunda village in Zimbabwe, Pawa and her family this week are embarking on an incredible dream. The work we do together this week will set in place a lifetime of contribution to the world.
So I am off to Tofino where we will initiate this endeavour being hosted by the land, the beach and the sea. We are open to seeing what will come of it and how it will flow.
If you would like to support this dream, please consider donating to the Indiegogo campaign and follow along here and on the facebook page where I will be helping to harvest what we learn.
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Some of my friends and I with in the Art of Hosting community create poems from our work as a kind of harvest, a way of listening to the voices shared in a circle and reflecting back to the group, it’s wholeness using the words of those in the room. The poems are written on the spot and read into the room, slam style. Such poems evoke energy, and honour the whole. We call these “dialogue poems.” Here is the one from yesterday’s check in in Montreal with our core hosting team…
Hosting team Check in poem
Where did you practice?
Where did you act as if you could do this?
What does the silence have to show us?
What is inside this seed?A potential to feed what is needed everywhere
Hosting is caring so we’re daring to share
what is in our jardin communitaire:
101 ways in a single day
to face the case of urban space
fall into a call of enfolded breath
and die 101 little deaths, for co-creation to be the method
that we use to create and let go. Whoa. Peace flowsCaroline is on the scene
and clear love flows in between us
a clean passing of a piece to serve
the swerve and curve of jangly nerves
that the emergent life turns up.
This is a romance and a dance of hosted circumstance.The space of the public dream seems
to be called to scream from the megaphone
deep in our bones in the intention for an intervention
ot suspension to the conventional ways of doing things.
We meet despair with care for beauty and do our duty.Economics in the commons needs us to anchor danger
as the social order rearranges strangers into the angels of
the commons”but”but”
Words were never spoken for the broken structures I have seen
for the painful way we remain unclean in the unconscious hosting
that leaves us unseen and suffering the wasted talents of human beings
so I offer a new chance to call us all into the hall and
share the commoning of Montreal.When there is no room at the inn we move outside and work from the rim.
And all we need to take
is one minute, innit?
Because a crack is a small thing to make.Small is beautiful, but tiny is fuller
What is the smallest container that can hold the future?
A negotiation with a child, a wild realization that we only flower
when the smallest things claim their power
and we take an hour to be in peace with other generations.The appearance of the aperitif
Helps us arrive and be hereThis work can be hard
when we haven’t got a clue
and the parameters make us do things we don’t want to do
we host grief and hate and create the state
for the gates to open and action to gain traction
for a fraction of the cost of the money we’ve already lost.And then, abundance appears because we stayed with the fears
and the tears and we finally see everyone as peers.It was a ride to get a guide that would help us get inside
the Art of Hosting and glide us to understanding, landing whatever we can
as a resource to help us plan for this.Two thousand thirteen seems like a series of scenes
of moments that mean my life has seen
the real application of peace between human beings.
In cote d’ivoire, ravaged by war, a mayor named need
to plant a seed for people to lead the conversations
that stop the bleeding and meet the need for
the chief of chiefs to hold the belief that these ways of talking
can bring relief.Two hundred thousand years of leadership
called into relationship, mateship and friendship
in a moment of reconciliation for a nation
where you do not have to be sorry
for the story, but you must offer a forum
for the experience of peace and a shift to dignified decorum.We are not here to be small.
We all just want peace.
That is all.I am touched to be here.
Daring to appear
à table citoyen”where the rabble fits in
to chatter and natter about things that matter and
do it in public where the interests clatter
and find a place to practice together
co-create a project that’s better and better”
and shift my life to something unfettered.
by the separation that I’m deluded with.
Tend to the people that are coming,
feel the field and yield to the real.Since January for me
It’s been a race from place to place
tracing a line from space to space
and stopping a moment to face the grace
That I have to receive for living as me authentically
I hope to inspire near and far
people to be just who they are.En formations nous avons les informations
pour le realization de collaboration
we carried the living spark
of what was lit in Lafontaine Parc
embodied a some light that shone in the dark
flowing from our humanity, a practice of embodied calamity!I feel that I am a dwarf among giants
and ready to offer my heart and defiance
of what my own ego wants us to do
so we can be free. How about you?
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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.