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.
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in the Art of Hosting world we put a lot of emphasis on the Art of Harvesting. Locally, Amanda Fenton has been paying attention to this practice a lot and is harvesting tons about hosting and harvesting on her blog, which is worth a regular read.
We’re in an interesting time in our inquiry around harvesting. At the Stantenberg learning Village in Slovenia. Monica Nissén hosted a great session on the chaordic design of harvesting processes and a really useful tool will be developed out of that. But until then, here is some high level summary on where we are with the practice, that I gleaned from an email I sent out to some local folks today.
Basic principles around harvesting from participatory processes include:
- Participatory processes should also have participatory harvests – what is co-created is co-owned.
- Meaning making should be shared.
- Harvests need both artifacts and feedback loops. Artifacts make learning visible and portable and feedback loops making learning useful beyond events. Both need strategic conversations so that needs can be met. these conversations include what media the artifacts need to be in, and how to use our harvests with existing power structures and methods of enacting change in order to maximize impacts.
- Harvesting can be both intentional and emergent. Intentional harvests are the fruits we set out to gather – in this case the report that we know we will be writing. Emergent harvests are the surprises we learn along the way. As these often require different eyes (focused vision for intentional harvests, “soft eyes” to see what is emerging) I often have people take on these distinct roles.
There is lots of work being done in our global community of practice around harvesting. You can find some of that work at the global Art of Hosting site, including our most recent thinking on harvesting. You can also see some of my musings over the years published here.
One of the really interesting things that this harvest inquiry has produced is a process initially developed by Monica Nissén and Mary Alice Arthur called Collective Story Harvest. I use this tool a lot to learn from community stories that can benefit a collective inquiry. But more important than its use as a tool, it actually embodies all of these principles above and is a fantastic training ground for learning to become a skilled practitioner of harvesting.
Next March along with some of my Danish colleagues, we are planning an Art of Harvesting retreat in Copenhagen where we will dive in more fully. We continue to think deeply about how to strategically use harvesting to accelerate the work that happens within powerful processes.
And if you want to learn more right away, consider joining us for the Art of Hosting retreat on Bowen island next month.
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One of the great pleasures of the weekend I just spent in San Francisco at the Applied Improv Network conference was hanging out with good friends, Caitlin Frost, Amanda Fenton (who is blogging up a storm these days), Viv McWaters and the inimitable Nancy White. While we were eating lunch one day, Nancy interviewed me on the subject of group sizes for a class she is teaching. Here is my off the cuff response:
If you want to see more thoughts on group sizes, I wrote a post on this a while back. See this as an invitation to practice and notice. No science was involved in the creation of these ideas!
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In the Art of Hosting community over the past two years a group of practitioners have developed a tool called the Collective Story Harvest. I’ve used it several times and it’s a powerful and useful way to rapidly learn from the stories in the room.
Today comes news frim Mary Alice Arthur, one of the developers, about recent developments with the methodology.
I’m reporting in from the road again, this time from the airport in Chicago. I’ve had many opportunities to catch stories along the journey and this time, I’m here to report in on what’s been happening with the method of Collective Story Harvesting.
We’ve been playing with this method for over two years now, using it in trainings, with clients and in many other gatherings. Attached is the latest version of the document and it now includes:
A group harvesting one story or set of stories together
Many stories being harvested simultaneously
A case study of CSH being used as the key focus for an organisational teambuilding
Using CSH during a community of practice gathering – all of telling and harvesting stories
How this method can support and work with other methodsA little “light bedside reading”, we are now weighing in at 19 pages. I have also been collecting all the harvesting arcs I’ve been hearing about to make a database of potential arcs or themes we can all draw on. If you have input to this list, please let me know. There’s a googledoc you can be invited to where your input can be collected.
The next level of CSH is about to happen. For some time now, I’ve had my eyes set on larger systemic stories that can be of benefit to us all. We – a group of dedicated Danes and two adopted Danes 😉 — are about to host a grand experiment as we attempt to harvest the story of Denmark going bankrupt in 1813 because we believe this story holds some keys for both Denmark and the world about how to deal with adversity.
If you’d like to be involved in an ongoing conversation about storytelling and the Art of Hosting, please join me on the Ning:
http://artofhosting.ning.com/forum/topics/storytelling-and-the-art-of-hosting-conversations-that-matterAnd for more about the power of story, have a look here: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/william_ury.html
Wishing you deep listening for your stories,
Mary Alice
Enjoy
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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.