In this article, stringing together some obersvations about Louis CK and Mary Halvorson, Seth Colter Walls touches on the wellspring of collaboration.
He writes a little of the play that replaces rehearsal for true improvisers, of finding outlets of artistic practice where
“no one person is responsible for all the tunes–if tunes are even the order of the day. Such groups aren’t the ones that players use as reputational tent-poles; they’re the ones that successful artists keep going in order to keep the channel for new sounds open. It’s the jazz-world equivalent of Zach Galifianakis’s avant-chat Web-show “Between Two Ferns,” the sort of thing that happens in the background of an otherwise thriving career.”
Facilitation or Hosting practice is improvisation too. Every time I work with a group I go in as a jazz musician, with a set list of “tunes” to play, which in group work as in music is simply a way to divide time into portions that carry and enable a narrative to unfold. Sometimes the unfolding narrative necessitates that we completely change the tunes we were planning on playing. Just last week for example, the group we were working with had come through some hard work rather earlier than we imagined, causing us to jettison our entire design for something that could take them onward from this new place.
So where do you learn how to do this? When I wrote recently on disruption, I talked about how learning how to deal with that is a capacity that serves marvelously in the world. In some ways for those of us who work with groups for a living, we are lucky to have a world that goes according to its own plan. You don’t need to work hard to seek out places where things change faster than you can account for them. It may be driving in traffic, walking in a busy street, participating in sports or music or dancing, socializing and playing in groups. All of these are training grounds where you can practice sensing and changing the plan, where you can try new ways of unleashing groups intelligence as a leaders, as a follower, as a bystander, as a participant. You can try and fail without any dire consequences affecting your bottom line.
In short, see your social life as practice, and your capacity to work with groups will be richer.
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A light summer of digital production, but a few things are coming my way that have my attention. Today, it’s a chunk of an email from my friend Kathy Jourdain who is evolving into one of the premier Art of Hosting bloggers out there. We were in a group email conversation about safety and comfort and the hidden dynamics of groups, and Kathy’s reflection on the distinction between the unnamed and the unknown was this:
The first is this difference between the unnamed and the not knowing. The difference is something I feel or sense and am not sure I can articulate. In hosting work we often sit in the not knowing – not knowing what will happen next, sometimes the not knowing of what is happening in this moment. In ourselves, as we host ourselves, we know stillness will help bring us through the not knowing into clarity. In groups, holding the space and consciousness of the not knowing – which often looks like chaos and often is the groan zone – will host the group into the knowing or clarity that emerges. In both these cases, naming things also helps to bring clarity. There is a subtle difference though in the naming of what’s in or emerging from the not knowing (like when we name the groan zone for a group) than how I am understanding the unnamed although this is a bit more mystifying and maybe even mystical to me. The naming of things changes our relationship to whatever it is we have named. I’m just wondering if there is a whole stream of things/stuff/experiences that we can’t name, will always be unnamed and allowing it to be unnamed allows a different experience of it – and maybe that’s what I mean by a spiritual experience. And maybe mostly, in how I’m thinking about it, it happens in the silent places, the silent experiences. It happens in connection with the divine or connection to that which is greater than us – the experiences we have that are beyond words, individually and collectively.
I find this distinction immensely helpful. I seem to have a built in desire to name everything around me, and to label and identify what is happening, but sometimes, as Lao Tzu reminds us, what can be named is not often what is actually happening.
I have been working with many spiritual leaders lately in a variety of Churches around North America. One of these leaders pointed to this unnamable mystery by referencing a “heresy” he holds about the Eucharist, the ritual sacred meal that evokes the last supper Jesus Christ shared with his friends. My friend, who is a gourmet chef in addition to being an influential spiritual leader, said that his heresy is that the Eucharist is not about the elements – the bread and the wine – but instead about the unnamable moment that arises between close friends who have just shared a meal together, on the eve of the impending death of one of their closest comrades. That sense of an electric space between us, of a rich field of love and affection and togetherness is what Jesus was pointing to when he said “do this in remembrance of me.”
Confusing the elements with the mystery is a great way to drain a moment of that ineffable quality that makes the impossible possible. It is important to learn how to host this distinction and name what needs naming and leave the mystery alone.
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A reposne I made today on the Art of Hosting list about the workshop we are leading this week:
We’re in the middle of a leadership residential for 25 leaders in the community social services sector here in British Columbia and we are blending a strong Theory U flavour with AoH practice. This is the second and final residential, capping a 9 month learning journey which has involved two Art of Hosting gatherings and bi-weekly webinars.
In this context, Theory U is helping give some shape and rigour to the art of learning about the systems we are in and providing a container for a learning journey about what the future of the community sector looks like in this province and what forms of leadership serve the emerging forms. We are operating from the premise that the emerging leaders we are working with be facing a career of work in a sector that will do work in ways that haven’t been invented yet and that they will have a fundamental role in co-creating these new ways of caring for society. That premise and invitation leads us into hosting practice, as a key leadership capacity for emerging and complex context is Block’s idea of “leadership as convening.” And as we all know, the Art of Hosting is the essence of that practice, from the four fold way to living systems views of complexity to deploying methodologies for co-creation and co-evolution.
I’m enjoying our work this week. On Sunday we worked with poetry to check in and help frame a challenge. We reviewed the Cynefin framework to help frame complex challenges and invite people to focus their attention on these. Today we had a deeper Thoery U teaching and then played some improv theatre games to train in improv principles and to practice sensing. We went into an afternoon of inquiry using The Work of Byron Katie which helps us to deal with the voices of cynicism, judgement and fear and to identify the stuck parts of “the system” that are actually within us. This evening we had a fabulous, spontaneous and unplanned learning journey to a local winery, Serendipity, the story of which was a perfect way to cap our day.
Tomorrow we will enter the deep dive with an afternoon devoted to a solo framed withtgroup pattern language cards, a teaching on the four fold practice and some recent thinking from Paula Carr, Tuesday Ryan-Hary and Kelly McGowan on hosting intercultural spaces and co-revealation. Tomorrow we listen to the whispers of the future sector and Wednesday we will begin some prototyping work using Proaction Cafe and chaordic stepping stones. Thursday we finish with a short open space to invite the community of practice to organize itself for sustainability and co-evolution after our project has completed.
I’m especially enjoying the way Theory U has given us a good frame to talk concretely about the deep edges of leadership practice in this sector and to invite the inversion of leadership that will take people into the co-creative space of an emerging field of practice. I think it is useful in the defining of a practice ground for hosting practice. There are lots of ways to frame work together. Theory U doesn’t always serve, but in this case – focusing on leadership in a sector that is rapidly emerging – it is a very useful framework indeed.
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“Conversation demands equality between participants. Indeed, it is one of the most important ways of establishing equality. Its enemies are rhetoric, disputation, jargon and private languages, or despair at not being listened to and not being understood.”
– Theodore Zeldin
To sit in the presence of one another, to open to each others deepest longings, o host the space that makes room for silence and the most earnest murmurs of the heart. To see another as they see you, to pay respect to the story of a human being who sits with you and who is curious about your own.
All this is the greatest practice for restoring our humanity and our relations to one another. And this practice should not be deferred to some future time when the conditions are ripe. To sit in the present act of conversation is to be creating the preferred world now.
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Working with 8 programs in the state of Minnesota this week, all of whom are putting together projects in local communities that work on acute health issues by creating upstream solutions. This is the third residential retreat with the 8 propoenent groups. all of whom are engaged in a year long planning process through which they are learning participatory leadership practices and are getting soaked in the Art of Hosting.
There are two things going on here. First is the design of an actual project that will move “upstream” and tackle one or more social determinants of health. For example, a group working on indigenous health and nutrition issues is building an indigenous food network that aims to bring people into better relationship with food through growing and cooking while addressing the need for available healthy food. While there is a program aspect to this there is also a capacity building aspect to it too.
Alone, small projects that are are linked to social determinants of health don’t stand much chance of long term success, especially if the long term sustainability of the project is anchored to a three year implementation grant. But a key piece of the work we are doing is also teaching hosting practices. Our cohort last year began work on their projects around creating healthy communities but have since been using participatory methods to organize in the community. They have been tackling racism, systemic abuses in the education system and saying no to arbitrary policy decisions. One hundred people in the community are signed up for Art of Hosting training in the fall which will probably also result in 25 new projects – safefail probes if you like – activated to effect changes in the community.
I’m skeptical about any given project to make a difference, but projects that are led with the purpose of learning how to lead help to develop practices that launch and spread leadership throughout the community. To me this is “there” to get to from “here.”
Now if only evaluators would catch up.