“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.
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.
I was up north on the weekend, working with a small community that has been driven apart by a large and contentious decision. It doesn’t matter what it was, or what either side wanted – the result is the same result that happens in many small communities: people who are friends and neighbours shouting and fighting with each other.
The team I was working with are trying to reinvent the way this community is engaged. We used a lovely redux of Peter Block’s work to help frame our conversation about design and implementation. A few things stood out for this group with respect to Peter’s work.
Changing the room changes the conversation. We talked a lot about the fact that changing engagement starts in this room and in this moment because this room IS the community. When we dove in about what was missing from the way the community engages it was clear that the ownership piece was the biggest one. As in many community meetings the way people traditionally engage is with passion that is directed outward. There is an expectation that someone else needs to change. We joked about the sentiment that says “I’ll heal only after every else has healed!” It was a joke but the laughter was nervous, because that statement cuts close to the bone. So we DID change the room and decided to hold a World Cafe. gathered around smaller tables, paper in the middle, markers available for everyone to write with…
So how do you begin a meeting with people who are invited to take up the ownership of the outcome? I am not a fan of giving people groundrules, because as a facilitator it puts me in the position of enforcer, and gives people an out for how the behave towards one another. So instead we considered the question of what it looks like when people are engaged. What stood out is how people “lean in” to the centre of the conversation. So the question became, how do we get people to lean in right away and take ownership of the centre?
The solution was simple but was later revealed to have tons of power. At the outset of the cafe as I was introducing the process I gave the following instructions:
“That paper in the middle is for all of you to use, as are the markers. We want you each to record thoughts and insights that other need to hear about. So before we begin I invite you to pick up a marker and write your name in front of you. <people write their names>. Now I want to invite you to answer this question: what is one thing you can do to make sure that this meeting is different? Write your answer beneath your name.”
People took a moment to write their names and their commitments. And they shared them with each other at the table. That is how we began.
The first round of conversation proceeded as usual, but I noticed something very powerful in the second round. When everyone got up and moved around they took a seat in someone else’s place, and often the first thing they did was to read the name and the commitment that was in front of them. Can you imagine coming across the name of someone who you have a disagreement with only to see that they have written “I won’t fight anymore” beneath their name? The core team is now going through all of the tablecloths and making a list of the commitments that people made. Taken on their own, they form a powerful declaration of willingness.
People reported that this was the best meeting the community had in a long time. And it had a lot to do with this tiny intervention of public ownership for the outcomes.
UPDATED: To include Patricia Kambitsch’s beautiful doodle.
We talk about the Art of Hosting as a practice. It is a way of being with self and other.
This is sometimes a difficult concept to understand, because the world is full of lots of instructions about what to do. Telling me what to do is very useful in situations where I am doing things that can be repeated. For example, if I am building a cabinet, fixing a car, creating a budget or processing a claim, then you can give me a set of instructions that will be very helpful in most situations. Of course there is an art to all of these, which is to say there is almost always some part of the context of these activities that require me to be smart and creative and solve a little problem here and there. But in general, these kinds of tasks can be taught.
But what happens when we are confronted with a huge question, for which the answers are unknown? What happens when things shift in ways that we have never trained for? What do we do then?
If you have trained as a martial artist or as an athlete, you will know that only with practice can you be ready to face the unexpected and create a good outcome. In martial arts, the point of training is not to rehearse every single situation so that you can create a logic tree of what to next. Rather the point of training is to actually get to a place where you don’t need to think about what to do next. It helps you to react wisely, rather than blithely. When confronted with the fight of your life, you act from clarity and calm and resourcefulness, none of which you can learn in the moment.
It is the same with the Art of Hosting. Art of Hosting workshops are not “trainings” in the typical sense of the word. Rather they are practice grounds – dojos if you will – where we can come together to spend a few days in a heightened sense of conscious awareness about what it takes to create and hold space for good conversations. In other words, the best way to come to an Art of Hosting is to prepare to pay attention in every moment to how you are practicing the basics of being in conversations with other people: being present, being an active participant, taking responsibility for hosting and co-creating a space together.
Luckily, we can also practice the Art of Hosting outside of workshops and facilitation sessions, because at its core, the Art of Hosting is about being together with another person consciously. This means that this art is extremely easy to practice because there are 7 billion humans on earth and each day we interact with dozens of them. So every moment can be a little learning journey; every conversation, no matter how brief, can be practice.
And what are we practicing for? We are practicing for the sake of practice. The practice is the practice.
For a world that is addicted to measurable outcomes and a linear progression of competency that leads from beginner to expert, this seems absurd. Why would I want to practice for the sake of practicing?
There are several reasons for this. First this kind of conscious practice – of being present as often as possible with everyone you meet – actually changes things. It actually shifts the social spaces of our world. If you want a kind society, you cannot ask for others to provide it for you. It arises to the extent that you practice it, in every moment. Starting right now.
And if you want to become good at working with other people to make creative decisions and chooses about the problems we face together, practicing on a daily basis and in small ways gets you ready for big and surprising challenges. It prepares you to meet the challenges that come on so fast that you have no time to learn how to deal with them. Practicing kindness, possibility seeking and deep listening on a daily basis ingrains those skills and capacities. It makes you a better facilitator. It makes you a better parent and a better citizen. It even makes you a better cabinet maker, a better financial analyst and a better claims processor.
But there is no goal. You cannot practice with the idea of achieving an 80% efficacy rate in generating creative listening in the moment of deepest crises. Practice does not lend itself to these kinds of metrics and targets. So let go of those expectations. Practice for the sake of it and revel in the small shifts that happen around you. Become present simply because it is a better way to experience the world. Participate fully in your interactions with others, ask good questions and experience what it is to be hosted. Step up and practice kindness in daily interactions to discover the core practice of hosting challenging spaces. And find a place, moment by moment, to co-create the world you want to live in.
Those of us that work with people have a terrific opportunity to practice and improve in every moment. Approaching our own training as a life long practice opens the possibility that we might get very good at it very quickly. Consider this an invitation to do so. The world is your dojo. Go practice.
The last couple of weeks my deepening of perspective on the four fold practice of the art of hosting has continued. In the Art of Hosting Water Dialogues we are teaching the practice and inviting participants to reflect on what they already know about the practice. Here is a snippet of the harvest from our work this week:
Presensing and hosting yourself
- Be place based
- Sense what could be better
- Develop confidence
- Prepare for surprising outcomes
- Centering before entering
- Personal wellness: sleep, eat and hydrate
- Give yourself enough time
- Know your participants
- Remember that you are always a learner
Participating
- Connect people to purpose
- Learn and speak with a common language
- listen and ask questions and be curious
- Take notes and connect to learning from elsewhere
- Realize that you don’t need to know everything
- Celebrate and reinforce commonalities
- Ask good questions
- Empathize and synthesize
- Notice your projections on to other people
- Response-ability
- Act on your beliefs and values in a positive way
- Trust yourself
Contributing and hosting conversations
- Create space for dialogue and for a community that cares.
- Bring together diversity for better innovation
- Make people comfortable and invite them to push their boundaries
- Invite respect
- Pay attention to logistics and the quality of space
- Create a space for invitation and learning, where disagreement is legitimate
- Work from common purpose
- Recognize and name the elephants in the room
- be clear about the purpose of and the intended harvest of a conversation
- provide the minimum structure to focus work while allowing for emergence
- Host people to enable them to engage in uncertain cisrcumstances
- Level the playing field for wisdom
- Use methods that bring in diverse voices
Co-creating the community
- Create collaborative buy in
- Change must come from the margins of the system, sustained by a core that is willing to co-create
- Do activities that connect rather than prescribe answers
- Always plan with an eye to sustaining momentum
- Develop a close network of mates and work together
- Work with people and have fun with them too.
- Collect and share stories
- Collaborate with complimentary allies
- Seek inspiration across disciplines.