A stump in a forest hosts life in a living system
Photo by alastairb
* NOTE: I changed the title of this post to better reflect the both/and nature of this conversation, rather than the unhelpful either/or way I originally wrote it.
At the Art of Hosting last weekend, it finally came to me – the simple description of the different between facilitation and hosting as I understand it. So here are a few simple metaphors and a more detailed meditation.
At the simplest level, you can think of a party. A facilitator is like a party planner, or a wedding organizer, running around taking care of details, scripting the event and staying outside of the experience. A party host, by contrast, is inside the experience, invested in the outcome, bringing energy to conversations, not only form, and both affecting and being affected by the experience.
For the sports minded is the difference between a coach and a captain, the difference between being on a football team and an ultimate team. For musicians it is the difference between what happens when a conductor conducts an orchestra and how a string quartet hosts itself.
Scaled up to another level, facilitation and hosting can be seen as complimentary forms of leadership for two different systems. Facilitation comes from a mechanistic view of organizations, that they are machines that can be fixed. Facilitators typically take a neutral stand, bring their tools and tool kits to help things run easier. The facilitator is the mechanic and the group is the machine.
Hosting, on the other hand, is a practice of leading from within a living system. It’s like entering the machine, becoming a part of it and changing it by being there. In a living system you cannot enter the field without affecting the field. So the host enters the field with all of the resources and assets he or she has and offers what they can to the centre of the work. When I am working explicilty as a host (which is my practice most of the time now) I am actively involved in what is going on. Sometimes it loks like facilitation if I may be called to offer an outsider’s view, but I do that from INSIDE the field in which we are working. I bring my whole self to the work and host conversations that invite us to co-create the tools and forms and processes we need to move. Hosting is leading from the field, and it is a very different path from “facilitation” and it operates out of a very different worldview about the kinds of systems in which we live. Anyone can do it, and in fact it works better when there is more “hosting consciousness” in a group. That way the power of a traditional facilitator is not needed, and the group’s capacity to take itself to the next level is increased.
From a complexity stand point, facilitation is seen as a reductionist activity, reducing complexity to simple problems with simple outcomes and a simple path for getting there. Facilitators help groups to seek answers and end states. Hosting from within the field however is more aligned with the nature of complex systems, where there are no answers, but instead only choices to make around the next question, and the paths where those questions lead us. There are no end states. The idea of a healthy community is a vector, not a point. It is a direction to move, not something that can be acheived and then crossed off the list.
For me the critical need for hosting is in the fact that traditional approaches to systems problems are not working. The systemic problems themselves are now understood to be so interconnected and embedded in each other that they are impossible to disentangle. The mechanical world view is fading and the living systems world view is arising. We are in a period of transition in the world between these two ways of seeing things and I think the core capacity of groups, organizations, communities and nations to find sustainable futures lies in their ability to host themselves to their next level of responsibility and action. Consulting in the mode of the mechanic that fixes things is over. Hosting in living systems is here.
One of the patterns emerging from our work in the Art of Hosting, is the practice of developing and supporting a core team that can collectively hold the bigger work that is being done.
At the moment I am working consciously with the core team pattern at VIATT, with the WK Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference, with the Quinault Indian Nation on a tribal strategic plan and with smaller conferences and gatherings, including one next week – a conference exploring collaboration in the child welfare and family services practice field. On that one we have been working with a core organizing team to co-create the process and a workbook for the conference to use. Today on our last conference call before the meeting, the organizers asked about catastrophic plan in case something happened to me and I couldn’t make it on the day. I replied that in that unlikely event, we should reflect on the fact that we have planned this entire gathering collaboratively and that if I got hit by a truck next week, any one of them could hold space on the day, working with the group through the set of exercises and experiences we have planned together. Everyone immediately recognized the power of a core team and the power of co-creation. It reuslts in co-ownership.
Working with core teams is differnt from facilitating a planning committee. When I work with core teams I join them as a host to discover the heart of a project, and to develop a co-created capacity to host a project together. This is not the same as acting as a facilitator for a team, inmy experience. Core team work comes from the inside of the group, not the outside. This is especially true of the large scale change work, because those projects need more than one person to generate and hold the deepest need, and to create capacity that lasts, that holding must be within the project. The core team then becomes the host for the project and the project become the host for change in the world, or the organization or the community. These fractal levels of work are very interesting to me at the moment, and very important to learn about as well. We’ll be rolling a lot of this thinking into the module Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen and I are leading at the Shambhala Institute this coming summer.
Just back from an amazing Art of Hosting in rural Pennsylvania. Found this in my email box upon my return, send to me by my friend Toke:
Not just any talk is conversation
Not any talk raises consciousness
good conversation has an edge
It opens your eyes to something
It quickens your earsAnd good conversation reverberates
It keeps on talking in your mind later in the day;
The next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said
The reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness
Your mind and heart have been moved
Your are at another level with your reflections.— James Hillman
This is what it is all about.
I’m happy to announce that this coming June 22-28 I will be teaching with my dear friends Toke Moeller and Monica Nissen at the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Nova Scotia. We will be teaching a module called “The Art of Hosting and Harvesting: From Strategic Conversation to Wise Action to Systemic Change.”
We would be delighted if you would consider joining us and the other great teachers who are assembled for the 2008 programme.
Photo by Khalid Almasoud
A note on some very interesting recent psychiatric research that shows that decision-making has much to do with finding an inner equilibrium:
Martin Paulus, M.D., professor in UCSD’s Department of Psychiatry, has compiled a body of growing evidence that human decision-making is inextricably linked to an individuals’ need to maintain a homeostatic balance.
“This is a state of dynamic equilibrium, much like controlling body temperature,” said Paulus. “How humans select a particular course of action may be in response to raising or lowering that ‘set point’ back to their individual comfort zone. In people with psychiatric disorders or addictions, the thermostat may be broken.”
Up to now, according to Paulus, psychiatrists and others have looked at the decision-making process as a considered series of options and values.
“What has never been considered closely, but should be, is the state of the decision-maker,” Paulus said. According to the researcher, this homeostatic state — the tendency to maintain internal stability, due to the mind and body’s coordinated responses to any stimulus that disturbs the normal condition — is altered in individuals with addictions and psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia or anxiety. “This disturbance of homeostatic balance leads to dysfunctions in decision-making — which helps explain why such patients make seemingly bad choices,” he said
This focus on the inner state and the need to find equilibrium has some correalations to the charodic path, the mental model we teach with the Art of Hosting that talks about the dance between chaos and order and how leadership has much to do with finding courage on that path.
[tags]decision making, chaordic path[/tags]