There were many leanings for me this week here in St. Paul, Minnesota. Foremost among these I think is a deep recommitment to the essential nature of the Art of Hosting: what we call the Four Fold Practice.
I admit that I haven’t always given this particular model the attention it deserves, so if you have been in an Art of Hosting learning event with me at some point and you are scratching your head about it, let me explain.
In brief the four fold practice is this:
- Be Present and cultivate a strong practice of hosting yourself.
- Participate in conversations with deep listening and contributing from the heart
- Host others with good process
- Co-create a way forward together
it is simple, and it is meant to be simple. But like any real practice, it opens up a life time of learning.
When the Art of Hosting was named it was out of a sense that a new world of participatory methodologies needed a new set of deep practices for facilitators if we were to use them well. The four fold practice (or as I have been thinking of it, the four folded practice) gives us a practice ground to improve our abilities to host powerful conversations and move to wise action. I have noticed in my own life that when I act in this work without having attention to all four folds of this practice, I fall short of the abilities I know I have to host well. This practice explains how hosting is a leadership style as well, one suited for the complex questions and complex situations that we deal with as humans.
So I invite a re-engagement in the four fold practice, for all of us who are in this work.
A busy first day in the Twin Cities. We met today with friends and partners in the InCommons network, an initiative supported by the Bush Foundation. InCommons is the primary sponsor of much of the flourishing of the Art of Hosting here in the Minnesota and Dakotas region. In a very short time, we estimate that there will be upwards of 1000 people in this state alone who have come through an Art of Hosting training, in cohorts and individually, as a result of InCommons’ intention to support new forms of leadership. This week we will turn our attention to hosting another 100 people in a three day Art of Hosting.
But today we spent time talking about worldviews and what the Art of Hosting is and how those of us who are practitioners see the world. As part of my own preparation for this conversation, I tried to whittle down the elevator speech about what it is, and one version of it now goes like this:
The most pressing challenges we are in are challenges thrown at us by complexity. Complexity produce emergent effects in our societies and requires emergent practices in order for us to find our way forward. The Art of Hosting supports wholeness by bringing together a loose set of tools, maps, models and practices that serve wholeness. We use dialogue to work with diversity to create emergent solutions, to hold groups and communities in the uncertainty and fear of not knowing, and to converge, prototype and design wise action. When we are telling the story about why this work matters, these touchstones seem to be essential to touch upon. From there we can go deeper into the worldview that embraces complexity (thank you Cynefin and the chaordic models of Dee Hock) or into the practices that support individual and collective leadership and resilience in times of change, uncertainty and fear.
On the plane to Minneapolis for 12 days of teaching, learning and co-creating with the Art of Hosting. While I’m there, I’ll be working with the Bush Foundation, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Foundation of Minnesota, and 100 people who will be coming to an Art of Hosting from all around the state. I’ll be deep in practice with my close friends and colleagues Jerry Nagel, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Toke Moeller and Ginny Belden-Charles among others. It’s a busy 12 days, with only 1 day off, and so I’m thinking a lot about what I’m doing.
And as I was wandering around the airport this morning, I came across the above mask, which sits in an alcove in the US Departures terminal at YVR. This is a transformation mask from the artist Stan Wamiss. If there was an active word to describe what is happening here it is “revealing.”
There is transformation that comes from outside, like a meteor strike or a tsunami. And there is transformation that comes from inside, like a seed sprouting, an egg hatching, or a butterfly emerging. The transformation comes from inside is revealed and in its revealing it has a powerful effect: it renders the transformed aware of the interior abundance of one’s self.
Transformation from outside can make us feel small and ineffective, unable to deal with what is coming or what has arrived. Indeed, this is so evident around us that it is almost too obvious to see. The products of colonization – whether in North America, Ireland, the middle east, Africa or elsewhere leave communities and people dispirited, dispossessed and disillusioned. In contrast, transformation that arises from within can have the opposite effect, leaving us in awe of the new levels of spirit and energy, ownership and mastery and vision and story that emerge. One of the reasons why “change management” fails is because a small group of people undergoes a transformative moment from their individual and collective interiors and they “roll it out” over everybody else with a – literally – missionary zeal. For the leaders, the mission is to give everyone the incredible experience of awe and wonder and creative energy. For the rest of us, we experience a meteor strike.
I once had a very good friend and teacher, Bob Wing, point this out to me. We were together in a small Open Space, and we were in different conversations. In my conversation a small group of us cracked a vexing problem by stumbling on a new map that seemed to make a great deal of sense in describing where we were. It was exciting and we were fired up. When we shared this map back with our colleagues, they listened politely to our exuberance and then Bob very calmly looked me in the eye and said “I like it. I like it a lot. But I don’t trust it, because I didn’t help create it.” Where we thought we had produced a solution, Bob reminded us that at best we had merely produced and invitation, and that our exuberance for our own experience of transformation had made that a very bad and incomplete invitation.
I think interior transformation is important, in fact I think it may be among the most important experiences that we can have as human beings. This is why such experiences are revered with masks and dances on the west coast of North America. It is what is fuelling the appetite for contemplative spiritual practices, for presence based leadership experiments, for all of the self-development and self-actualization process that goes on around us. And I think that it is important that we do not limit this experience to a chosen few.
Citizenship for example, is crying out for this kind of transformation. There is a tremendous poverty of beauty, intention, vision and soul in the public sphere right now. John O Donohue calls this “the evacuation of interiority.” There is a deficit of the kinds of qualities to public dialogue that are powered by listening, kindness, compassion and co-creation. The result is that we come to believe that it is a mean world out there and that if we don’t do things to others preemptively, they will do it to us. So we steel ourselves against vulnerability, wounding and hurt. Declare emotional intelligence “soft skills” and deride relationship building as “time wasting” or unpractical. So we end up in a cycle of terrible quality with a longing for something ineffable that seems further and further out of reach as we tie our actions to outcomes that can measured, funded and justified.
In Art of Hosting learning experiences I think we are trying to work against this cycle by, in a phrase, “serving wholeness.” This means working with the interior transformations that birth new stories and visions of possibility, as well as being skillful in dealing with the exterior transformations that we have no control over. We begin with provocative assumptions that somewhere within us, individually and collectively, is the resourcefulness we need to move from the stuck and unsatisfying places we are now in to places of possibility and resourcefulness. We might be wrong (and we need to get WAY better as a species in being wrong most of the time), but we serve the inkling that leads to individual and collective resilience. We are trying to teach and learn about a form of leadership and being together in organization and community that innovates with more diversity than we are comfortable with, to build relationships that can hold more confusion that we are comfortable with, so that we can develop solutions that will have effects that we can only imagine. I don’t know any other way to develop the capacity, person by person, to survive the external transformations that are upon us.
First of all there is no such thing.
Second, a friend asked me the question “What is the idea group size for collaborative process?” and in trying to answert the question I emailed him the following (please note that this is all off the top of my head, and in practice I usually go with intuition, relying more on patterns than rules):
Innovation generally starts with individuals, so I like to build time into to processes for people to just be quiet and think for a bit. Small groups can help refine and test good ideas, and large groups can help propagate ideas and connect them to larger patterns. In small group work, in general, working with an odd number is helpful because it creates an instability that keeps the group moving. If you want solidity, you work with even numbers. So it goes like something this:
1 = innovation, idea generation, inspiration and commitment
2 = Pairs are good for long and exploratory conversations, interviews, and partnering
3 = Good number for a small team to rapidly prototype a new idea
4 = A good number for a deep exploration. You benefit from having two pairs together, and from having a little more diversity in the group than in two.
5 = good number for a design team; there is always an instability in a group of five and good diversity, but the group is not so large that people get left out.
6 = Good for noticing patterns, and summing up. A group of six can be entered from three pairs coming together as well, allowing for insights gathered in pairs to be rolled up.
7 = At this scale we are losing the intimacy we need for conversation, and so generally I will work a group of seven into 3 and 4 if we need to break up.
8 = is too big. And it is no coincidence that big conferences are boring, because most hotels have tables that can accomodate 8, 9, or 10 people which is too many for real conversation. At these scales, people start to be able to dominate and introverts dry right up.
It is a good practice to use a huge group (like in the dozens or hundreds) to source the diversity that is needed for good dynamic small groups, and then to find ways to propagate ideas from the very small to the very large.
Last night in Vancouver listening to Le Vent du Nord, a terrific traditional band from Quebec. They put on one of the best live shows I have seen in a long time with outstanding musicianship combined with incredible energy. Listening to them and watching people dancing I had a deep experience of why we humans need art. It brings us into a joyful relationship which each other that we seem built to need – a kind of belonging that transcends each of our individual reservations, a sort of shared ecstasy. The cynic might say that such an attitude is decadent in a world of suffering, but I think it is clear that without these experiences of ourselves as joyful collectives, the serious work of living in our time is compromised by our own personal and private fears.
Lately I have been working with mainline Protestant churches and Christian communities a lot and I have appreciated being able to bring deep cultural and spiritual stories to our work together. The times they are all in are times n which the traditional forms of Church are dying and the new forms havent yet arrived. And while the leaders i have been with welcome the shift, many congregations are in grieving about the loss of an old way of doing things,
Last weekend in Atlanta, the group I was with picked the story of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones to explore together. In that story, Ezekiel, who is a shaman, is carried into the spirit world where is comes across a valley of bones. Turns out that these are the bones of an army and God says to him “can these bones live?” Ezekiel does what all good shamans do when confronted with the awesome power of mystery and gives up any pretense of knowing the outcome. So together, God gives Ezekiel instructions and wakes up an army.
The armies of the old testament stories have always troubled me, because they are forever slaughtering and committing genocide because of God’s commands. But read as an allegory, suddenly this stuff becomes very powerful. For example, most spiritual paths have you confronting archetypal enemies on your pathway, such as greed or anger or the ego. To achieve enlightenment, to get to the promised land, means overcoming these enemies. And an army then seen in this context is a group of people that are greater than any one person’s fear.
So here is Ezekiel in the valley into which an army has been led and slaughtered, and he is being engaged in the work of waking up an army. Why? Well, once they have been woken up, God tells Ezekiel that they can go home. Home is the promised land, a place of freedom and kindness and relaxation and fearlessness. Coming home to oneself, finding home as a community.
To illustrate, another story I heard yesterday. One of the congregations I have been working with has been waking up to themselves in the work we have been doing together. When a group of people wakes up like that one has, all the dust and cobwebs come off them, and all of their beauty and warts are revealed. While we have designed and implemented many little projects in the Church, we have also awoken a little power struggle over a small but important issue. Typical of these kinds of issues, a small group has dug its heels in and doesn’t see its impact or connection to the larger community. Last night they all met and with some deliberate hosting, quickly discovered a common consensus on moving forward, one which I am led to believe takes each person outside of themselves and into a common centre of action.
In short, they had a different experience of themselves and each other, an experience that awakens the centre that Le Vent du Nord awakened last night. It is an experience that Christians can understand fully from their traditional teachings – Jesus constantly talks about love at the centre of the work of the world, and that community is the experience we are after. In the best forms of Christianity – including the form in which I was brought up! – the spiritual path is one of discovering kindness and a shared centre. From that place, transformation of community, family, organizations, and the world can be experienced and pursued. The hard work of dealing with power is made more human by acting from love and the beautiful work of cultivating relationship is put us to use by transforming power.
Last week I took an afternoon in Atlanta and went to visit Martin Luther King Jr’s Church where love and power awoke together in what King called “beloved community.”. These past months and years, I realize that this is what I am working for everywhere – in First Nations, organizations, communities, companies, churches and elsewhere. The beloved community draws us back home to our own humble humanity. It tempers the world’s harsh edges and it enables powerful structures to create beautiful outcomes.
And that experience is worth waking up for. Even an army.