All of you looking for an intensive Art of Hosting experience, we are now accepting registration for the June 6-9 event in Edmonton, Alberta. Please join Teresa Posakony, Tennson Woolf, Corrinna Chetley-Irwin, Mary Johnson, Chantal Normand, and I for four days of learning, connecting and practice around hosting nad harvesting conversations that matter for wise action.
From a recent Art of Hosting in Sweden comes a learning from some young leaders thinking about how to lead in networks:
1. Open and transparency of decision making process and “organizational” structure, even if it’s dynamic. No Taboos or un-written rule. The aim should be to make the system as visible as possible.
2. Empowers loads of action (systemically): What is the minimum structure needed to enable self-organizing and action?
3. Good communication culture (this is the real challenge I guess)
4. Clear process of creation and updating the leading thoughts
5. Low entrance step, it’s easy to join, accessible.
6. Inclusive, nobody is left out if they want to contribute and participate.
7. Purpose large enough but clear enough. People should feel that I want to be part of this. Purpose is container both for action and expansion. Case: 350.org brought together many networks, as did Survival Academy.
via How to lead a network well? ideas from AoH Karlskrona | Monkey Business.
The vacation in Hawaii has ended for me and I’m now somewhere over the middle of the United States on the third leg of a four leg journey that sees me flying from Hilo to Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Johannesburg. I arrive in South Africa Monday morning in time to recover and help design and deliver and Art of Participatory Leadership workshop with friends from REOS Social Innovation. It’s exciting to be heading to South Africa, the birthplace of my wife, and therefore one of the ancestral homelands of my kids. Exciting to be working with Marianne Knuth and her team as well, and I’m interested in how the Art of Participatory Leadership and the art of harvesting unfolds in a multicultural African context. Expecting lots of learning as usual and I’ll blog and harvest as is possible.
So, inflight wireless, homeopathic letlag remedies and movies keep me going. Interested to see what recovery from a 12 hour time change will be like!
Today, the new moon rises, a time of aupicious beginnings, especially coming so close to the winter solstice. These are important moments in Nuu-Cha-Nulth culture, and the times are important in Nuu-Chah-Nulth history. Last month, five Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribes won a landmark court case that gave them the right to sell the fish that they catch. Not on an industrial scale mind you, but on a scale big enough to create small local commercially viable fisheries for communities that desperately need both the work and the reconnection to the sea. Moreover, the courta case declared this as an Aboriginal right, a significant ruling for coastal First Nations in general but for the Nuu-Chah-Nulth in particular.
All of this leads to a time when participatory leadership is needed to seize the opportunity of building culture and community back and doing real, powerful and grounded marine use planning. So today was a good day to get to work.
We begun with 20 minutes of Warrior of the Heart practice, introducing the concept of irime, entering in, joining energies with an attacker and helping them lead a situation to peace. This check in this morning was a powerful reminder to some about the way their work as hosts needs to change, to be able to stand in the fire of aggressive energy and work with it. Fisheries and marine use planning is full of passion and the work these folks will be doing will not be easy. But the passion that drives the aggressive fight for rights and allocations can be used also to build and heal community, and if we enter into that space well, grounded and ready and knowing a little bit, we can do something with that energy.
So today we heard a little about the court case and then we spent some time learning about the seven helpers with this harvest as a result:
From this morning’s sessionshort piece on designing meetings: Four groups of questions to ask before conducting any meeting, to help you choose a good way to get what you need:
BE PRESENT* How will we bring people together in a way that invites them to be present? * How do we make people comfortable to share from their heart and listen together for wisdom and learning?
KNOW YOUR HARVEST * What do we want to take away from this meeting? In what form? (notes? graphics? photos? video? audio?) * How will we use what we gather from the meeting?
HAVE A GOOD QUESTION * What question(s) could we ask that would invite contributions from everyone?
LISTENING PIECE * What is a listening tool that helps us have enough time for people to make their contributions and hear each other? * What kinds of activities and exercises can we use for people to explore content together and provide their own thoughts on our question?
If you use this checklist as a way of organizing your thoughts before a meeting, it will help you to stay focused and to ensure that everything you do is tied to the purpose of the meeting.
Nice…a basic set of planning guidelines for any conversation that keeps us focused on the harvest, and keeps us conscious about process.
After lunch we took the advice of our Elder Levi and the participants went out on the land to think about their work going into the community. This was the time to do a little oosumich, connecting with themselves and presencing the future that starts next week when they return to their communities. When they returned, we went into a really beautiful World Cafe around two questions that Laura and Norinne cracked. The first question was an appreciative question about a time when community was truly engaged. The second question, which we did two rounds on, was on question we could ask to bring community together around marine use planning.
The harvest from this was great, a real set of tools and ideas for them to use when they go home to start the conversation.
And sweet practice this evening. Bruce Lucas put on a potlatch DVD and some of us played Scrabble while Nuu-chah-Nulth tunes echoed through our dining space. Two or three kids played while we feasted on chicken, salmon and some great vegetable dishes prepared by our local caterer. This groups is really gelling, and becoming fast friends. They are tooling up on facebook and Skype to stay together as they move into this work seperately.
Tonight I can hear some geese flying overhead, moving south on the warm winds that have come in. The rain has stopped and the surf still pounds, the ever present sound of sae and land meeting, creating one another out of their shared conversation.
Tsawalk indeed.
It’s 11:30 and I’m about ready to tuck into bed. Through my open window I can hear the roar of the surf rolling on the beaches a mile away. The surf report says that the swells are coming in at 9 feet but are going to rise to 17.5 feet by tomorrow. The roar is deafening, but it is a sound that has been heard on these beaches from time immemorial. The Nuu-Chah-Nulth, upon whose territory I am working, have lived here as long as the sound of the waves has been heard, and they’ll be here until those waves stop.
And that’s the reason for this Art of Hosting – to introduce participatory leadership to people who are working in Nuu-Cha-Nulth communities up and down the coast ostensibly on marine use planning. We are using the framework of a set of traditional values based in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth prime directive: heshook ish tsawalk or “everything is one.” This principle of interdependence acknowledges that everything has a common origin and that our work in the world is to live according to several principles – basics you might call them – to be in accord with this natural law. We have chosen three of these principles to explore these days: he-xwa (balance), isaak (respect) and aphey (kindness). Today’s activities explored balance and looked at:
- The principle of tsawalk and the methodology for knowing the interior life of the world, called oosumich.
- Connecting oosumich as a way of knowing, to participatory meeting design, using a new take on Ken Wilber’s qnuadrants and my model of sustainability in communities of practice.
- Visiting the carving shed of Joe Martin, a well known Tla-o-qui-aht carver who dropped some good teachings on us about making canoes. The one that stood out for me was “we know the tree this canoe came from” which is to say that in an structure you have to know the source. Joe will not make a canoe out of a tree he has not seen standing, because he needs to know how it grew, where it’s weak points might be, which side faced the sun, how it lived with other trees and slopes and rocks. Only once he has understood the tree in its context can he cut it down and make a canoe out of it. The lesson here, is knowing source is everything.
- Doing a little Warrior of the Heart practice to discover something about balance and what it means to move from ground.
- Appreciative inquiry to connect to ground work and purpose in stories of health and abundance in communities and marine environments. We did a good long deep dive interview process, surfaced some powerful values and then entered into a dream phase but asking “If our work was to make the difference we wanted it to, what would our communities look like?” People drew systems diagrams, connecting the human and natural environments, the state of health of people, communities, ecosystems and economies. By the end of the day we closed with a breathing exercise, full to the brim with the almost sacred nature of this work.
Tomorrow we will dive into meeting and process design based on the principles of isaak meaning respect. The waves will get stronger, the new moon is coming, and something is feeling like it wants to be unleashed,