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Category Archives "Art of Hosting"

Principles for difficult conversations

August 12, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Being, Chaordic design, Collaboration, Community, Conversation, Democracy, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Learning, Practice 8 Comments

Peter Levine shared a video today of a panel he was on back in June, discussing practical ways to have difficult conversations. We could all do with a little more practice in this these days. I know I certainly could.

I found the audio hard to hear, but Peter’s post helpfully summarizes what each presenter practices, and I have gathered these principles here in a list for future reference. Each person is working in a different context, but the gathering was about teaching civics in schools in the United States. I think there is some useful transferrance of these principles, so I’m going to slightly rephrase them to be more general.

Sarah Stitzlein:

  • Ground discussions in shared principles, such as living well together or a desire to find common ground
  • Explore tensions (such as between equality and liberty(
  • Use historical rather than current examples.
  • Let the other lead.

Winston C. Thompson:

  • Set norms for addressing identities
  • Allow a person to opt-out of “representing” a group
  • Take responsibility for imbalances in credibility

Janna Mohr Lone:

  • Give full attention to the other
  • Practice receptivity, curiosity and open-heartedness
  • Allow long pauses to allow quieter voices to emerge
  • Make the conversation multi-centred, in other words allow it to become a real conversation rather than a mediated exchange of ideas through one person with power in the situation.

Alison Cohen:

  • Ask “What are you concerned about?” to uncover core values
  • Legitimate concerns without needing to agree with them.
  • Ground the discussion in a shared moral foundation
  • Understanding your own philosophical, moral or ethical principles can help you generate good questions.
  • Listen for understanding, not debate or attack.

Peter Levine (my summary , because he doesn’t cover his own talk in his post!)

  • Name your own biases and make them visible
  • Find a share ground of values
  • Ask questions that are neither too abstract but also not settled.
  • Explore unresolvable tensions

I recently found myself in a difficult conversation and I handled it really badly. It stemmed from a poor comment I made on a social media post during an election campaign where I accused my interlocutor of posting a hoax becasue a meme he shared did not reflect the data that was contained in the report it referenced. I know this person in real life, and the conversation did not go well online. When I saw him in real life, I apologized. A few days later we found ourselves together in the community and we started discussing the point of the post he made. It became a dogfight. I was triggered and upset, feeling some shame and guilt that I had kicked this whole thing off with what he perceived as a personal attack online. For his part, he is a lawyer, so the conversation became a debate, both of us convinced we were right. I was without any kind of skillfulness in creating a good curiosity based conversation. It wasn’t a proud moment.

Practicing these kinds of conversations is incredibly hard. None of us are saints. Principles like the ones above are just basic good sense for anyone hosting or participating in a difficult conversation, but they are incredibly difficult to remember and practice when we are in an emotional state and when the conversations we are having may ultimately have existential implications for the folks in the discussion.

I think at the end of the day one of the key principles that is my own personal responsibility to take is “I want this to go well, for me and the person I’m talking too.” I don’t mean that we should avoid conflict and just be civil to each other, or that we should deny any part of our emotional response to a situation. What I mean is that we should embrace a relationship, even if only for a few minutes, that can hold different experiences, different points of view and different aspiration side by side. For that we need a practice ground and before we step out onto that mat, we need some principles to guide us.

Here are some. What are yours?

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Toke Paludan Møller retires

August 10, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Featured 5 Comments

Me and Toke in Montreal in 2013, on the back of a 120 person Art of Hosting.

Twenty three years ago, in November 2003, I sat next to Toke Paludan Møller in a circle called by Peggy Holman to discuss how we were going to carry on the work of practicing peace that we started in a remarkable gathering at the Whidbey Centre. It was the last day of the conference, which featured Harrison Owen discussing his book The Practice of Peace, and then a group of truly amazing practitioners working together to learn about opening space for peace. On the last day we were in Open Space and Peggy called a session around the topic of “what next?”

I knew Toke a little from the online world, but this was the first time we met in person. We passed the talking peace around the circle and when it came to Toke who was sitting to my left, he spoke words that I later invited him to turn into this poem:

it is time

the training time is over
for those of us who can hear the call
of the heart and the times

my real soul work
has begun on the next level
for me at least

courage is
to do what calls me
but I may be afraid

we need to work together
in a very deep sense
to open and hold spaces
fields
spheres of energy
in which our
and other people’s
transformation can occur

none of us can do it alone

the warriors of joy are gathering
to find each other
to train together
to do some good work
from the heart with no attachment
and throw it
in the river

no religion, no cult, no politics
just flow with life itself as it
unfolds in the now…

what is my Work?

That was my invitation to work, and when he passed the piece to me, I said “yes…I want to do THAT.”

The next year, Toke was coming to my island to teach an Art of Hosting, having previously met some of the stewards of Rivendell, a retreat centre here. It was there that I met Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and others who would go on to be some of my most influential work and learning partners for the next 20+ years. The work of the Art of Hosting was taking off in North America, supported by the Berkana Institute and it gelled so completely with what I was doing through working in Open Space that I jumped into the remerging community. I was invited the next year to be an alumni at the 2005 gathering at Rivendell, and then invited to be on the team for 2006 and beyond. We have held Art of Hosting trainings on Bowen Island or in Vancouver every year since (and lately twice a year, in the fall and in the spring). Toke and I ran a session for Indigenous youth in 2006, set up by Pawa Haiyupis.

That work led to me inviting Toke to be a part of the engagement work we did for the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team (VIATT) an organization that was working on establishing a regional governance structure for Indigenous child and family services on Vancouver Island. Together we did two Art of Hosting trainings for folks working in that field, at Tsa-Kwa-Luten on Quadra Island and Hollyhock on Cortes Island. Those gatherings were profound. David Stevenson was our CEO and Kris Archie was the engagement specialist that I was working with at VIATT. Kyra Mason was the policy specialist. So many of my colleagues and friends that have developed this practice of the Art of Hosting were introduced to it at that time as we were using this practice and participatory methods to engage in some truly system changing work.

Toke invited me to join him and Monica teaching the Art of Hosting at the Shambhala Institute in Halifax the following year and I did that for several years as well including in Victoria and Columbus, teaching alongside a faculty of unbelievable quality and stature. I felt so privileged to by a part of that work.

In the mid-2010s we worked together in Estonia and Montreal, responding to calls for Art of Hostings in those places. We worked together with folks in Minnesota through the Bush Foundation in work led by Jerry Nagel and at the University of Minnesota where Jodi Sanford was leading a group of folks in exploring the practice in the public policy sphere. I dipped my toes in the work that Toke and Monica were supporting in Columbus with Phil Cass, trying to bootstrap a community-based health care network. That is work that I continue to do with Phil to this day, as a regular member of the Physicians Leadership Academy faculty. We worked together on a team with Monica, Phill, Tim Merry and Tuesday Rivera on the Food and Society conference for the Kellogg Foundation, hosting 550 people in a process that radically transformed that conference. We followed in his footsteps as he worked with a crew in Japan in 2017 and we followed up to support that community with a three-week intense visit in 2019.

We were at stewards gatherings in Slovenia, in Nova Scotia, Minnesota, Belgium, and on Bowen Island where we wrestled with questions of how a global community of practice could be held together without being controlled. Some of those gatherings included peak moments of my life, notably the night when we gathered on the rampart at Statenberg in Makola, Slovenia, where we sang into the grey, foggy, gloaming of dawn with Luke Concannon, gathered around a fire, joined in beautiful, present community.

Toke taught me about simplicity and clarity in the work of facilitation and hosting. He calls forth depth in everyone, and is a lovely facilitator. His commitment was always to practice. as a life long meditator, he knows the fruits of awareness of attending to the basic patterns of life – breath, movement, invitation, dancing together. With the Art of Hosting he and Monica distilled many years of professional practice into a framework that can hold this depth and that invites each of us to become better and better at what we do, more committed to dignity, to heart, to voice, to a commitment to what lies in the centre between us all, the desire for a more purposeful, life-giving and loving world.

Also Toke taught me to be a teacher, to always have mentors and always find apprentices who are hungry for the work. He models this by supporting young people in their journey as the learn to host and lead. He shares widely and deeply with those who hunger for the knowledge and wisdom he has acquired over the years. He models mastery – the humble learner, the humble teacher, confident in what he knows, open to what might happen, never knowing where the next thing will come from.

And he taught me to be a steward, to care for the lineage of what has been handed to me and to pass it to those who could also care for it. Not to preserve it unchanged, but to let it morph and respond and grow and be useful to the world.

Yesterday, Toke announced that he was retiring from this work. In a Facebook post, he wrote:

After 55 years practicing the art of organizing, hosting, process consultancy, and sustainable leadership training, I’m awakening into the next chapter of my life.

At 77, I’m retiring from professional work – to walk the path of gratitude – simply for being alive, and to live in deeper harmony with Life itself – as best I can in the last chapter of my lifetime.

I am focusing on deepening my practice of peace – regardless of circumstance.

Supporting other humans of the next generations – who choose to listen – to awaken to practice simplicity, to practice peace, and serve Life and humanity with courage & kindness – in our smaller and bigger contexts.

My journey continues with the co evolving Practicing for Peace Dojo, The Flow Game practice field – and the subtle Art of loving Life – in service of peaceful coexistence and wellbeing for All.

To all my clients, friends, and companions – thank you.

It’s been an honor and good fun to walk and work alongside so many of you in the fire of learning & what matters – striving to bring a bit of clarity, nowness, natural order, capacity – and peace into the fragmentation of our world – wherever invited and possible.

Listening for – and responding boldly to – sincere invitations from the heart is, I trust, a graceful way to live, walk and serve Life.

Learning in the right and wrong.

Now, tending a quieter flame.

Still, the Work goes on…..

The Work is in good hands. I am eternally grateful to this man for setting me on this path of devoting my own life to the deep practice of participatory work through the Art of Hosting. It is not easy, and it is not possible to do without a community of friends and colleagues and co-conspirators in the work. Toke’s greatest gift to the world through his work was perhaps that: tending to a community of “mates” who were willing to say yes to wild things and get in there and see what we could do.

When I met Toke he was two years younger than I am now. His example gives me a path of possibility for the next 20 years of my own life.

A bow to you, my friend.

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Call methods by their proper names

July 14, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Chaordic design, Containers, Conversation, Design, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured, Open Space, World Cafe 3 Comments

Yesterday I came across a paper that was published in a well-respected journal discussing how a group of computer scientists had discovered that participatory methods are much better way of organizing a conference that traditional methods of presentations, panels, and concurrent sessions (which are often just smaller presentations). They took the time to document their work and share it with their community of scientists, which is excellent. The conference itself seems to have included a great deal of dialogue and conversation around topics that were chose in advance by the participants and scheduled by the organizers. But, I won’t share the paper because it has significant issues with the name it uses for the method involved.

The paper refers to “World Cafe” and then proceeds to describe a process where over the course of the conference, two 45 minute sessions were held during which participants talked about topics that had been submitted weeks in advance and selected by organizers who then also appointed people to lead these discussions There were also panel discussions and social events.

On its own this is a fine conference design. Not especially ground breaking in the world of conferences, but novel to the organizers, and the feedback was positive from the participants which is what really matters. The issue I have is what appears to be the misattribution of the term “World Cafe” to the dialogue method that the organizers used. In defining the term, the paper references a website (now a dead link, but archived here) which does indeed provide a reference to the World Cafe method, but I don’t think they used the method per se in the conference itself.

Here’s why this matters.

I do believe that methods like World Cafe and Open Space Technology are powerful and extremely useful ways of organizing and working wth large groups of people in dialogue. It is the core of my work – convening large groups for strategic learning and engagement. There are many ways of working with large groups, but these methods are well established and they share a common feature: leadership or facilitation of these methods is a very particular act, one that has a very different relationship to control and power than working with small groups. Being able to “hold space” in these processes involves using enabling constraints to create the conditions for emergence. Technically speaking: enabling constraints are boundaries that contain an activity such that certain kinds of things can happen within the dialogic container. That is, in the context of a World Cafe for example, organizers and process hosts make decisions about what the conversation is to be about and design questions that enable every person in the process to participate. We also provide the conditions so that conversations can be self-hosted by small groups by making it as easy as possible for people to engage. What happens in these contexts is therefore emergent.

Sometimes I use a metaphor like this: classical facilitation is like sailing a boat – you respond to the wind and the waves to help guide the vessel on its journey towards its destination. Large group facilitation is more like pushing a boat out onto a lake in such a way that it also ends up travelling towards its destination. Once you’ve pushed the boat out, you have no more contact with it, practically speaking. Whatever will happen will happen (or as Harrison Owen wrote, “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.”) Therefore, the art of facilitating large group methods is very much in how the container and the participants are prepared, how the first few moments of hosting are framed, how the room and space is set up to enable the work, and then it is very much about NOT doing anything after you have let people get down to it. This is extremely difficult, but the results can be extraordinary in terms of ideas, engagement, and the overall revelation of capacity of the group itself. This is the heart of participatory work. The Art of Hosting, if you will.

The methods that have arisen around this common garden of practice and experience are well documented. When a person uses a term like “World Cafe” or “Open Space Technology” I would expect them to reference the primary material that exists in published form and use that method with some fidelity. I don’t mind if people change or create new methods from the world that has gone before, and in fact, as long as one has a good understanding of the basic principles and practice of participatory work, this kind of thing is to be encouraged, so that the needs of the group can be best met. But I have significant issues with what happens when this is done poorly.

Many people over the years have asked me to run an Open Space meeting and what they then describe is something that is far from Open Space. Commonly they describe a process whereby some or all of these kinds of features are present: people submit topics in advance, or organizers choose from a list of topics, or there is some voting on which topics will be discussed on the day, or perhaps organizers look at the agenda and then cluster conversations. All of these “modified Open Space events” are not just modified Open Space events. They actually are different kinds of events. They reveal an unstated limiting belief held by the organizers. They take the form of Open Space and introduce some level of facilitator control that is deliberately NOT a part of Open Space Technology facilitation. Why this happens, I think, largely depends on organizers’ feeling that they cannot fulfill Harrison Owen’s oft stated but rarely recorded admonition to “trust the people, not the process.” Open Space Technology in particular is a method that enables facilitators and leaders to fully trust the participants. Ironically, if you follow the method very closely (trusting the process), it initiates radical trust in the people. If you find yourself afraid of some outcome or another happening that you won’t have control over, then you are more likely to take Harrison’s original method and introduce a point of control there. That MIGHT be fine, but I always coach people to do this very mindfully and consciously and not to call what they have done “Open Space”

In its worst case, I have seen so much of the unexamined limiting belief creep into a process that the process is no longer “Open Space” or “World Cafe” but something else entirely. And once again, that is fine, but if you insist on still using the term “Open Space” or “World Cafe” to describe what you are doing (or even using the world “modified” before those terms) then you are doing the field a great disservice, and you are risking having knowledgeable participants view your motives with suspicion. These methods are not new, even though most people in the world don’t know the jargon or technical language associated with our field (and they don’t need to at all to be able to participate.) But if someone thinks they are coming to an Open Space Technology gathering and they are then met with a process whereby they have to pitch their idea to a large group of people who may vote to reject it from the agenda, they are going to be confused at best, and probably angry at worst.

So I want to leave this with a couple of encouraging ideas. First, use the methods. They are amazing. They have been honed in grounded practice, they are grounded in good theory and they work. They are widely and freely shared by the founders or designers and they are useful because they don’t need any modification beyond choosing the theme or questions for your own context. When you use them with fidelity to the original work, let people know that is what you are doing and share your sources.

Second, make up new methods. Go for it! There is nothing to stop you from really thinking through what a groups needs and creating a new method that will help people meet the urgent necessity of the moment. Use a good design tool like the chaordic stepping stones to help you think through your design. If you alight on something really good that no one else has ever done, make it replicable and share it in the myriad of communities of practice, like the Art of Hosting community, that are interested in such things.

___

PS. If you are going to publish a paper on your work and your findings, using participatory methods for large scale self-organized dialogue, here is a good example, with proper references and a discussion of the methods and how the final design relates to those methods. Please do publish! I have contacted the lead author of the paper I referenced at the beginning of this post to help make peer-reviewed changes to the paper to have it better reflect the knowledge in the field of participatory dialogue methods, so that it can be more widely shared without skewing academic references to World Cafe. If we get to make those changes, I’ll happily share their work.

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Designing for Open Space (and other large group facilitation methods)

June 20, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Chaordic design, Collaboration, Complexity, Containers, Conversation, Design, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured, First Nations, Invitation, Leadership, Open Space 2 Comments

Here are four key insights from a conversation on designing good invitations for Open Space meetings. This is the real work of hosting self-organization. It’s not JUST about facilitation.

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Protocols not platforms for making change in complex human systems

April 23, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Complexity, Conversation, Facilitation, Featured, Open Space, Organization, Uncategorized

It’s undeniable that in the time I have been publishing on the web (and before that on usenet and bbs’ dating back to 1992) we have seen a shift from protocols to platforms. Back in the day, people made protocols so we could all talk to each other, regardless of the platforms we used to do it. The web today runs on these protocols, which allows us to use all kinds of different platforms to communicate. Think email. We all use different email programs, but when I send a message, it gets to you regardless.

The enclosure of the commons that I wrote about last year is the fundamental shift in the way we communicate and talk to each other. It creates walled gardens of activity that regulates what happens inside and which limits connection to the outside world. I used to be able to publish my blog posts directly to Facebook for example, but that functionality was removed a long time ago. Facebook will not allow users in Canada to post hypertext links to media sites, which is a pretty reliable indicator that they want to own the web and not participate in it. Platforms limit possibilities and are driven by control. Protocols open up possibilities and enable self-organization and emergence.

Mike Masnick’s paper on Protocols,Not Platforms traces this history very well and makes these arguments for focusing on protocols that “would bring us back to the way the internet used to be.”

I came to Mesnick’s paper after reading an article in the New Yorker about J Graber and her involvement with Bluesky. I was struck at the parallels between the work I do with social technologies and the work that people are doing around social network technologies. When I first got into working as a facilitator, I focused on large group work (and I still do) and my focus was on the platforms of Open Space Technology and later World Café and Appreciative Inquiry and other methods of large group interventions.

These methods for large group dialogue are platforms, but what underlines them our protocols of organization and facilitation the protocol I use is the Art of Hosting, a simple four fold practice, which is applicable to a variety of contexts from meetings to structuring organizations to planning large scale change work. The art of hosting is a protocol that enables more collaboration, more creation, and more resilience among individuals and groups who are leaning into complexity and uncertainty.

On Friday, I’m going to talk about this more and I think I will use the Protocols, Not Platforms idea as the way to talk about how we do change work, and you could join us. The organizational development world is besotted with methods, and a good method for the right need is a good thing. All methods are context bound, however, so to really make change in complex domains, one need to be aware of the context for the work and rely on a context-free protocol to help engage and work. So if you join in on Friday you will learn about how context matters, how complex contexts in particular are composed, the simple protocol for working in complexity that is rooted in the four fold practice, and then maybe some stories of using methods that fit the need.

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Find Interesting Things
Events
  • Art of Hosting November 12-14, 2025, with Caitlin Frost, Kelly Poirier and Kris Archie Vancouver, Canada
  • The Art of Hosting and Reimagining Education, October 16-19, Elgin Ontario Canada, with Jenn Williams, Cédric Jamet and Troy Maracle
Resources
  • A list of books in my library
  • Facilitation Resources
  • Open Space Resources
  • Planning an Open Space Technology meeting
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