Part three in a series:
Part three: a collection of patterns for design and facilitation.
As I heard the story, the four fold practice was something of a flash of insight tied in with the original Art of Hosting offering made by Toke, Jan, and Monica. Somewhere in the forests of Northern California as the team was preparing to offer its first Art of Hosting training, somebody woke up one morning, after a few days of discussion and design with the strong sense that meaningful conversations had four things in common: people were present to the work, everyone was participating, the conversation was hosted in some way, and people co-created together. That’s it. It was, as the legend goes, drawn on the back of a napkin, which is the test of all useful frameworks, and it became the subject of an inquiry: so if these are the patterns that make up a meaningful conversation, what would the Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations look like? Could we anchor our hosting practice on that? Could we teach that?
This simple observation and the subsequent inquiry has become a generative framework that holds together a global community of practitioners and theorists. We have seen that what constitutes a “meaningful conversation” in a huge variety of cultural and linguistic settings on every continent is a process that more or less exhibits these four characteristics. When brought together in the service of meaningful work these four patterns bring life and effectiveness to collective sense-making, problem-solving, and action. When attended to with good design and facilitation, these patterns become basic elements of the best kind of dialogue.
The ART of using these practices is being able to use them fluidly and fluently in many different contexts. Each of these four patterns looks different depending on the group you are working with and the work you are doing with them. It is very important that each group experience these patterns in ways that make sense to them. As skillful hosts we are trying to build containers for important and meaningful work. These containers are not the product of our role, rather they are themselves instruments that help good work to be done. The Art of Hosting is purely instrumentalist, in the sense that if the hosting is not practical and pragmatic and not in the service of something else, then it is not appropriate. Our goal as practitioners is not to simply create good dialogues for their own sake but to do so to have an effect, so we can be of service to a group.
Over the past 15 or so years of teaching and working with this art I have thought a lot about the connection between these patterns of experience and the practice of hosting. For me now, these four patterns have become the enabling constraints of my work with groups, in that I try to ensure that my designs meet the group’s purpose using this practice. The practices are broad enough that they allow for a vast array of approaches to be used so that designs can be tailored to context, but at the end of the day, it’s important to ask myself these questions:
- Are participants present?
- Is everyone participating?
- Is the space being held and hosted?
- Is the group itself co-creating its work?
In my experience, the extent to which these four conditions are true is directly related to the extent to which the group is doing good dialogic work. When I see goops faltering in their work, it is usually because one of these four patterns is crumbling. A group may lose its focus, some participants might be dominating in a way that causes others to become redundant to the process, the facilitation may be too tight or too loose, or the group may be having its work done by someone else. All of these conditions have the effect of undermining ownership, capacity, engagement, and participation. In general, when we are working with uncertainty or unknown futures, the four-fold practice is a useful checklist to enable groups to work together in complexity to understand what’s happening, make sense of their situation and make some decisions about what to do next, all the while staying connected and in relationship.
That’s a pretty big return on investment for such a small and portable practice.
Being Present
When I think back to the original learning I did around hosting and facilitation with the Elders of the National Association of Friendship Centres, and indeed before that in the governance processes of the United Church of Canada in which I was involved as a young man, I notice that important conversations were always preceded with a prayer or an invocation, or even a moment of silence before we got to work. For a conversation to be meaningful, every participant must be present to the task at hand. That means each one needs to have the time and resources to be able to participate. The work of the moment must be the only thing that holds people’s attention and so focus is important.
In later years, through the playing of Irish traditional music, which itself is a kind of social ritual and through spiritual practice influenced by both my indigenous teachers and the stream of practice that comes from Celtic monasticism, I observed and thought deeply about the nature of thresholds, which are those edges we cross that help us understand that we are in a different space, set aside for particular collective work that requires a little more depth of attention than our day to day activities. Practices to cross the threshold are very important in these kinds of spaces because they help us understand that we are in a different place and we are asked to bring a different awareness to what we are doing.
This is true of dialogue.
So whatever helps people come present to the work is a useful way to build the container for dialogue. It becomes almost ceremonial, and indeed the importance of ritual of some kind cannot be overstated. Even something as simple as taking a moment of silence before beginning, or having people silently read the relevant document together is a useful way to begin. Of course, more elaborate processes can involve more elaborate ways of bringing people to presence, but I have never been let down by a moment of silence. Even in the middle of meetings, when things are going sideways and conflict has become unproductive, a moment of silence can have a powerful effect in bringing people back to the problem or the purpose.
Whatever helps the group cross the threshold – be it physical or immaterial – will help participants come to the presence necessary to do deeper work.
Participating
In my own journey to develop the art of hosting in myself, one of the biggest mountains to climb was the idea that the facilitator is the one in charge of the room. For years I stood at the front of rooms full of people struggling with problems, asking questions, guiding discussions, commenting on ideas and writing them on flip charts. I was an influential part of the discussion, mostly unconsciously influencing decisions and discussions towards ideas and actions that grabbed my attention and excited me. It was all about me. Even though I was schooled on participatory research and Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I was also raised and mentored by people who were training me to be a preacher in the United Church of Canada and the promise to the ego of commanding an audience was the hardest thing that I had to overcome. Indeed it is still the hardest place of my own facilitation practice.
Discovering Open Space Technology was an absolute revelation to me. It allowed me to see what was possible when the facilitator radically trusted the group and let them take full responsibility for the conversations and the outcomes of their work. Radical participation is at the heart of the Art of Hosting, and the practice itself is intended to constrain leaders and hosts in such a way that the groups do theor work within constraints but with a minimum of influence from the facilitator. This is often the hardest practice for facilitators to learn when they shift their style to hosting: we are generally imprinted its the idea that facilitation means the facilitator is taking control of the space, ensuring safety, managing the agenda, keeping things moving along and dealing with conflict. Many times clients have asked me to solve interpersonal problems for them, because we have an idea that we can outsource these kinds of things to a facilitator.
But we know that when a group takes responsibility for its own work when everyone is actively participating and making sense of their own situation, we get a much more sustainable and resilient outcome from dialogic processes. The job of the host is to enable participation through careful attention to the constraints and methods that make it possible. This means first of all that hosts themselves must have a practice of participation, meaning that they must be good at engaging in dialogue themselves: sharing Ideas, listening to others, being aware of their impact in systems. It means that hosts must understand that they are never neutral in a system, that the privilege, power, and influence they bring is significant and important. Learning more about complexity, power, and privilege has made me a better host and has deepened my practice of participation in the world.
There is a reason that methods like Circle, Open Space Technology, World Cafe, and Appreciative Inquiry have been fundamental to the practice of the Art of Hosting in strategic settings. These methods have full participation built into them, and participants actively share the responsibility for the quality of the conversation and the harvest of the outcomes. Furthermore, when practitioners in the Art of Hosting global community have created methods, they also ensure full participation from all, including methods like Pro-Action Cafe, Collective Story Harvesting, and Design for Wiser Action.
Participation is at the heart of the four fold practice.
Being Hosted
In the practice of Dialogic Organization Development, of which the Art of Hosting is one expression, there is a great deal of attention given to the “container.” Participatory conversations take place within a described time and place and a set degree of freedom. The container is formed from attractors like a core purpose, a calling question, or a felt need. It is constrained by boundaries like time, space, resources, and degrees of influence. The role of the host is to pay attention to the container so that participants can operate within this space. Sometimes this involves tightening constraints or destroying them altogether. It might mean inviting attention on a shared purpose again or moving with the energy of the group and changing course. It is a dynamic and ever evolving practice.
And yes, it is different from what most people understand as “facilitation,” which is that person standing at the front of the room managing the conversation ad scrawling away on flip charts. Years ago I wrote a blog post that sought to make a clear distinction between the two terms but it was really too stark a distinction. These days I’m not so precious about this and I use the terms interchangeably. The essence of the art of hosting for me though is attending to the properties of the container so that the group itself can do the work. I see the host as a part o the system but a part with a very specific role of managing constraints. Most often in my work, this is done as a consultant, with the power and responsibility to do this, but there are times when I am a part of a group that needs hosting and I turn my attention from the work at hand and focus on the quality of the container instead. It is, as my friend Tenneson Woolf often says, a gift to host and a gift to be hosted.
Being hosted well is indeed a gift, and is not that common. Think of how many meetings you have been to where your irritation with the facilitator has gotten in the way of the work you came to do. Some of those times may even have been with me as your host! Alos, think of the times when you were acutely aware that the LACK of hosting was a real problem, impeding the ability of the work to get done. Reflect on these experiences and contrast them with the experiences you had of the most meaningful work in your life. It is an almost certainty that these experiences were hosted – that is they happened inside a container that was built around mutual purpose,a common challenge, a relationship, or an opportunity to do something relevant. The hosting may have been extremely light, or it may have involved a tightly scripted flow. It may have been held by another person, or the group itself may have played the role of the host. Regardless, I am willing to be that the most meaningful conversations humans are involved in – and the most meaningful work – comes inside just the right enabling constraints. It is hosted.
Sometimes when I am talking about the four-fold practice I will say that this pattern is about enabling contribution, and I truly think that a well-hosted meeting sets up a kind of gift economy, where participants are offering and receiving in the best way. This doesn’t mean that folks are always getting along well, but it does mean that difference, dissent and conflict can be offered and received in the service of something bigger and not as a back and forth tennis match of accusation and closing down. Hosting is not something that happens without intention and a commitment to the role and so in spaces where hosting will benefit, to step up and do the work is to contribute to the emergence of this pattern.
Co-creating
The fourth pattern of meaningful conversation acknowledges that the best dialogues leave the participants with the knowledge and evidence that they have been creating something together. When things are truly participatory, participants can point concretely to the way that they contributed to the outcome. This is a rare feeling these days where both organization and community life is dominated by accountabilities that are more often than not pointed towards people in power or responsibility and not towards oneself or to the group of folks to which one belongs. There is of course some truth to this, but complex challenges require the participation and ongoing ownership of all in order to be sustainable. The feeling of having co-created something brings tremendous meaningfulness to a task and ongoing commitment to the relationship that will extend and sustain the effort.
Co-creation for me is a key piece of design in every way. I recently hosted a meeting with drug users, community members, service providers and non-profit leaders where we were looking at the stories collected about opioid use in a sensemaker project. It was obvious to me that the meeting needed to be co-created with people from all of these groups in order for it to be something that had some real efficacy. In the end, a network of peers offered the four main tasks for the day (review the stories to find patterns, discuss them with others, come up with bigger solutions, and leave with something concrete) and they also took responsibility for setting up safe space where people could use drugs or be supported if the stories triggered trauma. This was something I couldn’t do at all, and so I stuck to hosting the process and the peer network hosted the space. That is co-creation.
Likewise, when I am hosting, the group itself will be largely responsible for its own harvest of the gathering. That means data written or recorded in their own hands and voices, and it means that they make sense of the conversations they have had and even create the substance of the report of the proceedings. My basic principle is “never touch the data” and if there is ever a time I have to move post-it notes or write words about the event, I think very carefully about whether or not it is my place to do so. It is tempting for facilitators to show their prowess by synthesizing data, writing reflections and telling the group what happened in their reports. All of that, useful as it may appear to be, has a cost. It is your job to find that cost and determine whether it is a price you are willing you to pay!
So these patterns translate into a useful set of design and planning guidelines. They help us practice the art of hosting and keep meetings as participatory as possible. They also often guideposts for the development of practice of both facilitation and, at bigger scales, leadership.
Part of a series.
Part two: Where did this come from?
Something Harrison Owen said to me somewhere along the line drove me to understand that facilitating Open Space Technology meetings required a tremendous amount of personal practice. He talked about rising at 4am the day of his Open Space meetings and meditating for an hour. The work of actively letting go takes a tremendous amount of energy, especially if, like most of us, you have control instincts to overcome. When one is facilitating an Open Space meeting the desire to control things, even the little things, burns throughout the day. It takes active and constant personal work to deal with that instinct and to continually and kindly return responsibility for the quality of the day to the participants.
In seeking to learn more about this intersection between personal practice and facilitation I connected to Birgitt Williams during the years when she was beginning to develop the Genuine Contact program. I brought her to Vancouver a number of times in the early 2000s and also co-hosted the World Gathering of Open Space Technology facilitators in 2001 at the University of British Columbia. I found myself more and more in care of a simple method that nevertheless had profound effects on the groups with which I was working. Birgitt’s work very explicitly extended facilitation and leadership practice into spiritual practice and it was she who drove home the point that Harrison had made earlier, that one needed a strong personal practice in order to hold space well. Michael Herman, whom I met in person at the OSonOS in 2001, influenced me to begin to think about facilitation as practice, rooted as it was in his own meditation practice. He also was the one who helped me to draw the lines out from methods to context, concentrating on supporting the core mechanic of self-organization: the invitation. In 1998 he had already mapped out where all of this was going with his profound little e-book “The Inviting Organization Emerges.” Suddenly my own practice lit up. I understood that in order to be good at this stuff I was going to need to develop both a personal practice and get good at using maps and frameworks to help the clients I was now working with as a consultant.
By the time I met Toke in 2003, and he uttered those words, I was keen to find the next level of my facilitation practice.
Years later I learned that my friend Maria Scordialou had uttered the phrase “the river beneath the river” to name what many of us were feeling at that time in the late 1990s. The phrase referred to the sense that there was something happening beneath the surface of the organizational change initiatives methods that had sprung into the world in the 1980s and 1990s. Although already well known in many community development contexts, participatory work was coming into its own as organizations became more and more interested in the complex parts of their operations: the people and networks and markets and environments in which they existed and to which they could exert no explicit control. Chaos theory was beginning to come into organizational life and influence leadership and management and the rise of the internet was holding great promise for enabling horizontal and self-organizing networks. Many of us began to experience the powerful results of well hosted participatory meetings and we began to see that the ability to facilitate these
The origins of the Art of Hosting as a field of practice, as a framework and as a workshop are not completely clear. Back in 2007 an online discussion sought to discover the origins of the Art of Hosting and indeed it had multiple tributaries that flowed together at a few specific gatherings. A small group of people primarily based in Europe who had been working with participatory methods in the 1990s began to meet and discuss the question of “What could the Art of Hosting also be?” Although Toke, Monica Nissen, and Jan Hein were the first to offer an Art of Hosting workshop in San Jose in 1999, many of the people that have now become close friends and colleagues over the years were a part of these initial discussions. These folks include Tim Merry, Tatiana Glad, Maria Scordialou, Christina Baldwin, Ann Linnea, Bob Stilger, Teresa Posakony, Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, Tenneson Woolf, and Meg Wheatley.
As befits a practice that was beginning to emerge from a variety of streams, the Art of Hosting took shape at a number of gatherings at which like-minded practitioners were meeting. These happened primarily in Europe, at Castle Borl in Slovenia, Hazelwood House in the UK and a little later at the Shambhala Institute on Authentic Leadership in Halifax, Canada. The conversations at these places were deeply influenced by the sense that leadership was practice and that “hosting” was a form of facilitation that was radically participatory in its nature. The Art of Hosting, as a collective inquiry, was finding a home in some influential networks including the Pioneers of Change, the Kaos Pilots, The Berkana Institute and the World Cafe community, all of whom were seeking to develop dialogue, conversation and participation as a key skill to make sense of the complexity of the world’s 21st-century problems. These networks were responsible for the rapid global spread of the Art of Hosting, especially amongst young leaders and social entrepreneurs who were taking on a massive piece of work in which community building and collective co-creation were essential.
None of this history explains exactly what the Art of Hosting is, but it does explain why the simple generative framework contains four practices: hosting oneself, hosting others, participating, and co-creating. It is a framework that is widely adaptable to spiritual practice, entrepreneurship, leadership, citizenship and governance, development work of all kinds, and facilitation for complex challenges. Its simplicity combined with its adaptability has mean that the “Art of Hosting” has found a home in all kinds of diverse contexts from the European Union to a 20-year experiment in intentional living in Zimbabwe, to decolonization efforts in Canada, enterprise development in the USA, the regeneration of faith communities, land and local economies. It shows up in equity and justice work, academic leadership contexts, governments and parliaments. Anywhere human beings need to work together, make sense together, and act together around complex challenges where traditional command and control leadership is not appropriate has been a context in which the Art of Hosting as a practice has shown to be useful.
So what the heck is it? That’s the next part.
To begin the new year, I’m offering here a series of posts on the core practice of the Art of Hosting, the Four-Fold Practice. Since 2003, the Art of Hosting community has been my primary learning and practice community as I have learned and grown my facilitation and leadership practice. Central to that community is the four-fold practice, a simple framework that describes both what the actual Art of Hosting is and what it does.
Part one today describes a bit of my own journey that brought me into contact with this community. Over the next few days, I’ll share a bit more about the practice as well including its origins and my current thinking on its application in both facilitation and leadership.
Part one: just what I needed
I began my journey as a facilitator back in the early 1990s as I ran meetings for the non-profit I worked for, the National Association of Friendship Centres. Across Canada, more than 100 Friendship Centres provide services, cultural programming, and care for urban indigenous communities. Beginning in 1948, it is one of the oldest indigenous community development movements in Canada and has become a powerful force for change and social development.
Facilitation is a very important skill in the Friendship Centre movement because, as an organization that is devoted to community development and the elevation of urban indigenous voices in policymaking and social change, well-hosted meeting are an active part of the work of Friendship Centres. Friendship Centre staff, especially younger staff members, often find themselves in front of a flip chart, armed with markers, writing down ideas and helping groups make sense of the world. The Friendship Centre movement is an excellent training ground for participatory work. SO tat is where I began, in the national office, as a policy analyst, armed with a culture and community development-heavy degree in Native Studies from Trent University and a deep desire to help.
My first facilitation training came from Bruce Elijah, an Oneida Elder who was our Board Elder and spent many days at our office advising us, guiding us with prayer and good advice and making sure we were doing things “right.” One day in 1993, when I was about to go an host a very important meeting on family violence policy development, I asked him for some advice and he gave me an eagle feather to use as a talking piece and said “The Creator gave us two important gifts: circle and story. Use them.”
That was the full extent of my first facilitation training and I put it into practice right away, convening a meeting of Friendship Centre staff and Health Canada officials and researchers that resulted in the establishment of the national Aboriginal Family Violence Initiative. It was clear to me that these two gifts – circle and story – were the secrets to meetings in which participants themselves were in control and the content was uninfluenced by the facilitator. It reminded me that my only role was to be quiet, hold space and keep careful notes.
I think I had an inkling very early on that quality participatory work required something like meditation for personal preparation. It also always required a prayer or some way of deliberately entering the work, with a good heart and an aspiration towards kindness, listening and contributing one’s best thinking. I could see too that people were more engaged when everyone was given a chance to speak, when there was a good process held in place to enable the work and what, at the end of the day, what was created was created by all. I watched the Elders in our movement open meetings with prayers and hold us in ceremony for the duration. Bruce himself would begin Board meetings with a long Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving prayer, which sometimes lasted 20 minutes or more and acknowledged our dependence on things far greater than those on the agenda. We would sometimes smudge the room, to bring kindness and calm to the space. Sometimes we would sing together or someone would sing for us and after this extended beginning, we would start our meetings. The Elders would sit quietly with us, and intervene only if saw something that threatened the quality of the space in a negative way. They didn’t suppress dissent or disagreement, but they called people to account for their behaviours and invited a pause for everyone to remember the bigger teachings and get back to work.
Those were my first teachers in facilitation work: Bruce Elijah, Sylvia Maracle, Marge White, George Cook, William Commanda, Gisda’wa and many other Elders in communities across Canada who opened our meetings with prayers and guidance and who stayed present during the whole time. These names are well known across indigenous communities in Canada. When you are in a meeting hosted by them, you are in ceremony, plain and simple. They make no distinction between the two. When people are gathered to do work, it is a sacred moment with the potential for healing and significant change. One never knows the long term outcomes of an important meeting, so attention to the quality of the space is critical. In retrospect, I can remember the exact birth moments of significant things like the Aboriginal Head Start Program, the devolution of the Friendship Centre Program, the Aboriginal Family Violence Program, the Tsawassen Accord, and the BC First Nations Leadership Council among others. All were meetings that began in prayer, with that deep level of intention.
Mostly my job in these meetings was to design and run the process by which work got done, but it was always critical to do that in line with the quality of the space that Elders had created. I made many mistakes when my own ego or sense of self-importance trampled on what the elders had given us, and I paid for those moments with some embarrassing public scolding from Elders! These moments were some of the most important parts of my facilitation education – being called on the floor and corrected in front of groups of people, always directly, always with kindness, always with the intention of restoring and remaining in relationship.
In 1995 Caitlin and I decided on a whim to travel to Whistler, BC, for the International Association of Public Participation Practitioners conference (it was known as IAP3 back in those days). One of the sponsors of that gathering was BC Hydro, who had been using a large group facilitation method called “Open Space Technology” in their work. Chris Carter, who was working in change management with BC Hydro at the time, hosted the open space day alongside Anne Stadler and Angeles Arrien. In retrospect, that is quite a team, and it was a brilliant opening, which included some aspects of ceremony such as lighting a candle in the centre of the rings of concentric circles holding 400 of us in the Whistler Convention Centre. We were all offered a chance to call sessions and record the results of the sessions in a newsroom filled with a bank of 20 386 PCs running WordPerfect. After their opening, the conference exploded. Into dozens of topics and sessions – I led one on the role of storytelling in facilitation – and after I had witnessed a whole day of this I knew that there was a way to host large group meetings that ensured that the responsibility for the experience was owned by the participants.
For many years afterwards in my work with the BC Association of Friendship Centres and later, the Federal Treaty Negotiations Office and the BC Assembly of First Nations and Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services, I used Open Space whenever I could. We ran meetings on economic development, firearms legislation, the implementation of Aboriginal title, family rights in the child welfare system, policy research conferences, youth network development, organizational change, governance, stakeholder consultations…you name it. If you were in a meeting with me in the early 2000s, you were probably in an Open Space.
Through my work with Open Space Technology, I met Harrison Owen, initially in 1997 at a one day course on self-organization and then later at a gathering in 2003 on Whidbey Island, where he was the key feature in a four-day conference called “The Practice of Peace” based on his little book of the same name. This gathering brought together folks from around the world working on peace and reconciliation as well as those of us who were working with Open Space and other large group methodologies. It was there that I met Toke Møller as well as Juanita Brown. At the conclusion of that conference, Toke and I found ourselves in a circle with a dozen or so other people, already tightly connected through relationships. We passed a talking piece amongst us discussing the question of what comes next following this conference. When it came to Toke who was sitting next to me, he spoke of the trainings he was starting to do around the Art of Hosting, and he said something like this, which I later asked him to rewrite as a poem:
It is Time
the training time is over
for those of us who can hear the call
of the heart and the times
my real soul work
has begun on the next level
for me at leastcourage is
to do what calls me
but I may be afraid ofwe need to work together
in a very deep sense
to open and hold spaces
fields
spheres of energy
in which our imagination
and other people’s
transformation can occurnone of us can do it alone
the warriors of joy are gathering
to find each other
to train together
to do some good work
from the heart with no attachment
and throw it
in the riverno religion, no cult, no politics
just flow with life itself as it
unfolds in the now…what is my Work?
what is our Work?
And I said yes to that invitation.
It feels like Christmas Eve around here. I am sitting at home on Bowen Island and our house is full of friends and colleagues Amanda Fenton and Kelly Poirier who have now retired to bed. Along with Caitlin, we have completed a long and productive day of planning and design for what will be the 17th annual Art of Hosting on Bowen Island. This evening I am sitting by my fire, finishing a dram of Laphroaig and remembering the first one in 2003 when Toke Moeller and I sat by this same fireplace discussing teaching and learning and what this practice is really all about.
Back then the Bowen Island gatherings were hosted at Rivendell, a beautiful contemplative retreat centre on a small mountain above the village of Snug Cove on Bowen Island. That first one in 2003 was hosted by Myriam Laberge, Brenda Chaddock, Toke, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony (if I recall correctly) and supported by Marks and Marg McAvity, who we (and still are) stewards of Rivendell. That was the first Art of Hosting for me, and it was really a coming home.
For years I had been working as a facilitator specializing in large group participatory methods and I had a strong sense that there was a leadership practice in the way we hosted Open Space and World Cafe, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Luckily Toke and his partner Monica Nissen and friends Jan Hein Nielsen and Finn Voldtofte and others had done the ahrd thinking and realized that great participatory meeting had four characteristics: people were present, they were all participating, they were being hosted and they were co-creating something. The Danes postulated that increasing these patterns would bring more engagement, more dignity and more emergence in conversations and so they articulated the four-fold practice of theArt of Hosting, which are the four simple touchstones of presence, participation, hosting and co-creation.
In 2003 I came home to this and was invited the next year to come as an alumni and then the following year where I was invited to be on the hosting team . Every year since 2005 I have been pleased to welcome people to our island, known as Nex?wle?lex?wm in the Squamish language, to experience the Art of Hosting. SInce that time I have been privileged to be on nearly 100 hosting teams for Art of Hosting gatherings around the globe in places as diverse and far flung as Japan, South Africa, Estonia, Ireland, Turkey, and all over Canada and the US. I have worked with dozens of stewards of this practice, and thousands of practitioners, learning every day more and more about how to create social processes that truly affirm human dignity, invite folks into all kinds of storywork, and help people listen to each other in a way that makes it easier and maybe a little more possible for them to co-create the futures they need.
A couple of years ago my friend Scott Macklin caught the spirit of our gathering in a short film. It reflects the kind of pace and deep learning that characterizes the Bowen Island gathering, and is a beautiful record of our 2017 team. Have a watch:
So, as I get ready for bed tonight, I’m feeling deep gratitude for my teachers, especially Toke Moeller and Monica Nissen who guided me onto this path of my life’s work, and who have supported me over these 15 years with love and care. And I’m looking forward to meeting these folks that are coming, each of them like a little Christmas gift, full of surprise and delight and curiosity and possibility.
Last month Caitlin and I worked with our colleague Teresa Posakony bringing an Art of Hosting workshop to a network of social services agencies and government workers working on building resilience in communities across Washington State. To prepare, we shared some research on resilience, and in the course of that literature review, I fell in love with a paper by Michael Ungar of Dalhousie University.
In Systemic resilience: principles and processes for a science of change in contexts of adversity, Ungar uncovers seven principles of resilience that transcend disciplines, systems and domains of action. He writes:
In disciplines as diverse as genetics, psychology, sociology, disaster management, public health, urban development, and environmental science, there is movement away from research on the factors that produce disease and dysfunction to analyses of capacity building, patterns of self-organization, adaption, and in the case of human psychology, underlying protective and promotive processes that contribute to the resilience of complex systems.
The same is true for my own practice and development around complex facilitation. From a resilience standpoint, my inquiry is, what are the facilitation or hosting practices that help create containers that foster resilience and capacity building?
Ungar’s principles are as follows:
- (1) resilience occurs in contexts of adversity;
- (2) resilience is a process;
- (3) there are trade-offs between systems when a system experiences resilience;
- (4) a resilient system is open, dynamic, and complex;
- (5) a resilient system promotes connectivity;
- (6) a resilient system demonstrates experimentation and learning; and
- (7) a resilient system includes diversity, redundancy, and participation.
I think it’s a moral imperative to build resilience into strategic dialogue and conversations, whether in a short hosted meeting or in a long term participatory process. Participatory work is always a chance to affirm the dignity of human beings. Furthermore, many people come into participatory processes suffering the effects of trauma, much of it hidden from view. While facilitation is not therapy, we cannot practice a “do no harm” approach if we don’t understand patterns of trauma and the way resilience strategies address the effects. Creating “safe enough” space for people to engage in challenging work is itself a resilience strategy. Do it well, and you contribute to long term capacity building in individuals and collectives.
I find these principles inspiring to my complex facilitation practice, because they help me to check designs, and make choices about the kinds of ways I intervene in the system. For example, just off the top of my head, here are some questions and insights we could use to embed our processes with more resilience, related to each principle.
Resilience occurs in contexts of adversity
- Ensure that a group struggles with its work. Don’t be afraid to overload individuals for short periods of time with cognitive tasks (evidenced by confusion, contorted faces, and fatigue). But don’t let that cognitive overload create toxic stress in the system. Your boundary is somewhere between those two points.
- Avoid premature convergence (a Dave Snowden and Sam Kaner principle). Create the conditions so that people don’t simply accept the easy answers without going through the struggle of integrating ideas and exploring emergence.
Resilience is a process
- A resilient system is constantly growing and changing and achieving new levels of capacity, and able to deal with harder and harder stresses. Build-in some adversity to every aspect of organizational life, and you will build capacity building into the organization.
- There is no “final state” of capacity that is acceptable, and so good leadership and facilitation continue to design processes that work the resilience muscle.
- Don’t undertake a “capacity-building project.” Instead, make capacity-building a collateral benefit of engaging in a participatory process.
There are trade-offs between systems when a system experiences resilience
- Watch for the way resilience begins to shift power dynamics and authority in a system. When a group can manage itself well, it requires different support from leadership and different methods of management.
- If the “operating system” of the organization in which a resilient team doesn’t keep pace with the capacity built in the team, a break can occur. Attend to these connections between the resilient parts of the system (that survive by being changed) and the robust parts of the system (that survive by being unchanged).
A resilient system is open, dynamic, and complex
- To my point in a previous post on complex facilitation, you have to work in a complex system with a complexity approach. That means eschewing tendencies to control, closed boundaries, fixed approaches and known outcomes.
- Work with the properties of containers to encourage emergence and self-organization
A resilient system promotes connectivity
- Many of the dialogic methods we use with the Art of Hosting are premised on the fact that everyone in the system is responsible for participating and that relationship is as important an outcome as productivity.
- Working with stories, shared perspectives, diverse identities, and multiple skills in the same process builds connection between people in a system. Solving problems and overcoming adversity together helps individuals become more resilient and connected to each other.
- Any process hoping to survive over time needs to have explicit attention paid to the connections between the parts in the system.
A resilient system demonstrates experimentation and learning
- The very first inquiry of the Art of Hosting community was something like “What if learning together was the new form of leadership we need now?” A good marker of a resilient team or organization is its ability to fail, recover, and learn. Many organizations say they do this. but few actually pull it off.
- Create work in which individuals enjoy solving problems and take pleasure in getting things wrong.
A resilient system includes diversity, redundancy, and participation
- A forest without these features is a tree farm. An organization with these features is a machine.
- Diverse perspectives and lived experiences present opportunities for change and development. They challenge existing ways of doing things and disrupt in helpful ways.
- Redundancy is a feature of living systems. Never be afraid to have the same conversations twice. Or three times.
- Aim for full participation in every meeting. If a person is not participating, the group cannot benefit from their knowledge, experience, or curiosity.
These are just my initial musings on Ungar’s work. They validate many of the practices and methods used in the world of participatory leadership and the Art of Hosting. They also challenge us to make braver choices to create spaces that are harder than we might want them to be so that participants can struggle together to build capacity for change. I truly believe that communities, organizations, and people that develop resilience as a by-product of their work together will be best equipped to face increasing levels of uncertainty and emergence.