I was hanging out with my mates and fellows from the Art of Hosting yesterday here on Bowen Island. Any time I get to spend with these guys changes the way I see things.
Yesterday Toke Moeller was describing a game he has developed called Flowgame, which is a way of asking questions and hosting conversations to sustain flow on these questions. In passing he mentioned that in order to play, you have to have a real question, and he described a real question as a question where you have something at stake.
That’s a wicked definition if you think about it. It gets away from questions that are just academic, or that are leading questions, or closed questions and it invites questions which, by their very asking, change everything.
THAT is the practice of invitation.
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There is a great flowering of dialogic facilitation training this month around these parts in southern British Columbia and northern Washington State. First Peggy Holman and Tom Cato are offering an Appreciative Inquiry training in Seattle from October 18-21.
Following that, Toke Paludan Moeller and friends will be right here on Bowen Island offering the excellent Art of Hosting gathering which I can highly recommend. That workshop will run October 30 to November 3 which is a great time to be here on our island, as we celebrate Hallowe’en as a quasi-national holiday. That workshop will also feature an alumni gathering that I’ll be at on November 2 and 3.
Finally, you can top off your learning month with an Open Space practice workshop offered by myself and Wendy Farmer-O’Neil in Nanaimo from November 15-17.
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A propos of my post on facilitation and authenticity, I am becoming more keenly aware of the ways in which artists have been describing the process of “hosting.” Today, my pal Andy Boprrows posts a set of poems that speak to me, including this one by Wendell Berry:
The Real WorkIt may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
— Wendell Berry
I’ve also been looking for songs online that describe “this work” and so far have collected a few into a playlist at Webjay. Just follow the link and click play to hear them. Additions to that list. which is composed of free and legal online media, are welcome. And if anyone can find me a copy of Alanis Morrissette’s song “Utopia” send me the link. As a poem about conversation it is amazing:
Utopiawe’d gather around all in a room
fasten our belts engage in dialogue
we’d all slow down rest without guilt
not lie without fear disagree sans judgmentwe would stay and respond and expand and include
and allow and forgive
and enjoy and evolve and discern and inquire
and accept and admit and divulge and open
and reach out and speak upThis is utopia this is my utopia
This is my ideal my end in sight
Utopia this is my utopia
This is my nirvana
My ultimatewe’d open our arms we’d all jump in
we’d all coast down into safety netswe would share and listen
and support and welcome
be propelled by passion not invest in outcomes
we would breathe and be charmed
and amused bydifference
be gentle and make room for every emotionwe’d provide forums we’d all speak out we’d all be heard
we’d all feel seenwe’d rise post-obstacle more defined more grateful
we would heal be humbled and be unstoppable
we’d hold close and let go and know when to do
which we’d release and disarm and stand up and feel safethis is utopia this is my utopia
this is my ideal my end in sight
utopia this is my utopia
this is my nirvana
my ultimate
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I’ve been facilitating groups for as long as I can remember, going back probably 20 years to high school when I ran both informal and organized youth groups with my peers. It has probably been about twelve or thirteen years ago that I started to actually pay attention to what I was doing. But only in the last five or six years, as I have been facilitating full time, have I noticed a deepening in my practice.
Work as practice. And by practice I mean something akin to a spiritual practice, whereby one undertakes a life of value and meaning through living in a particular way. When I feel my facilitation practice deepening, I notice that what I do is becoming more and more aligned with who I am.
I am starting to see just how important that is in the work I do with groups. When I was first starting out, I used to collect “tools” for working with groups. I had what amounted to a cookbook of ideas for working through different processes. I got some success in simply following the instructions and helping the group get to where they wanted to go. For most groups, and perhaps even a lot of facilitators, this is enough. It certainly served my work for a number of years.
The thing that changed that, and caused me to deepen my practice, was noticing what happened when things went wrong. Occasionally groups strayed far from the expectation I had for them and when the movie departs from the script, the facilitator’s REAL work begins. In these situations What I noticed was my own anxiety and panic about being in the unfolding chaos. I had very little idea what to do, and on a couple of occasions, things just went very wrong.
In reflecting on these experiences I realized what I was lacking was chaordic confidence, a term I appropriated from my friend Myriam Laberge. Chaordic confidence describes the ability to stay in chaos and trust that order will emerge. It’s a subtle art, but it is essential to working with groups who are themselves confronting chaos. If you can stay in the belief that order will emerge from what Sam Kaner calls “The Groan Zone” then the group has something to hitch its horse to, so to speak. But if you are married to your tools, and things go off the rails, you feel like a fish out of water, and you flop around unable to deal with the uncertainty around you. I’ve seen it happen – we probably all have – and it’s not pretty.
Developing chaordic confidence is more than acquiring more tools. It is about integrating an approach to life and work that is anchored in a a set of principles and values that serves our clients. For me these values include believing in the wisdom of the group, trusting that chaos produces higher levels of order and seeing conflict as passion that can be harnessed in the service of progress.
I began looking at some of the tools and processes and approaches I was using and started to realize that the things that worked for me and that brought a better experience to my clients, were processes rooted in the same values that I try to live. This weblog,tagged as “living in open space” is largely about that journey to live and work with the principles of Open space Technology – principles that amount to creating a practice of invitation. Living a life of invitation is a blast.
And there is more. My repetoire of approaches is expanding into a full range of what Toke Paludan Moeller calls “hosting practices.” And as I adopt and work with things like the world cafe and appreciative inquiry, I realize that the values and principles underlying those processes feel authentic to me. When I use those approaches to working with groups, my clients are getting ME, and not just a set of tools. I try to bring my whole self to this work now, with a large dose of chaordic confidence rooted in principles and values that link what I do with who I am. Doing and Being meet in the board room or the retreat centre.
We facilitators don’t talk much about this stuff, but I think it actually preoccupies a lot of our time and thinking. My own preparation for group involves many hours of design and reflection on process and principles so that I can go to work offering the highest level of service to the people with whom I am working. And for me, this means reflecting on what is core to my life and work.
So this is a long winded way of offering some insight into facilitation practice, perhaps mostly for those who are new to this path and who are realizing, as I am, that there is a life time of learning about oneself involved in this work. So as a service to those who might be interested in developing this deeper connection between life lived and tools used, I offer a set of links to principles underlying the processes I work with (and some I don’t work with!) in groups and communities. I offer these up both as a guide to group work and as a compendium of principles and teachings about living. See what you think…
Principles of process and life
- Open Space Technology
- Appreciative Inquiry
- Dialogue
- Circle
- World Cafe
- Dynamic Facilitation
- Chaordic principles
- Four fold way
My recipe book is changing. It’s no longer about tools for group work, but is instead a collection of teachings about living a true and good life of service to heart and community.
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Lifting this right from Adam Kahane’s book Solving Tough Problems:
We get stuck by holding on tightly to our opinions and plans and identities and truths. But when we relax and are present and open up our minds and hearts and wills, we get unstuck and we unstick the world around us. I have learned that the more open I am – the more authentic I am to the way things are and could be, around me and inside me; the less attached I am to way things ought to be – the more effective I am in helping to bring forth new realities. And the more I work in this way, the more present and alive I feel. As I have learned to lower my defenses and open myself up, I have become increasingly able to help better futures be born.”
Before I picked up this book, I had been feeling the same way. Sitting with mates in the Art of Hosting learning last month attuned my senses to my facilitation practice such that I was thinking exactly the same things. And some serendipitous connections that have emerged since then with Adam Kahane have strengthened that commitment to openness and receptivity. At some I think, every facilitator hits this realization. It has taken me close to 15 years to really sink into this new reality.
And the journey continues…