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.
There is no way you can learn the art of facilitation, the art of hosting, by simply coming to a workshop. It happens from time to time that people show up for a three day workshop and expect that at the end they will be competent hosts of groups process in any situation. To get good at arts you have to practice.
Last week in Montreal, I saw 120 people come to an Art of Hosting with an overwhelming desire to practice. The invitation to them was to attend if they were wanting to develop and improve their practice. It made for an incredible experience. When people are invited to come to learn because they are ready to host, they are open wide to what is offered, not only by us as teachers, but more importantly by the group itself. This is an excellent ground from which to develop a practice of hosting, and the relationships that are formed are the critical supports for competency in that practice to unfold.
Somehow, the view of learning in the world has been confused with the kinds of quality control that is attached to manufacturing. We imagine that a learning experience will have specific achievable outcomes and that upon completing a course, we can be certified in the competency in which we have been trained. While this can be true for technical training, such as how to operate equipment, with things like art and strategy and leadership and communications and other practice based arts, the opposite is actually true. When I leave practice based learning events I recognize that I am a baby, just starting out, and with a lifetime of practice ahead of me. I can’t be certified to be competent, because there is no way to guarantee that I will be perfect. When we first begin to practice, we always make mistakes. Over a lifetime we develop our own styles and we get better at it.
Hosting is practice. The willingness to embrace it this way is the biggest indicator to me as to whether someone will eventually develop a competency in this art. Expertise is developed, not given or bought.
Several little realignings in my life have meant that this blog has gone through one of it’s periodic wanings. Also, I have been enjoying some time off and some time developing projects which aren’t ready to be written about yet. But I’m still here, watching calendars tick over, watching the rhythms of light and darkness oscillate in everything, and committed more than ever to a kind of gratitude of the present moment that seems helpful in a world where we are increasingly disenfranchised from everything that lies outside the skin (and some that lies within as well.)
Meg Wheatley has a new book out, and her message is pretty resonant with what I have been thinking lately: that spiritual warriorship is essentially doing the right thing anyway. Doing it in spite of the fact that nothing might work, in spite of the fact that we know no certainty for our effectiveness in the world, that we are small and human and able to do what we are able to do. I have appreciated that.
I don’t like making new year’s resolutions, but in these temporal turnings my thought turns to what is alive in me that may take shape in the next year. At this point I’m refining a new spiritual practice, trying to fit some stuff about what I know into some old stories that I know pretty well. It is engaging my mind and heart and making me more compassionate, but the path is a confusing one and I think being knocked around by it is helpful, for to have certainty in a spiritual practice while swimming in uncertainty is a dangerous thing. I am appreciating a spiritual practice that is chaotic and confusing and demands my attention to inconsistency and struggle. It wants me to be rational and compassionate, exploring new frontiers and rooting myself deeply in old stories. So…
This year too, I’m trying to figure out how to work with power. I mean real, brutal, cold and independent power. Power that doesn’t need me or doesn’t care about me, but might occasionally invite me to engage with it. How do you work WITH the system that you hold blame for? How do you work from within? This comes from a place of occupying, not moving against. It comes from an idea that if we occupy exactly where we are at the moment, we are in good shape, doing what we can. I love the flashmob round dances that #IdleNoMore is putting on. What does that look like when you are bringing that kind of serious play to questions like “how do I bring more life to my work in the bank? Or with a land developer? Or with the establishment?”
My friends Tim Merry, Marguerite Drescher and Tuesday Ryan-Hart and my beloved Caitlin Frost are deepening this inquiry at ALIA this year. Consider joining us.
And I think this is the year I look at the practice of participating, as one of the core Art of Hosting practices. What does it men to be a participant in different contexts? Whose responsibility is it for a good experience? Is cynicism just a way of not participating? I feel this one deeply in my bones, thanks to a lovely inquiry into the nature of the sacred with my friend Tenneson Woolf.
Travel-wise, I’m lucky to have a lot of local work lined up for this year. Nevertheless, I’m off to Ontario and Quebec next week and will travel to Sweden, Denmark, Chicago, calgary and around British Columbia a little this year. I may also visit Estonia and Zimbabwe as well. And who knows what else will come my way. i’m trying to reduce my travel and have happily lost my Air Canada Elite status for the coming year, which was a goal of mine from a couple of years ago. It means that I am travelling less and working closer to home.
Elsewhere, this will be a year of all season stand up paddleboarding, continued music making in sacred and secular contexts (it’s all sacred actually!) and being close to the natural world. Something about a paddle in my hand, a song in my heart and a lung full of forest air.
And I may even return to this space more frequently.
See you out there.