Over the past few years, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to develop artistic mastery in facilitation/hosting practice. It’s an important topic to me because I teach this work, and it’s not always easy to design deep learning when people are expecting to become instantly good at facilitation after a single workshop.
The Art of Hosting is a practice founded on tools, rooted in theory. It takes time to understand and integrate this practice and become masterful at it. I often draw parallels between learning the practice and development of mastery in the arts.
Today I was sharing my experience in a kind of cheeky way with some other Art of Hosting stewards, and I wrote the following, which seems helpful:
The 14 steps of the artist’s journey to mastery (based on the last 30 years of my experience)
1. Cultivate the desire to create beauty
2. Discover a medium for doing so
3. Seek the teachers who can teach you how to use the tools of your medium faithfully
4. Use the tools faithfully to make simple things.
5. Ask why things work and why they don’t
6. With that knowledge, modify your tools to do what needs to be done beyond simplicity.
7. Discover the limitations of your tools.
8. Become a tool maker
9. Take on apprentices and teach them to use the tools faithfully to make simple things
10. Take on apprentices and help them reflect on why they are succeeding and failing.
11. I don’t know…I haven’t got there yet
12. Unimaginable to me, but I see it.
13. Wow.
14. The unrealized ideal master that I aspire to become, should I be given more than one lifetime to do so.Along the way, be aware of the following:
- self-doubt
- errors at different scales
- mistakes and regret
- joy and surprise
- the desire of others to learn from you
- the feeling that you have nothing to offer them
- times of steep learning and times of long periods of integration
- waxing and waning of inspiration
- Rule 6a applies at all times (an inside joke: Rule 6a is “Don’t take yourself too f*cking seriously)
I’ve been deeply influenced over the years by Christina Baldwin’s principle that “no one person can be responsible for the safety of the group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for it’s own safety.” I too think that the principles of Open Space allow for the right balance for individuals to take responsibility for co-creating group safety. What is remarkable is that safety is an emergent phenomenon in Open Space, a true artifact of a self-organizing system. Of course I have seen some real conflicts happen in Open Space, but what seems to mitigate them is the double wall of the container.
What I mean by that is that meetings in Open Space happen within break out groups within the larger container. If a break out group breaks down, participants are still held in the larger space. I have seen very few instances where people in conflict left the bigger container, even if the exercised the law of two feet and left their breakout space. Most often a kind of “neutral ground” emerges in Open Space: near the agenda wall, around the coffee table, sometimes outside on a nice day. These emergent neutral spaces provide participants with a chance to discharge, relax, calm down and get their wits about them. The facilitator never has to do anything, in my experience, but just keep holding the space.
I don’t like the idea of safe space though, I prefer the term “safe enough” space, or even “brave space.” For many marginalized people the idea of safe space is always a myth, and there is no way that we can guarantee it will emerge in Open Space. So instead I encourage people to take a bit of a risk and enter into “safe enough” space, so that they can learn something new and let go of whatever it is they are holding on to.
I remember an event I did once on Hawaii with indigenous Hawaiians and well heeled Americans looking together at the values of reverence and sustainability. At one point, one of the Americans, a person with a net worth in the millions of dollars, asked the group that we commit to safety in the space. This raised the ire of the senior Elder in the room who snapped (and I paraphrase) “You have no right to safe space! Your desire for safety has imperilled the entire world. We do not live safe lives as a result. Our lands are colonized, our food supplies are depleted and our oceans are in danger of no longer providing for us. There is no safe space here. You must learn to live with risk and take responsibility for your role in creating it.”
When we are invited into risk together, everyone giving up safety according to their means, the possibility for real relationship exists in the shared challenge to our well held worldviews.
We were working with a local government client last week in a meeting that had a very contentious subject matter focused on the return of land and uses of that land, to First Nations owners. There was an important conversation as a part of this work that involved removing a structure that had some historical significance to the community but was seen as a mark of an oppressive history by the First Nations owners who could not contemplate it remaining on their land. It is a wickedly complicated issue right at the heart of what reconciliation really means: returning land, transferring ownership and working with history.
Our client did an incredible job of preparing multiple stakeholders to participate in this discussion, by meeting each group personally and hearing their thoughts on the situation. All the stakeholders, twenty in total, agreed to come to a two hour dialogue to discuss the issues at hand. Our client put together a beautiful 8 page booklet with much of the technical information in it about proposals and process and sharing some of the things they had heard in the pre-meetings. The format of the day included a presentation from the First Nations about what they were proposing and why, with most of the meeting involving a World Cafe for dialogue.
It went well. We received a couple of really powerful pieces of positive feedback.
These kinds of conversations are the sharp edge of the reconciliation wedge. It is one thing to conduct a brief territorial acknowledgement at the beginning of a meeting or event, it is entirely another for people to sit down and discuss the issues around the return of land.
In debriefing with our client this week, she made the following observations about what contributed to the usefulness of the container for this conversation:
- Very small groups – no more than four at a table – meant that there was no need for people to “take their best shot” as they would have in a larger plenary format. Groups smaller than five reduce the performative nature of conversation and allow dialogue to fully unfold. This enabled people who needed to invest a lot of emotional energy and attention in their speaking and listening, to operate in a more relaxed way.
- The questions for the dialogue were very broad. Sometimes the most powerful question is “what are you thinking and feeling about what you just heard?” This question kicked off 45 minutes of intense learning, listening and story telling at the tables.
- The invitation process is everything. We helped our client design an invitation process but she took the lead in going to each group separately and talking to them about why they were needed in the conversation.
- There were no observers. Everyone in the room was at a table except for me and our graphic recorder. Everyone at a table had a question they needed answered or a curiosity about the outcome. there was no certainty in the room, no positionality, and yet, each person spoke about their own experience and their own perspective and listened carefully to what others said. Also, everyone in the room had to stretch their perspectives to participate. This was not comfortable for anyone, because this work isn’t comfortable for anyone. It is literally unsettling.
- The First Nations leadership pulled no punches in explaining their reasons for their proposal and why it was important that the structure be removed from their lands. This can be a very tricky thing because while it is important for non-indigenous stakeholders to hear First Nations perspectives, there is a tremendous amount of emotional labour involved in talking about traumatizing history. We had one of our own team prepared to talk about the history and emotional legacy of the structure. She had interviewed people from her community and was well positioned to share the rationale but on the day we didn’t need to her to tell the story as the leadership were willing to tell that story themselves. Enabling this to happen well is important.
Reconciliation is nothing without the return of the lands or the influence over the lands which we acknowledge as “unceded territory.” What stops people from going much further than territorial acknowledgement is the fear of being unsettled in the conversation. But we can’t do this work without holding containers that allow for people to be unsettled. Only that way to we share perspectives and find possibilities and to do so in small, deep conversations where stories can be shared, perspectives understood and . Or sometimes not. But the path to reconciliation requires us to try, and these few notes and observations might help in that.
One of the things I am learning reading Stuart Kauffman’s book “Reinventing the Sacred” is just how powerful and pervasive the phenomenon of creative emergence is at every level in our world. From the very tiny chemical interactions that begin to define what life is, up to the order of the planetary biosphere and noosphere to the cosmic scale, emergence from pre-adaptions is a pattern that is everywhere, that offers a counterpoint to the reductionism of physics and yet does not violate the laws of physics at all. This paragraph sums up his premise:
“We are beyond the hegemony of the reductionism of half a century ago. We have seen that Darwinian natural selection and biological functions are not reducible to physics. We have seen that my law of collectively autocatalytic sets in the origin of life is also not reducible to physics. We have seen creditable evidence that science is moving forward towards an explanation for the natural emergence of life, agency, meaning, value, and doing. We have, thus, seen emergence with respect to a pure reductionism. Thanks to the nonergodicity and historicity of the universe above the level of atoms, the evolution of the biosphere by Darwinian preadaptations cannot be foretold, and the familiar Newtonian way of doing science fails. Such preadaptations point to a ceaseless creativity in the evolution of the biosphere. If by a natural law we mean a compact prior description of the regularities of the phenomena in question, the evolution of the biosphere via preadaptations is not describable by law. We will soon find its analogues in economic and cultural evolution, which, like the biosphere, are self-consistently self-constructing but evolving wholes whose constituents are partially lawless. This is a radically different scientific worldview than we have known. I believe this new scientific worldview breaks the Galilean spell of the sufficiency of natural law. In its place is a freedom we do not yet understand, but ceaseless creativity in the universe, biosphere, and human life are its talismans. I believe this creativity suffices to allow us to reinvent the sacred as the stunning reality we live in. But even more is at stake. Our incapacity to predict Darwinian preadaptations, when their analogues arise in our everyday life, demands of us that we rethink the role of reason itself, for reason cannot be a sufficient guide to live our lives forward, unknowing. We must come to see reason as part of a still mysterious entirety of our lives, when we often radically cannot know what will occur but must act anyway. We do, in fact, live forward into mystery. Thus we, too, are a part of the sacred we must reinvent.” (from “Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion” by Stuart A. Kauffman)
Now I want to be clear that despite my interest in theology, I am not reading this book from a theological perspective. In fact I am wondering a bit why Kauffman insists on tying his amazing proposition to the idea of “the sacred” because it actually makes for something of a distraction in his narrative. And as we get into the extension of his ideas into the economic and cultural realms, the idea of the sacred seems less and less interesting. What is more interesting is to see the parallels between the physical and biological acts of creative emergence and the way in which our cultural, social and economic lives are intertwined with natural processes.
To me this is the good part about this book. It validates that approaches to complexity and emergence are necessary parts of human social life and we need to relearn them (perhaps even re-place them as sacred epistemologies alongside the religion of reductionism) and put them to use to counter the dark stuff that has crept into our human world through our cleverness and addiction to a method of analysis that reduces the world and it’s problems to mere parts.
We are embarking on a innovative approach to a social problem and we need a framework to guide the evaluation process. As it is a complex challenge, we’re beginning with a developmental evaluation framework. To begin creating that,I was at work for most of the morning putting together a meta-framework, consisting of questions our core team needs to answer. In Art of Hosting terms, we might call this a harvesting plan.
For me, when working in the space of developmental evaluation, Michael Quinn Patton is the guy whose work guides mine. This morning I used his eight principles to fashion some questions and conversation invitations for our core team. The eight principles are:
- Developmental purpose
- Evaluation rigor
- Utilization focus
- Innovation niche
- Complexity perspective
- Systems thinking
- Co-creation
- Timely feedback
The first four of these are critical and the second four are kind of corollaries to the first and the first two are essential.
I think in the Art of Hosting and Art of Harvesting communities we get the first principle quite well, that participatory initiatives are, by their nature, developmental. They evolve and change and engage emergence. What I don’t see a lot of however is good rigour around the harvesting and evaluation.
All conversations produce data. Hosts and harvesters make decisions and choices about the kind of data to take away from hosted conversations. Worse, we sometimes DON’T make those decisions and then we end up with a mess, and nothing useful or reliable as a result of our work.
I was remembering a poorly facilitated session I once saw where the facilitator asked for brainstormed approaches to a problem. He wrote them in a list on a flip chart. When there were no more ideas, he started at the top and asked people to develop a plan for each one.
The problems with this approach are obvious. Not al ideas are equal, not all are practical. “Solve homlessness” is not on the same scale as “provide clothing bundles.” No one would seriously believe that this is an effective way to make a plan or address an issue.
You have to ask why things matter. When you are collecting data, why are you collecting that data and how are you collecting it? What is it being used for? Is it a reliable data source? What is your theoretical basis for choosing to work with this data versus other kinds of data?
I find that we do not do that enough in the art of hosting community. Harvesting is given very little thought other than “what am I going to do with all these flipcharts?” at which point it is too late. Evaluation (and harvesting) rigour is a design consideration. If you are not rigourous in your data collection and your harvesting methods, others can quite rightly challenge your conclusions. If you cannot show that the data you have collected is coherent with a strategic approach to the problem you are addressing, you shouldn’t be surprised if your initiative sputters.
In my meta-framework the simple questions I am using are:
- What are our data collection methods?
- What is the theoretical basis and coherence for them?
That is enough to begin the conversation. Answering these has a major impact on what we are hosting.
I high recommend Quinn Patton et. al.’s book Developmental Evaluation Exemplars for a grounded set of principles and some cases. Get rigourous.