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Category Archives "Art of Hosting"

Upcoming training in complexity, hosting, and other things

March 15, 2023 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Complexity, Evaluation, Facilitation, Featured, Learning

Working with Complexity Inside and Out

We are getting excited about our Complexity Inside and Out program which starts on April 13 and runs to June 15, every Thursday in the afternoon for the Pacific timezone, early evening in the Eastern time zone and late evening in western Europe. The course will cover:

  • Characteristics of complexity and foundation practices for working with them
  • Identifying and working with patterns
  • Working with constraints to shift sticky situations and unsolvable problems
  • Complexity-based tools for shifting inner systems (limiting beliefs, fears other mental gymnastics that keep us locked in unhelpful patterns)
  • Evaluation and participatory narrative inquiry
  • Using the Cynefin framework for decision making

…and more. This program will serve you well if you are a facilitator working with groups in complex situations, a leader, a community worker, a strategist, a researcher, or a teacher. Or just a human who is curious about how the world works and is developing a practice for working with it.

We have some great folks coming into the cohort from around North America including people working on racial equity in public health and people responsible for quality and change in a province-wide child and family services system. The conversation and practice opportunities will be rich. Come and learn together! Come with a team and we’ll give you a discount!

You can register here. Drop me an email if you want more information.

The Art of Hosting

Our annual west coast Art of Hosting is taking shape for the fall and we are hoping to return it to Bowen Island. The team of Caitlin Frost, Kris Archie, Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier and I are looking forward to welcoming you back here. Get on the waitlist now, as space is limited and tends to fill quickly. We’ll announce the dates soon. Sign up here.

Other training from friends

I have many great colleagues out in the world doing cool stuff. here’s a listing of some other upcoming learning opportunities

March 18

The global Art of Hosting practitioner community has a full 24-hour day of events that will be happening online. I’ll be participating and you should come too. It’s free. Check it out here.

March 30

My colleague Amanda Fenton, who is one of the best I know of in using online tools for harvesting is offering a two-hour introduction to the current state of online harvesting tools. This is not to be missed if you want to level up your harvesting game.

June 2

Amande will be joining Michelle Laurie for Engaging Beyond Words (in BC, Canada or online option, it’s a hybrid offering). The focus is on using visuals to help increase understanding and learning; retain information.

July 13-14

Michelle will be leading her annual Graphic Facilitation intensive in Rossland, BC, Canada. If you want to increase engagement at your meetings, help plan with people in a collaborative way, be more creative and generally help people make sense of complex ideas, and see the bigger picture, this hands-on workshop does this!

Room requirements for participatory meetings

February 3, 2023 By Art of Hosting, Facilitation, Featured, Open Space, World Cafe 9 Comments

The Paul Klee Centre in Bern, Switzerland. An amazing room, even though it lacked natural light.

Many of my meetings involve being in both a circle configuration and gathered around small tables. It is possible to move table in and out, but for most meetings (and full day or more workshops) these room requirements will be ideal:

  • The formula for an ideal room size is 100 square feet per person or 10 square meters per person. the more square the room the better. This allows us to set up a circle and a cafe space. If we are only doing one process (a world cafe OR an Open Space), then we can go with 75 square feet or 7.5 square meters per person. But more room is always better, especially in pandemic times.
  • Good air filtration is important.
  • Natural light is ideal. Windows on two sides of the room with empty walls on the other two sides is perfect.
  • Room set up is a circle of chairs in one half of the room and a cafe space in the other side. The tables in the cafe space should be ideally 3×3 feet or 1×1 meter with four chairs around them. For a group of 40 people, we need 10 tables. Square tables work best. if squares aren’t available, 6 foot (2 meter) long rectangular tables work well too, and we can get 6 people around them if need be. Round conference tables are not helpful as people are too far apart and it increases the noise in a room.
  • It is ideal to be able to tape posters on the wall using painter’s tape.
  • Projection optional but useful.
  • For groups larger than 40, and depending on the acoustics, a handheld microphone is helpful. I always assume there are folks in the room with hearing issues. 30-40 is the maximum for unamplified sound, and even then some people have very soft voices.

Typical materials we use in workshops and participatory events include these:

  • Mr. Sketch markers, one marker per four people.
  • Crayola markers, one package of these per 20 people. 
  • Plain white flip chart paper for the tables so people can write on it. One pad of 50 sheets per 30 people.
  • Post it flipchart pads optional (these are expensive and not as useful as plain pads, but we do use them)
  • Post-it notes Packages of 3×5 and 6×4 and assorted 2×2 square sizes are useful too. Important that these have the “Super Sticky” symbol on them which means they will stick to walls and hang vertically. 
  • Basic office supplies: Scissors, painter’s tape, ballpoint pens and name tags.
  • Additional decorations for the circle centre, important organizational artifacts, nice fabrics, flowers.
  • A portable bluetooth speaker for music.

For local events, I usually bring the markers and post it notes, letter sized paper, tape and bluetooth speaker, and ask the client to bring flip chart pads, office supplies and the organizational artifacts.

Put all that together well and you get a beautiful space with lots of room to move around and lots of materials to work with.

What is your essential list?

Leadership enables gifts to make meaning

January 10, 2023 By Art of Hosting, Community, Featured, Football, Invitation, Leadership, Organization, Philanthropy 2 Comments

A box of donuts that Joanna Vervoza-Dolezal, the starting centre back for TSS Rovers, brought for the Swanguardians on the last game of the season. Reciprocity in support.

Yesterday I had an informal call with a person who is leading up customer relationships for a large local company. The company is both a profit-making venture but also is a community institution and has a profile and responsibility beyond just the bottom line. We were talking about how the organization was stuck and the different approaches that the organization was taking towards customer relations when we stumbled onto an untapped area that may help to get the organization unstuck.

For organizations with double or triple bottom lines, the moment your focus moves beyond a financial return on investment, your customers and clients stop becoming ATMs and start becoming friends. Yes. Friends. The lines between your organizational life and the community become blurred. Social license becomes a reality, and that means that customers suddenly make decisions out of love and loyalty to the bigger vision which they can help co-create. They become non-material investors and shareholders in what you are doing. Your sustainability does not solely rely on making a profit. It relies on how those people that buy your services AND how they help shape and co-create your mission.

Where we got to in this conversation was that the organization needed to find ways to allow customers and clients to offer something back. Rather than going out and catering to their needs constantly and trying traditional marketing methods of giving the illusion of being a part of something, customers and clients of the organization need to have a chance to be meaningfully involved. In fact there are probably at present lots of people who are trying to give back and be involved but haven’t been seen because the organization has no way to receive their gifts. This is a real shift for how this organization has grown to see its customers. As the connection to social license fades away, customers increasingly get seen as people to be catered to, responded to and served. On the surface that seems a noble customer relations strategy, but when challenges are met, there are very few people with a meaningful investment in the organization to help repair it and set it back on track. Customers can just walk away at any time. And if you have customers who have bought into the social bottom line but you are only chasing the dollar, those ones will feel the lack of reciprocity first. When they leave its hard to get them back.

Why? Because people want to give. They want to be a part of something. They want to do something meaningful with their lives, their time and their money. We love a good product, but we also crave being a part of making it. Witness the way Apple for example has created a Distinguished Educator network. This is a way that educators in schools who love Apple products can help create new applications for these products in their schools. These folks are often cutting edge front-line teachers who are exploring pedagogy and using technology in a way that supports good learning theory. They are no longer customers. They are helping the company grow its brand, for sure, by working with schools but they also helping Apple find new ways to use their technology in service of education and learning.

As the Chair of the Board of Rivendell, a non-profit spiritual retreat centre, we’ve been exploring this angle through fundraising. We are an organization that has been generously supported by a Foundation throughout our whole existence and we have decided that we want to start doing fundraising not because we need financial resources, but because we want to create a different relationship with the community of people who love and support us and for whom our organization has made a deep impact in their lives. None of us on the Board are skilled at fundraising, and for all of us the prospect of doing it is terrifying. So we decided to learn together. We worked with a friend of mine who specializes in fundraising in these kinds of situations and he said his job is not parting people from their money but rather “helping people with money them heal by giving them a way to make meaning.”

Heal from what? Partly from a world that has completely commodified us either as a customer or as a unit of productivity. I think humans have a deep need to give and to be a part of something, but those of us who live in capitalist market-based societies are primarily valued as transactions. Everything we do is tracked for the benefit of dominating our attention and ultimately our wallets. But when I am offered an opportunity to provide a gift of time or money because it enters me into reciprocity and relationship, suddenly my life has the meaning I have been seeking. It is truly healing to give a gift and have that gift received.

To refuse an authentic gift is dehumanizing to both the giver and the receiver. Over time, losing the opportunities to provide gifts causes us to lose touch with what fundamentally makes community.

You cannot build communities around transactions. If your organization has a social bottom line at all and your entire customer relations strategy is transactional, I reckon you will always fail on this score. I think many companies who start out with a social bottom line leave it behind if they can’t figure out how to do it and revert to the single financial bottom line. That is enabled with customer management systems and managers who are trained in this type of work. Through our Art of Participatory Leadership training, we seek to teach leadership practices that enable social sustainability through enabling contribution. I’d love to know if folks are seeing this meaningfully taught in MBA programs or inside other institutional management and business programs.

The sustainability of an enterprise with an implicit or explicit community mandate rests in the ability of the enterprise to create spaces for people to give and co-create. That leads to co-ownership which can be material – like with our TSS Rovers FC community-ownership model – or more intangible, like the feeling of connection people have to helping create a space for spiritual renewal at our Rivendell retreat centre. Our sustainability depends on financial security and community. TSS Rovers FC needs to make a profit to survive, but we cannot do that without a community of people investing their time and talent over the long term to create an organization that is about developing humans, whether on or off the pitch. We encourage folks to offer what they can to the enterprise with two principles:

  1. Assume your talents are needed and;
  2. Proceed until apprehended.

The result at Rovers is that we have a happy patchwork of folks who offer expertise, enthusiasm, money and sometimes just an extra body to move things around. We even have a tradition of our players helping to set up the stadium and prepare the supporters section before they begin their warm up routines. We try to provide opportunities for everyone to experience gifting, because that is fundamental to the game of football anyway. Giving, receiving, offering space and time, and enabling your team mates to succeed is what secure victory on a football pitch and so we try to bring that ethos into our lives off the field too. That is how we go from being a successful football club to being a place that makes better humans and builds community whether you come to a match, in cleats, boots, shoes, sandals or bare feet.

Think about that. In the place where you are involved as a formal or informal leader, how are you enabling people to give? How are you receiving and holding the gifts and intentions of those in your orbit who are already giving to you? How are you enabling reciprocity to build community and sustainability?

End of year reflections

December 24, 2022 By Art of Hosting, Being, Bowen, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Football, Leadership, Learning, Music, Practice, Stories, Travel 10 Comments

Smelhmelhélch (Passage Island) at the mouth of Átl’ka7tsem (Howe Sound) before the snows came earlier this week.

Some notes on 2023 while I have a moment to review them.

The year began with the death of my father and is ending with worries about the serious and lingering health issues of other senior family members and so in a lot of ways this year has been split between personal grief during the first part of the year, and the waiting, supporting and attending in the second part of the year. Several times during the year, I haven’t found myself at my best. And that’s added on top of the persistent and low level background radiation that comes from the feeling that the world is slowly coming apart on this part of the planet and we are collectively ill-equipped to deal with it.

It hasn’t left me pessimistic, but I have noticed that I’m sad at what we have lost, which most of all appears to be the collective capacity to DO SOMETHING about the long term prospects for our planet and the community of living things that occupy it. as irrational as that thought is, because truthfully, it has been that way for my whole life, nevertheless, there is a feeling of loss. I’ve always described myself as an optimist because I believe that there is always something better we can do or embody, but the general prognosis needs power and wealth to radically change directions, and increasingly, I’m not confident that will happen. And so we push on.

Work

My work is changing, and has done throughout the pandemic. In the past I did much more face to face and one off facilitation work and delivered teaching through Art of Hosting workshops, for which I travelled the world. As I get older, I am more interested in teaching and supporting younger facilitators and so there is much more teaching now and one-to-one coaching and we are also taking work that is larger in scope than facilitating single meetings, in which we are focused on longer term support for leaders and organizations who want to be more participatory and more engaged with meaningful work. I like this as it means we develop longer term relationships with a few clients and are able to see the results of our work together over time. Additionally most of this work continues to be online, which suits me well as I have become more of a homebody and more introverted in the last three years. I do love face to face work, but as I get older I find it much more tiring, and I appreciate the ability to deliver quality content to folks and then turn off my computer and go to the garden or play guitar for an hour.

In 2023 I will turn 55 and I have a strong commitment that on my 55 birthday we will begin the process to scaling back and only working four days a week. We have been planning on this for a while, and I’m really looking forward to this shift. I feel like I need it for all kinds of reasons. In my calendar starting June 13, every Friday for the rest of my life has a recurring event that says “Fridays off for the rest of my life.”

This year Harvest Moon which consists of Caitlin Frost and myself along with our stellar assistant Laura O’Neil, had 27 clients. Many of these were larger projects working within large organizations and involving a lot of teaching and capacity building to support leadership and organizational change. We do this with a set of tools and practices that include participatory facilitation methods from Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development approaches, Participatory Narrative Inquiry, complexity work and personal practices for rigorous inquiry on limiting beliefs. This year we packaged these into bespoke programs in complexity focused participatory leadership for the Executive levels and senior leadership of a major university, a Crown corporation, an Indigenous government, a national labour union and one or two smaller organizations. We embedded several three day Art of Hosting/Art of Participatory Leadership workshops in these settings, and also used our course material we have been developing around complexity and personal leadership practices to complement the strategic conversations that we hosted. We have written four extensive workbooks for these programs and this might well turn into something more formal in the years ahead.

We amplified all of this work with story collections primarily using NarraFirma to gather stories and PNI to design sense-making and strategic interventions. This last capacity has become key to our work now and I have now run upwards of 30 story collection and sense-making projects through NarraFirma since the pandemic began. Although we have become really good at working with this material online, this work is most powerful in person, and it is one of the things I am looking forward to doing more face to face.

Partners

Over the past year we have worked with many partners and it is my usual practice to name them. They live in five different countries (Canada, USA, Netherlands, Moldova and Australia) and working with them makes it possible for all of us to do amazing work together. My gratitude to them all.

  • Harvest Moon partners Caitlin Frost and Laura O’Neil
  • Tatiana Glad
  • Meribeth Deen
  • Bhav Patel
  • Kris Archie
  • Kelly Foxcroft Poirier
  • Tiaré Jung
  • Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen at Beehive Productions
  • Phill Cass
  • Ciaran Camman
  • Amanda Fenton
  • Quin Buck
  • Corrina Keeling
  • Jodi Sanford
  • Kinwa Bluesky
  • Chad Foulks
  • Geoff Brown
  • Teresa Posakony.

Teaching

This year I offered several open enrolment courses with colleagues.

Learning

In addition to everything I learned from teaching these courses I also enrolled in two important programs myself to deepen my own practice.

  • Weaving It In: Making evaluation part of your work. This was an inaugural offering from my close colleague Ciaran Camman and combined their decades of evaluation experience with solid complexity and participatory practice. A nice combination of theory and practice and experiential learning.
  • Co-Resolve introduction to Deep Democracy with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson. After about 20 years of Sera challenging me to become friends with conflict, I finally came to study with her and this was a great course. The biggest shift in me is seeing how my conflict-averse tendencies have shifted from conflict resolution to what I’m calling “conflict preservation.”
  • This next year I have signed up for Cynthia Kurtz’s deep dive into Participatory Narrative Inquiry which is a 20 week long practicum during which my colleague Augusto Cuginotti and I will be running a PNI project with a client. I haven’t done any learning like this at this sort of scale since University. I’m looking forward to it.

Living on the web

My first website was a collaborative writing project with my old friend Chris Heald called Stereotype back in 1995. It was a proto-blog in the style of suck.com, which even 25 years later is a remarkable documentation of the shift of life from physical to online. So I’ve lived through a lot of iterations of web life. This past year I started a long wean away from the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter and began writing again on my blog with more frequency. I started a Mastodon account and have used that as an opportunity to rethink how I have compartmentalized my life online to suit various audiences. For the most part I have maintained a professional kind of look here and on my @chriscorrigan twitter account and I have devoted hours and hours of time to soccer life through my @salishsea86 twitter account. That is all changing slowly. I maintain some twitter accounts for the supporters group of the soccer team I co-own, but otherwise, I think everything will eventually be centralized back here with micro-posts on Mastodon. I will republish links to these posts through Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter as usual.

I’m slightly looking at LinkedIn again as there is some interesting professional content there that used to be published on blogs, but as much as possible I am integrating interesting content into my feeds at NetNewsWire. That is where I will be doing most of my reading, as the endless scroll of twitter and facebook are no long giving much value and Instagram is useless for my life, other than keeping up with our footballers who are half my age who only post there!

Avocations

This year has had three big commitments outside of family and work. As a founding member of the TSS Rovers Supporters’ Trust, I have spent the year selling shares to 351 co-owners of Canada’s first community-owned semi-pro soccer team. We have done some remarkable things this year including winning a League Cup on the men’s side and qualifying us for Canada’s national championship, the Voyageurs Cup, which is, mindbogglingly, the pathway to the FIFA Club World Cup. We will play a meaningful match in the first round of that competition in April against a Canadian Premier League professional team and the only thing better than actually getting this far would be effecting a giant killing in April. It has bee a remarkable journey all it’s own.

Another responsibility that I have devoted myself too is chairing the Board of the Rivendell retreat centre, a contemplative centre on Bowen Island. We have come through a pandemic and stayed afloat and are now beginning to engage in active fundraising for our longer term sustainability. This role is part of the way I live out my contemplative spiritual practice alongside a commitment to leading worship once a month at our little United Church on Bowen Island. I love that job. It helps us to afford our part time Minister and I get to dive deep into topics and scripture readings that are close to my heart. Perhaps I’ll post my sermon notes here in the new year if that’s of interest to you.

Music is my love and my third commitment. I have been singing with a renaissance choir doing medieval liturgical music and madrigals and studying jazz guitar on my own. My guitar teacher sadly died in April, and I miss him dearly. We had only a few lessons this year as he grew sicker. Learning jazz alone with only you tube videos and fake books is incredibly hard but incredibly rewarding and I’m hoping this year I might be able to study with another teacher and finally get a chance to play with folks.

Life on an island

I have lived on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) now for 21 years and seen many changes over that time. I have blogged about living here for most of that time. These days we are facing a huge population turnover and some rapid growth which has introduced lots of new folks to the place and radically changed the culture. Community events are returning which is essential if we are to repair the cohesion as a community that has been lost through the pandemic. I feel that we are fragmented in many ways, and we are being confronted with some very challenging situations including a ferry system that is crumbling under global staffing shortages, strains on our little island infrastructure, economic pressures from living in one of the most expensive places on earth with no level of government committed to radical change, tourism pressures and mindset that sees the places increasingly as an under served and under resourced suburb rather than a rural community. These changes have been steadily occurring over the past number of decades but social media and a lack of face to face contact has made them more pressing.

In the natural world, the big news is the tremendous numbers of humpback whales and orcas that have returned to our seas, and there are almost daily sightings of these mega-fauna. Ten years ago that was unimaginable. While that is happening, we have also witnessed some extreme weather, including long hot droughts in the summer which are the biggest threats to the place. Things change here and being grounded in place means that one can be a long-eyed witness of it all.

So that is the state of play on Christmas Eve 2023. At the end of a year in which I was not at my best, after three years of living in a strange new world, entering the half way point of my 50s. Thank you for sharing this year with me. Say hi. I hope we can cross paths next year.

The theology of the Art of Hosting

November 24, 2022 By Art of Hosting, Being, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Emergence, Featured, Flow, Learning, Podcast, Practice 2 Comments

In the Art of Hosting world we have a few shared core teachings that show up in nearly all the learning workshops that happen. At some point we talk about complexity – we usually explore the Chaordic Path as a simple introduction into complexity – and we always touch on the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting.

Back in 2014 I was doing a project with the United Church of Canada looking at the different levels of their structure in British Columbia and imagining what they could also be. If there is one thing that Churches have consistently done from the beginning it is that they adopt new forms. At the moment the United Church, and many other mainline progressive Christian denominations, are going through a massive shift, probably the biggest one since the Reformation. And it’s affecting everything.

So as I was doing this consulting work I started meeting communities of people who were asking how could they live through these transitions. Not survive them necessarily, but go with the transformation that was happening. As a part of the work I was doing I started offering talks and workshops based in the Art of Hosting, but wrapped in the theology of the United Church, becasue it turns out that having a way to understand complexity and to host life community is both necessary in struggling churches AND is pretty much the basis of Christian practice.

Now for those who don’t know, the United Church of Canada is a progressive, liberal Protestant denomination committed to radical inclusion and social justice. I was raised in that Church and at one point had my heart set on becoming a minister in that Church. My own spiritual practice is grounded in contemplative Christianity and I am an active member of the Bowen Island United Church where I help lead worship and preach one Sunday a month so we can give our paid minister a break.

That is just context to help you understand the theology behind this talk.

This talk was a keynote for the Northern Presbytery of British Columbia annual meeting from 2014. That year the churches of northern BC were gathering in Prince George to be together and practice being a bigger community. They invited me to come and speak on the work I was doing around community building and I chose to share the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice and I relished the chance to share these ideas using stories and teachings from scripture.

So if you work with Churches or Christian religious communities and you are interested in the way the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice basically help us use the teachings of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel in practice to build community, click here and have a listen.