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.
So I’m a map maker. I am a cartographer of my own learning, and I love making maps to help me understand where I am, where I have been, and where I might go.
Since being an active participant in the community of learners working with what we call the Art of Hosting, I have been fascinated with the maps we use that represent our ways of making sense of the world. I have been trying various ways to draw a grand map of all of these things, and here is my latest effort, a sketch I did today based on learning as recent as last week. Click here to get the large version of this, so you can read it.
These are drawn as a circle, to address the idea that the way we have been drawing our maps was too linear. This is a map that charts the territory of working in long term, large scale change efforts within complex living systems.
There is a lot here, so let me go through it is some detail. It’s a draft, a sketch and it changes about as fast as the territory does, so I’d appreciate your thoughts and noticings about it.
Circles within circles (black)
The two black circles are where we begin the one with the cross in it stands for the individual and the larger one stands for the social sphere. The personal sphere is divided into four quadrants and these extend out into the social sphere as well. Wilber’s integral quadrants map on to here if you put individual at the bottom and collective at the top and internal at the left and external at the right. It is this interaction that is what the Art of Hosting is all about.
The four stages of developing leadership in community
The naming of the quadrants in this map comes from Meg Wheatley’s and Debbie Frieze’s work with the Berkana Institute on the Lifecycle of Emergence. The green words are four stages for developing leadership in community and they translate well into individual leadership practices as well . These four stages are naming, connecting, nourishing and illuminating. These are practices that are alive in the relationship between people and the lives of groups.
Navajo concepts (light brown)
The light brown words delineate five spaces that reflect the Navajo cycle of collaboration, moving from Creation Space to Intention Space to Vision Space to Action Space to Renewal Space, again coming around to Creation Space again. In actual fact, this is a map of the unfolding of Creation Space, so if it helps, picture the point at which the two circles intersect as an infinite point.
These concepts are based on Navajo philosophy but are not orthodox interpretations of the same. They are simply the way Navajo facilitators and hosts are making sense of their work from a traditional context. These concepts were developed by the Shuprock Health Promotion team that we have been working with over the past year.
The Diamond of Participation redrawn (dark blue)
While the circles do look nested one within the other there is another shape tat they create together that is important. Travelling clockwise from the bottom of the diagram you will notice that the space between the circles grows and then shrinks away again. This is intentional. I have named these three phases after Sam Kaner’s three zones in the Diamond of Participation: Divergent phase, Groan Zone and Convergent Phase. This is the shape of an overall project, and it is a pattern that scales.
The Five Breaths (red)
In looking at large scale change, we work with a pattern called “The Five Breaths” which is a pattern of the life of a project, be it a meeting or a systemic shift. The five phases of this process are Call, Clarify, Invite/Design, Meet and Act. Each of the breaths is nested in the other and each one is experienced as diamond, with a divergent, emergent and convergent phase to it. Hosting and Harvesting as practice grounds live deeply in these diamonds.
On either side of the five breaths, in the spaces that are called Intention Space and Renewal Space, there is a think thread. On the left, this thread represents the call that is alive in someone from the moment of inspiration (or the threshold of longing, that red line at the bottom left) until the call is made. This thread, even held as an intention grows and attracts attention to work until a call blossoms. On the other side, beyond action, the thread fades away in what could be called the art of stewardship, an art that is about letting go of things once they are done. This line grows ever fainter until the thread of consciousness passes over the threshold of memory and all of our work is gone and forgotten. The ideal result of such a fading away is ripples of action and influence that emanate out as the legacy of a project or a life.
The Chaord (purple)
Chaos and order interact in Creation Space, where the chaos of the world intersects with the order we as individuals bring to making meaning of our world. This dance is generative and is both the source of all great work and the place to which it all returns. The chaord lives in the space between the threshold of memory and the threshold of longing, on the other side of doing. It is unintentional but conscious being-space.
The Chaordic Stepping Stones (light blue)
The chaordic stepping stones are some ways we help make sense of the journey. We use different stepping stones, and there are some that aren’t on this sketch that are listed elsewhere. All of them emerge from the lenses developed by the Chaordic Commons. They lie on the outside of the model more because they are tools. They are points of order in the chaos that surrounds work.
If anyone wants to take a crack at a more beautiful way to draw this, I’d love it. We could probably use it for the module Monica Nissen, Toke Moeller and I are doing at the Shambhala Institute this June, where we will be teaching much of what is on here.
Note: I’ve updated this post to reflect Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze’s ideas here. I had wrongly attributed them to my Navajo friends.