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.
This afternoon, Toke Moeller and I are hosting a little session on Art of Hosting basics at a gathering for emerging indigenous leaders. We decided this afternoon to bring real design challenges into the room and we improvised this simple, simple design checklist. In some ways this is the simplest form of the chaordic stepping stones. Here’s how it works.
In my experience good participatory meetings result from good design and preparation. In this diagram the meeting itself is the last thing we design. First we design the bookends: Purpose on the one hand and harvest/action on the other hand. Once we know that, then we can develop an invitation and finally choose processes that bridge the two sides. The meeting itself therefore become the vehicle by which a group of people reach a harvest and wise action ground in a purpose and a deep need.
Purpose
What is the big purpose that we are trying to fulfill?
A meeting that has too small a purpose has no life in it. It just seems to be a mundane thing done for it’s own sake. To design creatively, keep purpose at the centre and ensure that everything you do is aligned with that.
Harvest
What do you want to harvest?
– in our hands ( tangible)?
– in our hearts ( intangible)?
Not every meeting needs to have a report and an action plan, but every meeting does have a harvest. This question is the strategic conversation that helps us focus our time together. We need to think about the shape of the harvest we can hold in our hands (reports, photos, videos, sculptures…) and those we hold in our hearts (togetherness, team spirit, clarity, passion…).
Wise action
How will we make action happen?
– who will help us tune in to the reality of the situation?
How will you keep people together?
It is easy to make a list of to do’s at the end of a meeting and feel like something has been accomplished, but that is a naive approach to change. If action is required get really clear about who needs to be involved to make it happen. Think about who enables action or who can stop it and what resources are required. And if the resources aren’t available or accessible, then make a different action plan.
Also, never forget to make a plan for how people will stay together. If sustainability is important, then strong relationships are important. Building a process that doesn’t enhance relationships does not contribute to sustainability.
Invitation –
What is the inspiring question that will bring people together?
How will we invite people so they know they are needed?
Good participatory gatherings depend on the quality of the invitation. A lazy invitation attracts confused participants. A clear and powerful invitation accompanied by a powerful personal invitation gets participants who are ready and eager for the work. Invitation is a lot of work. It SHOULD be a lot of work. A good invitation process makes the meeting easy.
Meeting
What will you do to make the meeting creative and powerful?
Once we know all of this we can choose a meeting process that helps move from purpose to wise action. We can use pre-existing processes like Open Space or World Cafe or design new ones particular to our needs. Today we are using the group pattern language card deck to inspire creative thinking about meeting design.
If we really want to create a new normal, we shouldn’t settle any longer for boring meetings. If the processes we are using aren’t serving us, or helping us crack the deepest questions that confound us, then we should stop using them and start being more creative and powerful.
This little tool has the feeling of a portable, quick and dirty design checklist, that allows core teams and process designers to get working pretty quickly. Use it and let me know what you learn.
This week I was hosting at a moderately sized conference in Victoria BC with 100 regional public sector union members. The purpose of the gathering was to increase the number of active members and to inspire members to engage and improve local communities. These union members all work in the public service and so they have a close ear to the ground on the issues facing communities from homelessness to addictions to environmental degradation to service levels in health and education. Many of them took public service jobs in the first place because they are caring and committed people, intent on making a better world, especially for the most vulnerable.
This is the fourth year we have done this conference, and the structure has remained pretty much the same over the past four years. The first evening there is a keynote from the union president (who then stays and participates through the whole two days) and a special speaker, in this case a well-known progressive lawyer who is currently running for office in a local federal by-election. That is usually followed by a plenary panel, which this year featured some provincial politicians from the labour movement and the current legislature and a journalist.
Day two begins with morning workshops on community organizing. in the afternoon we begin with a World Cafe. This year we took the Cafe through the following flow:
- Two rounds on the question of “What does all of this inspiration mean for my own community activism?”
- One round on the question “what do I still need to learn to deepen my activism?” The harvest from that round was a post it note from each participant outlining some of their learning needs, which union staff will use to help support the members with resources and materials.
- Following that round I invited participants to reflect on an area of focus for their activism, such as homelessness, environment, youth engagement and so on. Participants wrote their focus on the blank side of their name tags and then milled around the room and found others who shared those areas of focus. We ended up with about 12 groups composed of people from across the region who didn’t know each other and who were interested in working in the same issue area.
- Using this network we next invited the participants to consider the question “What are some of the key strategic actions we can take in this sector?” The harvest from this was simply to inspire and connect each other in preparation for the next day’s work.
That was the end of our days work. A quick poll of the room showed that perhaps 20 people had some ideas for action that were considering.
This morning was devoted to a ProAction Cafe. We had 21 tables in the room and I opened up the marketplace. It took about 20 minutes for 21 hosts to come forward and for everyone to get settled. From there we followed a standard ProAction Cafe format. During the reflection period, when participants are given a break and hosts are able to take a breath and make sense of all the advice we heard, three people all working on engagement strategies got together to compare notes. This helped them a lot before the fourth round as they were able to point to work the others were doing. The action networks were already taking shape!
We finished in just under 2.5 hours. In previous years we ran Open Space meetings on the last morning, but this year the shift in format gave a more concrete set of actions and surfaced more leadership in the room. With a quarter of the room engaged as hosts, we topped the average 20% of the room from previous years using Open Space. ProAction Cafe, used at the end of a conference to generate and develop concrete actions is so far the best process in my practice for getting good ideas out of the room with passion, precision and participation.