Taking a moment here in the newsroom to blog a little about the WK Kellogg Foundation Food and Society 2008 gathering here in Phoenix. It is halfway through day one of this two-plus day gathering to look at connecting and inspiring leadership in the good food movement across the USA.
For the past nine months my Art of Hosting colleagues Tim Merry, Toke Moeller, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Monica Nissen and Phil Cass and I have been working with the Kellogg Foundation and their partner Winrock International to craft a conference that was fundamentally different from the previous eight conferences that have supported this movement. Last year, Tim was invited to attend Food and Society as a slam poet to help with the harvest at that gathering. As a result of him sitting in the design meetings and debriefs, he was able to show up more and more as the process consultant that he is most of the time. After inviting the possibility that the conference could shift to focus on relationships, Kellogg opened up and decided to try something different, to connect and inspire leadership instead of a traditional conference format of keynote speaker and break out session. That’s how we all got involved in the design and hosting of a gathering of 550 people looking at fundamentally changing the American food system.
This year we are tipping the conference design much more into a participatory and engaged gathering. We are in the middle of a Good Food Village Square, featuring 17 projects from around the United States who are sharing their leading edge questions, rather than slick presentations. They are inviting people to work with them to address issues like scaling good food distribution, working to alleviate the poverty embedded in the food production system, growing small operations larger while retaining core principles, and engaging community in the production, distribution and consumption of their own food for health, culture and prosperity.
Instead of keynote speakers, we have provocateurs, including Norma Flores, an incredible woman who works with the Association of Farmworker Opportunities Programs spoke this morning of her experiences growing up as a farmworker from a very young age. She spoke of the child labour practices, the health risks and the exploitation of farm workers to produce cheap food cheaply. We also had an incredible montage about migrant farmworkers from The Migrant Project to focus our thinking on the social justice imperative for this movement. Later on today we have a world cafe to sense what is cooking with good food.
Tomorrow we’re into Open Space for most of the day, looking at how to organize for action within the good food movement and see what good food can also do. 550 is the largest Open Space I have ever run, but despite the logistics being more complex, the feeling is the same. Working with good friends also makes a huge difference.
[tags] fas2008[/tags]
From a conversation with Tenneson this morning, we were playing with a pattern of shifting systems that flows from skilfully hosted conversations. A simple pattern emerged, which is about bringing people together, shifting power and developing and hosting emerging beauty. In a linear form it goes like this:
- Gather people together from wholeness, including inviting the deeply personal into the work.
- Understand and work with a willingness to shift power.
- Cultivate curiosity: what could we really do together?
- Harvest what our Navajo friends call “the beauty way” a way forward that serves life and keeps people engaged in their pursuit for change to the better.
Simple eh? Right. The shifting power one is especially interesting to me. Working with leaders to move control and power to their people is the most challenging aspect of working systemic change. Without this shift, only constrained action is possible and sustainability is difficult. With a shift, many things can unfold and the people themselves can take responsibility for the results.
Where this really hits the ground, it seems to me, is in the process of invitation and calling. Leaders who are callers must be willing to let go of power and control if new levels of work and being are to emerge. They also have to shift the culture of the organization or community from an answer-based one to a curiosity-based one, where inquiry and co-sensing becomes a normal way of working. Communicating this in an invitation to a gathering is difficult and not adequate. We look at many more ways to invite that builds a field of inquiry, an appetite for curiosity so that when people meet together it is simeply one phase in an ongoing project to change the way things are done.
So what are your experiences in shifting power and generating curiosity, especially in large groups?
This week is Conversation Week.
I’ve known Vicki Robin for a few years now. She’s a lovely, lively and curious soul, not shy about standing up and taking responsibility for leading shift in the world. She developed the Conversation Cafe methodology, and conceived of Conversation Week in 2001.
Vicki was with us at the Art of Hosting on Whidbey Island in January, where she did something I’ve never seen before. She stepped out of her own methodology and facilitated an Open Space gathering. She was skeptical about Open Space, not having had great experiences in Open Space gatherings, and she is a developer of process, and in my experience, those who have devoted their lives to developing and polishing methodologies rarely step out of their cherieshed processes and try something new. Vicki held space beautifully for us and was incredibly generous with the group about her learning and observations. I have never seen a person so closely identified with one methodology step out and practice in another one. It was really very cool.
You can now hear for yourself some of these observations and learnings from Vicki’s many years of experience. She recently produced a short podcast on Conversation Week and the art of hosting, which is a lovely summation of the role of a host and ways that you can host everywhere. This is a great way to get into Conversation Week and contemplate a deeper practice of hosting.
Just announced…Tatiana Glad, Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony , Cheryl De Paoli and I will be working together to host an Art of Hosting retreat near Calgary, Alberta, June 9-11, 2008. We invite any and all to join us for three days of inquiry, exploration and learning into organizational leadership, community development and strategic and meaningful conversation.
The invitation and registration form is now available for download.
For more upcoming Art of Hosting events in Boston, Tampa Bay, Ireland, Bowen Island and elsewhere this year, visit the Art of Hosting website.
For those of you curious about exploring the Art of Hosting, our emerging pattern language on leadership and facilitation in living systems, you are invited to join me, Tenneson Woolf, Peggy Holman Sharon Joy Klietsch and Francis Baldwin in Tampa Bay, Florida from May 7-10. We’ll spend three plus days learning about chaos and order, living systems, the role of group work with Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry and World Cafe, and many other aspects of working with human relations to do good things in challenging and complex times. This will be our first Art of Hosting in the southeastern United States.
You can download the invitation here: AoH Tampa Bay Invitation.pdf.