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.
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.