Its that time of year when we are getting ready to invite people back to Bowen Island for our annual Art of Hosting. Since 2004, folks have travelled from all over the world to come to this gathering. Over four days and three nights, we will be diving in with each to explore powerful tools for participatory leadership, engagement and hosting conversations.
Our team this year consists of myself, Caitlin Frost, Amanda Fenton and Teresa Posakony, four long time Art of Hosting stewards who have extended their practice into other related fields. These are some of my closest colleagues in the work, and people with whom I have done some of most interesting, engaging and complex work in my career. We each bring a deep set of practices and experiences to our work and we all love teaching.
Caitlin is one of the world’s foremost practitioners of The Work of Byron Katie, a practice of self-inquiry that has been used by leaders and participants in our program to develop a strong personal leadership practice for inquiring into limiting beliefs. Being able to show up resrouceful in challenging work is a crucial aspect to participatory leadership, whether you are leading an organization, a community or a single meeting. The Art of Hosting is predicated on the ability of hosts to hold space when we are uncertain of outcomes and dealing with emergence. Caitlin will be leading a half day of work during the workshop to introduce participants to the practice and demonstrate ways of using similar practices collectively, so that groups can increase their capacity for working in complexity.
Amanda is a steward of The Circle Way, which is the core practice behind the Art of Hosting. Understanding how to lead and work in Circle gives hosts and leaders a powerful practice ground for participatory leadership. It is a place where hosts can learn how to practice standing in places of power and leadership and how to lend their attention to holding open the space that is needed for voices and leadership to emerge within a system . Circle practice is not simply about a dialogue method, but is instead a ground for developing the leadership skills needed for participatory work.
Over the past decade, Teresa’s work has combined skillful participatory practice with a curiosity about how to change systems, especially those systems that are responsible for health and education. Using a combination of learnings from research in neurology, epigenetics, adverse childhood experiences and resilience, Teresa has put together a body of work to bring trauma informed practice to leadership, participatory gatherings and systems change.
This year we are also being joined by a colleague from Japan, Yurie Makihara who uses dialogue and participatory leadership in her work with businesses and municipalities in Japan on sustainability issues.
As for me, I get to bring my deep interest in designing process for complex challenges, using hosting for planning, action and evaluation to address tricky strategic work into this work. What I love about teaching is how much more I learn about my own work as I share it with my colleagues and with participants who are bring real life challenges to the program.
It’s not all about us though. It’s also about you, the participants. each Art of Hosting is highly experiential and you are invited not only to bring your own work and curiosities to Bowen, but bring your courage to step up and host with us. We have participants coming from a variety of sectors including business, education, social services, churches, local and indigenous governments and philanthropy. The conversations and connections that are formed on Bowen often last year, between diverse folks from a variety pf places. We invite you to join us as well.
All facilitation work happens within containers and those containers are separated from the rest of the world by thresholds. When you enter a meeting, you are removing yourself from the world and entering into a space where specific work is being done. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is almost a ritual experience, especially if the work you are doing involves creating intangible outcomes such as team building, good relations, conflict resolution or community.
Good participatory meetings have the characteristics of the Four Fold Practice within them: people are present and hosted with good process. They participate and co-create. In order to do this, participants need to make a conscious step over a threshold into the container.
Thresholds are as old as humanity. The boundary between in and out is ancient. Being welcomed into a home, a family, a structure or a group comes with ritual behaviours to let you know that you have left one world behind and entered into another.
In meetings, these thresholds are multiple and nested. My friend Christie Diamond once said “the conversation begins long before the meeting starts, and continues long after the meeting is over.” That has rung true for the thousands of conversations I have hosted and participated in over my life. And on reflection, I can trace a series of threshold that are crossed as we enter into and leave a conversational space. At each step, my “yes” becomes more solid and my commitment to the work becomes more important and concrete. See if this scheme makes sense:
- Invitation is noticed
- Engage with the call, connect it to my own needs
- Making time and space to engage (committing my resources)
- Physically moving to the space
- Arriving in the field of work
- Entering the physical space
- BEGINNING THE WORK
- PARTICIPATING IN SUB-CONTAINERS WITHIN THE MEETING
- FINISHING THE WORK
- Leaving the space
- Exiting the field of work
- Returning home
- Reorganizing resources to support the change
- Re-engaging with the world
- Working from a changed stance
Each one of these crossings happens whether you are coming into someting as mundane as a staff meeting or something as important as attending your own wedding. Often time facilitators pay attention only to numbers 7-9 and many times 7 and 9 are given short shrift.
I’m curious to hear about your own experiences of crossing thresholds for important meetings.
The Art of Hosting is predicated on a very simple set of practices which we call the Four Fold Practice. This framework emerged from a conversation in the late 1990s between Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Carsten Ohm and Jan-Hein Nillson about what patterns make for a meaningful conversation. After talking about it for days, the clarity that arose was that people experience meaningful conversations when they are present, when they participate, when they are hosted and when they co-create something. Simple.
The next question then became, what if these four patterns were actually practices that could be cultivated both by individual leaders/facilitators and by groups? What would that be called?
The answer was, “That would be called the art of hosting.” And so a collective inquiry was born that has spread around the world and been taken up by tens of thousands of people working in all forms of leadership, organization, and community.
I sometimes feel that the four fold practice doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Sometimes people can confuse the Art of Hosting with the methods we use or the way we harvest conversations or the tools that help us design things. But that’s not what it is. The Art of Hosting, at its deepest essence, is these four practices.
Today we are beginning an Art of Hosting workshop with some community foundations in British Columbia and tonight we began by introducing the four fold practice in some depth, because when all else fails, coming back to these practices will at least remind you how to invoke patterns that make engagement and dialogue meaningful. We began by telling the story of the practice and where it came from (you can learn a bit about that here) and then we led people in a simple exercise to explore it.
Getting into pairs we asked people to spend 5 minutes on the question “Which of these practices are you strongest on, and what’s a story about that?” We heard a bit in plenary about what was strong with folks, and there are lots of assets and experiences in the room
Then we asked people to talk about which of these practices they were weakest on and what they were eager to learn about. These learning questions were captured on index cards and placed in our centre where we will use them to focus our teaching and inquiry over the next three days.
It’s a simple way to dive into these practices, acknowledge that there are lots of ways to come into an Art of Hosting workshop, and build on the strengths that people have. And it allows us to discover the learning agenda in the room and tie it to the practice. It’s a rich harvest.
Bowen Island is where I live and work. Since 2004 there has been an annual Art of Hosting learning event offered by a really solid team of my most deeply experienced and connected friends and colleagues.
Last year Scott Macklin came and made a beautiful video capturing the experience we craft here. Enjoy it and if you would like to experience it for yourself, please join us this November.
Erich Fromm studied love and connection as his life’s work. Along the way he was able to study and learn about the art of some of the core capacities of loving.
From a blog post today on Fromm’s work, comes this simple set of principles for deepening the art of listening (in his own words):
- The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
- Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
- He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
- He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
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The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
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Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.
Over the last few months I have been hosting gatherings among groups of people that have some conflict, which isn’t at all unusual. These aren’t acute disputes but rather long simmering cultural characteristics of exclusion, mistrust and a loss of meaning in work. These are natural rhythms of organizational life and they require intentional interventions. Instead of addressing the conflict head on however, the designs of these gatherings has focused on creating shared work that requires people to be listening to one another with presence and attention, in unusual groupings, focused on things like overarching principles to guide big organizational work.
I can see that when more people are working situations that need intense and engaged listening, they are better able to overcome the low grade malaise and dissatisfaction. It sharpens the awareness of one’s own role, and sharpens the attention on what others have to offer. Sharing perspectives alone is a key route to overcoming those kinds of low grade conflict that seem to eventually sneak into to all aspects of organizational and community life.