This afternoon Caitlin and I were in a delightful conversation with new colleagues that ranged across the landscape of the work we are all trying to do in the world, supporting leadership, supporting quality and addressing the ineffable aspects of human experience that pervade our work on leadership.
And in the conversation we found our way to the idea of friendship.
In our Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics offering we are exploring friendship as a key strategic pillar to transforming the nature of engagement, organizational life and community development. And today as we were discussing friendship as the highest form of accountability, I was reminded of my work 15 years ago in the BC Treaty Process.
Back then I was employed as a public consultation advisor for the federal government. It was my job to talk to non-indigenous people about the treaties that governments were negotiating with First Nations. Most of the non-indigenous stakeholders I had to meet with were hostile to the treaty process, to put it mildly. Some of them were just downright furious, driven by the white hot heat of completely irrational racism, uncertainty and disruption to their lives. At their worst, hey shouted at us, threatened us with violence and tried to have us removed from our jobs. these were not folks that I would ordinarily try to meet with, let alone befriend. But I found I had no choice. No amount of rational discourse about rights, law, policy and economics could persuade these people that treaty making was a good idea.
And the truth is that I didn’t have to have them think it was a good idea. But I did need them to understand what was happening and I did need to offer them many many ways to engage with what we were doing, even if they were 100% opposed to it. It was my professional obligation as a person responsible for the mundane daily workings of a democratic government, and it was my moral obligation as a human being who saw a group of people in danger of being dismissed by their government for their opinions, no matter how odious those opinions were to the government of the day, or how opposed those opinions were to government policy.
I realized that the only way we were going to create lasting agreements that gave First Nations the best possible future was to treat the noin-indigenous stakeholders as human beings. And that meant that I quickly abandoned my professional guise of talking to them as experts in their field and instead I adopted a stance of friendship. Instead of asking them questions I was interested in answering, I asked questions about what they were interested in: logging, ranching, fishing, making a living, what they did in their spare time, what was important to their families.
In due course I found myself hanging out with these folks. Having dinner, going on long drives through the British Columbia wilderness to visit clear cuts and mining sites. Joining them on board their fish boats and in their pastures, hanging out in local hockey arenas watching junior teams from Quesnel and Prince George and Powell River ply their trades. I ended up playing music with people, drinking a lot of beer and whisky and meeting up with folks when they were in Vancouver. It became social. We developed friendships.
And in the end I believe it helped to transform the atmosphere in BC from an angry and bitterly divisive climate to one where folks were at least tacitly okay with treaty making, if not outright supportive. My seven colleagues and I and our counterparts in the provincial government worked hard at developing these relationships.
Friendship is not something that we set out to create. It is an emergent property of good relationships and good collaboration. When you do a few things together that end up being – well – fun, then you begin to experience friendship. And in the end when times turn a bit hard, that friendship will see you through, helping to sustain the work you have done.
It is not perfect by any means, but those three years spent in the late 1990s befriending folks all over BC proved to me that no one is above friendship, and that the results of dedeicated and personal relationship building are essential to a humane society.
What passes for “engagement” these days is so professionalized and sterile that I think it threatens the very fabric of the kind of society that we live in. Society by definition is an enterprise that connects everyone together. “Public engagement” that does not also include the capacity for personal connection is a psychotic and sociopathic response to the need to care and be cared for. And when we get into hard places – think Ferguson, Burnaby Mountain and even Ukraine – it is friendships, tenuous and strained, but nevertheless intact, that offer us the way out.
I had the great pleasure of coaching a team of folks last night who were running their first World Cafe. I’ve been working with this crew for a while – a core team looking at the future of the Victoria Presbytery of the United Church of Canada – and this was the first time they’ve stepped up to run their own conversational process as part of our work. Last night it was a Cafe to sense the future of what the Presbytery could be and do. And they did great.
One of the advantages of coaching is that one gets to reflect on the little bits and pieces of practice that make things work. Last night a number of them came up, so I thought I’d share them here.
Give instructions one at a time. Don’t give a long list of instructions. At the beginning of the Cafe let people know how the time will flow, but when it comes time to invite people to do certain things (move between tables, change questions, reflect, summarize…whatever) just give one instruction at a time. It is important that people know WHY we are doing a thing, but not important that they have the whole flow. And especially if your instruction involves them moving, then don’t give any more instructions until they have stopped.
Invite people to mark the paper early. The paper in the middle of the table is for all to use. “Typical” facilitated sessions imprint people with the pattern that someone will take notes while everyone else talks. It’s important that before the conversation begins, you invite people to pick up a marker, write something and draw something on the paper in front of them. That way, before the conversation begins, folks know that the paper is for everyone to use, there is no top or bottom, and images and words are equally welcome.
Have one more marker and one fewer post it note than people. If you have tables of four, give them five markers. This means that people can trade colours without prying a marker from someone’s hand. And if you are summarizing key findings, have three post-its for a table of four, to encourage people to pick three things together rather than just having everyone put their best thought down. World Cafe is about tapping and making visible collective intelligence. You lose that if you just have individual thoughts.
Build in silence. At the conclusion of a round, have a minute or two of silence. It calms the room down, allows people to reflect and integrate what they are hearing and makes it easier to give directions. This is especially important if you are wanting people to raise their level of awareness from what is important personally to what patterns are emerging. It requires a shift in awareness to see that.
Collect post its before having a summary conversation. Last night we used post its at the conclusion of the third round to capture the patterns that people were hearing consistently in all three rounds. Collecting the post-its before we had a summary conversation meant that people couldn’t “report out” and instead we hosted a “conversation with the whole” whereby we roved around asking people what stood out for them. What emerged was indeed a conversation and not a boring reporting out of things that everyone knew anyway.
Avoid the temptation to use a different question for each round. This is important. Having a different question for all three rounds creates three shallow conversations and inhibits pattern finding. It can also leave people feeling like they are being led down a garden path and it doesn’t leave a lot of space for emergent conversation. For all Cafe beginners, I always suggest they do their first Cafe with a single question for all three rounds. This gives you a clear picture of how the process can work to surface COLLECTIVE intelligence.
Keep the question simple and broad and make sure you can answer it on your own. Trust the group. They want to have a conversation, not guess at answers that you are trying to get them to. Last night our question was simple; given a context in which the structures of the Church are becoming increasingly unsustainable and in which congregations still need to be connected on a local level “What should Presbytery be and what should it do?” That was it. Three rich rounds on that, with lots of great insight and some amazingly courageous admissions (“Time to finally admit that this structure is dead.” etc.)
Invitation matters. Even though the 50 people we had out last night are used to being together every few months, the core team mworked on their invitation for a month. They held the purpose of the event close (discovering what the new shape and function of the Presbytery could be) and they shared the question with participants, even before we had decided on what the final question was. The team made sure people RSVP’d on the invitation which helped us to know the logistics of food and space, and also gave a chance for the conversation to begin as folks started sharing what they were thinking right away. This primed the conversation and meant that people were really ready for the work. Ninety minutes was not enough.
Know what you will do with the harvest and tell people. People learned in the invitation what our plans were for the harvest. This even was about helping the core team design some experiments over the next year for new ways that the Presbytery could meet and be useful to the two dozen United Church congregations on southern Vancouver Island. We summarized the patterns that people found (above photo) and began right away writing a report. But the bigger piece of work will be engaging in design over the next couple of months to create new and interesting gatherings in line with what the Presbytery members actually want.
Caitlin Frost, Tim Merry, Tuesday Ryan-Hart and I have been loving offering our Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics workshop over the past nine months.
We’re really pleased to announce that we are coming to Minnesota May 6-8, Staffordshire UK July 8-10 and Ontario this fall. And we’re really happy with the video invitation.
If you have been working with participatory methods and are curious about extending these tools and forms of leadership to systemic challenges, please consider joining us!
Asheville, North Carolina
We are about to begin three days of learning together, Ashley Cooper, Dana Pearlman and me. And 27 other folks who are coming to something we called “the Art of Learning Together.”
One of the core inquiries of the Art of Hosting, since it’s beginning has been “what if learning together was the form of leadership we needed now?” It’s not that other forms of leadership AREN’T important, but that ihis particular form is not well supported. We think of learning as something you are doing before you become a leader. Something to do before you ramp up to the next level of leadership.
But of course there are situations in the world – complexity, confusion, innovation, disruption – that require us to learn, sometimes almost too fast, usually only until we can make the next move “well enough.” We need tools, heuristics (my new favourite word, meaning experience based guidelines or basic principles based on previous experience) and ways of quickly understanding our experience so we can be open to possibilities that are invisible when we take a narrow view of change.
Over this three days we will teach and learn about frameworks for personal and collective leadership, including Cynefin, The Lotus, and principles of improvisiation. We will use dialogue methods of World Cafe, Pro-Action Cafe, Open Space, Circle practice and other things. We will use movement, improvisation, music and art. And we will employ walks in the neighbourhood, silence, reflection and raid prototyping. We are alos going to be diving into the art of working with core teams and understanding the dynamics of power, identity and relationships as they unfold in a context that is disruptive, changing and complex.
And we are doing it in a sweet space called The Hub in Asheville, which, if you don’t know it, is the most amazing, creative, and moldable space in an amazing, creative and moldable city. You can follow along online if you like at our weebly.
in this video, Organizational practices applied by Tim Merry he talks about an organization that adopts basic practices to restore humanity to its structures. Predicated on the idea that the quality of results are directly dependant on the quality of relationship in the organization, he describes using circle practice as a simply way to activate relational capacities in a team.
The link between relationship and results is well established. It is the basis of relational theory and is a core assumption underlying a whole world of organizational development thinking and practice, including the Art of Hosting.
Good relationships are fundamental but not completely exclusive to getting great results. It is also important that people in the organization are skilled for the work they are doing and that there is a clarity about what we are trying to achieve. Skills include the technical skills needed to do the job as well as adaptive skills needed to be able to respond to changing conditions. Clarity includes personal and collective clarity of purpose.
i find that many organizations excel in a technical skills focus and spend a lot of time on clarifying organizational purpose through strategic plans and the operational plans that are meant to connect everyone in an organization to the central purpose.
And what passes for good management is this technical axis of organizational life. It is privileged by using terms like “hard skills” and when push comes to shove the “softer side” of organizational life is often sacrificed in favour of strict accountability to the plan.
Restoring relational skills is often the first step to stabilizing a team that has lost its way. I have worked with highly skilled team – for example in university professional faculties – where there is no shortage of extremely talented individuals and an audacious but achievable drive to be the best of their kind in their market. But very often highly skilled and committed people get into tough disputes with one another as egos clash and personal purposes become more important tha organizational ones. Over time toxic environments can appear that, when combined with the unskillful use of power and authority, can create pain and trauma in organizations. Almost everyone I know has a story of this. It is absolutely rife in organizational life as we seek to balance self-fulfillment with collective strategic direction.
What Tim points to, and what we cover in the Art of Hosting, including in our offering on Beyond the Basics, is that a restorative approach to human relationships can steady the ship. This means taking time away from strictly strategic objectives in order to attend to relationships. And it is not simply a thing that happens in offsite meetings to deal with organizational conflict. It is about instituting practices – such as week-starting and week-ending circles – to discuss strategic objectives, and to do so in a way that honours and deals with the struggles that naturally occur as we try to do things we’ve never done before.
A weekly practice of PeerSpirit Circle for example becomes a strategic leverage point for better organizational life and more humane working environments. It doesn’t replace technical skills or organizational goals, but it ties those things to personal aspirations and provides a rich ground for creativity, adaptability, cohesion and sustainability