On a bus at the moment travelling from Tartu to Tallinn, through the Estonian countryside. We pass by fields and forests that remind me deeply of the southern Ontario countryside I grew up, differing only in the occasional ruins of old Soviet collectivist farms and apartment blocks that housed their workers when this was part of the Soviet Union.
This is my second trip to Estonia and it is perhaps not my last one. There is some much that is interesting about this country and my friends here, including a close connection to land and culture and a strong sense of both contemporary identity and traditional practices. It somehow for me embodies the Art of Hosting.
This week we were running a Learning Village – a sort of training where we come together to work and co-create community for a week and share learning that deepens our practices of hosting and supporting authentic human being in community and organization, family and life. We were at that Sänna Kulturmoise, an old German manor that was bought by a group of families who are running it as an intentional community and a place of learning and co-creation. We lived half our time in Open Space, half our time hosted in beautiful process with a local team led Piret Jeedas and Ivika Nögel and Robert Oetjen along with Dianna, Kritsi, Kristina, Helina, Paavo and other AoH practctioners. James Ede, Luke Concannon, Anne Madsen and I represented the visiting contingent.
As beautiful as the Art of Hosting Learning Village was, for me the journey was also about exploring something deeper here in Estonia. I have noticed in my practice lately that it is hard to sustain the kind of energy, interest and creativity that I have always tried to bring to my work. I have been reflecting on this and why it is and what it all means. So the Art of Hosting gave me a chance to work with new and old friends, and to host in a radically different context where I had to be sensitive to language and culture. But it also took place in a part of the world that has something to teach me.
Travel of course, always does this…gets us out of our patterns and ruts. I have had very little opportunity to reflect on my work this year, and so I have been treating this journey to Europe (which includes a leg in Turkey and one in Ireland as well) to be a time to discover something new.
Here in Estonia, it has felt like I have gone through several gates. Arriving in Europe, arriving in Estonia, spending one night in the capital Tallinn, travelling to the rural and traditional south to work at Sänna, and then a journey with friends deep into the heart of Setomaa, the region of Estonia that is home to the Seto people, a small Finno-Ugric tribe that I have come to love. Our friend Piret has a piece of land she is working on in the village of Harma, very near to the summer home of our friend Margus, who works for the Seto Nation. Eight of us packed down to Setomaa the other night to spend the night at Margus’s house, to practice sauna together, eat at a traditional Seto guest house, sing songs from our traditions, take part in local traditional social protocols of sharing a local moonshine called hanza which is used kind of as a talking piece by Seto hosts and to rest on the land. Yesterday morning we woke up and went walking and harvesting in the forest, picking many mushrooms, blueberries and lingonberries, visiting Piret’s land, and a new local chapel called a tsässons, which is a traditional worship place of Seto people. It was a journey that seemed to go every deeper into an ancient landscape of human activity, human community, deep friendship and powerful connection. We were hosted by the land and each other and we were blessed with a quality of time and space that seems rare.
Yesterday as we were leaving, across the fields behind Margus’ place, we witnessed what I think was the teaching that this container held. James and I stood and looked across a field at two women, a man and a horse who were taking hay from a field by hand. The women were cutting it and carrying it to the man who was pitching it into a horse drawn hay wagon. It was an incredibly powerful scene of continuity and tradition and also sustainability, practicality, simplicity and clarity. We remarked that perhaps if we could simply undertake to practice these kinds of ancient human practices with such clean volition, it would be our ideal.
I am leaving Estonia for Turkey this afternoon with the thought that this simplicity of practice is what will renew me. We humans are in love with our brains, and in making things complicated and confusing. Sometimes harvesting the hay is so simple that we can do it the way we have always done it. I think much of our work in hosting is the same. We may be facing novel situiations and mproblems in the world, but there is very little that is different about how we as humans can deal with them. To practice the ancient arts of conversations, meaning making, connection and community in the service of meeting needs, and to do that simply is the lesson.
And in some small but not insignificant way, Esotina works the obvious into my tired spirit, and the close friendships and colleagueships I share here along with a land I somehow know in my bones have hosted a little insight around simplicity that may unfold more in Turkey or Ireland.
I’m staying tuned.
There are conversations I don’t want to have and there are conversations I show up in and where I don’t like how I show up there. How to change these?
We are always inside the conversations we don’t want to have. We cannot leave them. We always have to host from inside this place.
At some level you can never leave earth. You belong here and to every conversation that is happening here. You are invited to host it all. That is your obligation for being given the gift of life.
My friend Peggy Holman is about to write a short series of posts on how to manage the tension between hearing from luminaries and hosting participation in gatherings that aim to:
- Make the most of the knowledge and experience of the people in the room;
- Support participants to make great connections;
- Bring the wisdom of luminaries – respected, deep thinkers – on whatever subject drew people together; and
- Deepen collective understanding of a complex topic.
Peggy notes that:
A common design challenge with such gatherings is to work the tension between hearing from luminaries and engaging participants. When the mix is off, it shows up in missed expectations and at its worst, a revolt by participants. (It didn’t go that far at this gathering, though I’ve been on the receiving end of a revolt. But that’s another story”)
I left this conference contemplating four design choices to support the four goals I mentioned above. They are:
- Invite thought leaders with different world views so that participants benefit from a tapestry of ideas.
- Mix theory and practice so that they inform and amplify each other.
- Do activities that make the experience in the room visible so that we meet kindred spirits, discover each other’s gifts, and learn as much as possible about what works.
- Take a co-creative stand, so that the unexpected becomes a source of engagement and learning.
As a participant from time to time, I find that I can be cynical about how I am hosted (as if I am a perfect facilitator every time!). But what I like about being hosted is the opportunity to practice participation. Let go of the “perfect container” and show up as curious and committed to learning as possible. IN this way I can honour the host (and sometimes help a process succeed by moving the conversation towards substance and away from process). It will be good to read Peggy’s thinking, as always.
via Designing for Community: Luminaries and Engagement | Peggy Holman.
Here at the Art of Hosting in Chicago working with 70 people fromthe restorative justice field and the early childhood education world. Inspired by a design from Tenneson Woolf and an invitation from Teresa Posakony, my new friend Anamaria Accove and I hosted a lovely exploration of the Cynefin framework using movement and physical embodiment to help people understand the difference between the domains. The exercise went this way:
We taped the framwork on the floor, which is the standard way I teach it. Before we talked about it at all, we invited the group to divide into four groups and follow our instructions.
The first exercise was a simple challenge: to arrange the group by height. There were different ways this was accomplished but everyone settled on a linear shape with the tallest at one end and the shortest at the other.
The second exercise was for people to arrange themselves by age and year of birth. A complicated problem for sure, and there was a variety of good solutions that emerged. Of course in order to do this you need a little analysis, both of the data and a good model fro representing it. But having arranged themselves, each selection was accurate and useful.
In the third exercise we asked people to arrange themselves by place of origin. This wasn’t a particularly complex task, but it did result in an experience of emergence. Again it required conversation, story telling and some meaning making (like, from my mother’s womb? From my hometown? From the place I left this morning?). What emerged were several interesting ways of representing the data, but we honed in on one of the two maps. By asking one or two people where they originated from we were able to predict where the rest of group was from with startling accuracy. What emerged was a map of the United States that came with its own information and data.
For the fourth exercise we asked people to arrange themselves like five year old children at a birthday party right after the cake had been eaten. Utter chaos.
Finally we posed a question from the realm of disorder. We asked the group to arrange themselves by temperature. “What?” This really helped to show that disorder was not the same as chaos. Disorder invites us to lean in and figure out what is going on before we see if this is a simple or complex task. In that sense it is the opposite of chaos, in that disorder itself is a container. This is such an important domain to understand and to understand especially how we default to assuming how to solve problems without first defining the scope of what we are looking at.
After running this exercise we taught the Cynefin framework but naming the domains, explaining the cause and effect relationships and explaining the decision making schemes for each domain. Many people reported that they understood it at a deeper and more practical level and especially in the domain of disorder which gets a short shrift in the wider world. Folks that were familiar with the framework but who had not groked the concept of disorder got it this time! That is partly down to me learning how to teach it better as well, by characterizing the disorder domain as one that present problems that stop us in our tracks and force us to say “WTF?” WTF has now been translated by the group in this context as “Where’s the Family?” which is actually a pretty good strategy for dealing with disorder!
All the best stuff I have learned about mentoring has been in the context of traditional culture, whether with indigenous Elders from Canada or in the traditional Irish music community. Traditional Irish music is played and kept alive in a structure called a “sessiun.” There is a repertoire of thousands of tunes, but most musicians who have played for a while will have a hundred or more in common, and that can easily make for a long evening of playing together. Sessiuns are hosted by the most experienced musicians (traditionally a Fir a Ti, or Ban a Ti; the man or woman of the house). These guys are responsible for inviting people in, inviting tunes, keeping a tempo that everyone can play with, resolving any conflicts”in short they are the hosts.
But the best ones are also the teachers and the mentors and they dispense wisdom, lessons, encouragement and direction during and between tune sets. If you are smart and you are learning you try to sit near them in the circle to pick up teachings.
With Irish music, the best mentors I ever had always did a few things well:
- They were better musicians themselves than I could ever imagine myself to be
- They created space for me to play with them and gave me increasingly more responsibility from starting tune sets to perhaps playing a solo air to eventually sitting in for them if they couldn’t make it out to host a sessiun. But they didn’t invite me to lead the session when I was just beginning.
- When they knew I had a set of tunes down they invited me to lead that set. If I had a slow air they knew I could play, they would invite me to play a solo.
- They pointed out things that I could DO, rather than things not to do, and if they played flute (my instrument) they showed me on their instrument what they meant. There was never any abstract conversations about the music or technique. If I was doing something wrong, they would suggest an alternative (indigenous Elders, and especially Anichinaabe elders are very good at this. There is something peculiar to traditional Anishinaabe culture that makes it very hard for an Elder to tell you NOT to do something. They always point to doing something else.)
- They protected me from “hot shots” who like to show off by playing tunes too fast for you to play with them.
- And when I was ready I got invited into more and more responsibility with the sessions and was eventually invited to perform with them. The day of becoming a colleague is a big deal, and I still feel that I can’t hold a candle to my teachers, even though they insist that we have moved into a co-mentoring relationship.
What was beautiful about all that was that, even when i became colleagues with my mentors I never lost the sense of gratitude of being able to play with them. Even today 20 years later, it is a treat for me to play with those who taught me.
Mentoring in the art of hosting, of leadership of working with groups is the same. It is a traditional practice.