I have great clients. Most of the people who end up working with me do so because they want to work in radically more participatory ways, opening up processes to more voices, more leadership. In conference settings this means scheduling much more dialogue or running the whole thing using Open Space Technology and dispensing with pre-loading content.
But there persists, especially in the corporate and government sectors, a underlying nervousness in doing this. common objections to making things more participatory include:
- It’s too risky
- We’re not ready for it
- I’m worried it won’t work
- There won’t be enough structure
- People need content
- We need to know what the outcomes will be.
It is worth exploring these issues in a compassionate and direct manner. What these issues are really about are trust and control and a sense that the responsibility for the experience lies with the organizers and not the participants.
This is not always the easiest thing to say to people, especially those that have hired you to deliver a conference or a conversation. But it is important to confront these issues face on, because no matter how well you run a participatory process, without confronting the edges of control and trust, you are going to get anywhere ultimately.
These setiments originate in a couple of assumptions that are worth challenging:
- The responsibility for the experience rests with the organizers, not the participants. This is to some extent true although it does a great disservice to most conference design. Assuming that you as a planning committee have to deliver a great experience for everyone is neither possible nor productive. You are never going to make everyone happy, so leave that idea behind. And you aren’t going to get all the content right. The best traditional conferences meet some of the expectations of participants most of the time, meaning that there are large blocks of time that don’t meet people’s expectations. And so the default setting for most participants is to spend thousands of dollars on a passive experience, taking some interest in workshops or speeches and spending the rest of the time self-organizing dinners, coffee breaks and other chances to connect with friends old and new. Another word for a conference that takes thousands of your dollars and leaves you finding your own way is “a racket.”
- People need content and structure. Of course we do, but not in the way most conference organizers deliver it. On the content side, most conference planning consists of spending a year guessing what people want to learn about, or worse, putting out RFPs for workshops, which results in conferences becoming big commercials for people’s pet processes, or ideas, without any consideration for what folks want to learn. The conference is then marketed on the backs of these offerings. That isn’t to say that there can’t be value, but it does constrain learning. Similarly, with structure, conference organizers will often say to me that things like Open Space don’t have enough structure. Open Space has plenty of structure, but it is free of content until the gathering itself populates the agenda with the questions that are top of mind. I have worked at countless conferences where “structure” is everything. And what this typically means is that the conference runs behind schedule and people are herded here and there, shortshrifting almost every aspect of their experience, to the point where folks just plain don’t return from coffee breaks.
- People learn by passive listening. There is no question that a stirring keynote or a dynamic and powerful presentation can have the effect of galvanizing ideas and making people hungry for learning. But too often the passive experience of listing to experts is built into conferences such that a key note is followed by a panel, is followed by lecture-workshops, is followed by another keynote and so on. Participation is minimal.
What I have discovered over the years is that people want to be in a conference setting that has a variety of experience. If there is a keynote, it is important to have that person act more as a provocateur, to set up questions that folks can dialogue around rather than proclaiming the truth from on high. Also building a conference in part or in whole around Open Space means that people can bring their own questions and expertise to the gathering, create a marketplace to exchange ideas and perhaps even create new ways of being together. I don’t think every conference needs to end in “action,” but I do think that many conferences could build in more explicit opportunities to start something.
the bottom line for people in understanding that giving up control is important. A conference planning committee should focus on building a container into which participants can pour their ideas. Creative, engaging, participatory conferences and gatherings have substantial participation undertaken by the participants themselves. They look at how passive a conference is and break open opportunities for people to connect, to go on a learning journey together, to create something new, or simply to sit in good conversation with each other catching up and sharing their work.
Trust your participants and invite them well. Invite them to come prepared to make contributions. Put responsibility for their experience solidly in their laps. Let them know that if they are taking to time and money to come to the gathering, they should also take the chance to create and contribute content to the gathering. Bring your questions, bring your stories, look for others and see what you can create. Challenge participants to show up to a co-creative gathering rich in conversations, connections and inspiration. Invite them, provide a good container with tools for them to do their work, and turn it over to them.
Fearless conference planning, accompanied by excellent invitation and skilful hosting for productive self-organization and emergence creates memorable experiences.
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Bob Stilger on “decision happening” rather than “decision making:”
I’d add to what John has written by introducing the concept of “decision happening” rather than “decision making.” It is a term I coined a decade ago and am reminded of from time to time.
Decision happening uses collective discernment to discover the decision that is happening before our very eyes. It has a very different energy than “decision making.” There is a curiosity. It has an openness and a sense of inquiry rather than a driving quickly towards a given decision. It invites the participation of spirit, non-material beings, the force of life — however one gets at the memory that there is more involved here than just humans and our human systems.
In my work I refer to enspirited leadership as the kind of leadership that invites all of us forward — intellect, emotions, spirit, hands. Decision happening relies on this sort of enspirited leadership.
I often use things like inviting people to create models with play-doh clay as one way to inquire into their lives and the decisions they are called to make. Also use nature walks, paired walks in silence where first one person, then another has their eyes closed and other guides them. I use Arawana Hayahsi’s social presencing theatre work as other pathway in.
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Two dear friends, Ashley Cooper and Juanita Brown, are up to some world-changing mischief together in the mountains of North Carolina. They are going deep into hosting intergenerational conversations. Here’s why, from Juanita:
I have always been fascinated by large-scale systems change and what might enable whole societies to shift into more life-affirming patterns. Over the years I had the great good fortune to have older corporate and community leaders take me under their professional and personal wings as I engaged with this work.
I began to think abut the challenges we face at every level of system today. I realized that there is a huge untapped large-scale social change potential in the wisdom, experience, and perspective of younger leaders as well as children. I began to ask myself: How can we honor and use the unique contributions and gifts that reside in all of us, as a single generation, alive and awake together–whatever our age or stage of life?
Read about what they’re up to together: Wiser Together: Partnering Across Generations.
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I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice. We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of “What time it is in the world?” We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing. We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were emerging. At the end of the Cafe, the hosts gathered in a fishbowl in the middle of the rest of the group and shared their insights, sensing into the patterns that were emerging. I listened with a poet’s ear tuned to the harvest and this is what I heard:
You have to be ready to die on the hill atop which you have heard the deepest call of the world
When you open the smallest space in your life, passion can erode obligation. You become more social, unable to be unaware.
You cannot see yourself in the window of a rushing train but only for a second. You need to slow down so that the reflection can be studied, a life examined.
What would a world looki like that is flowing in responsibility, courage, reverence and wakanza?
Responsibility and courage are individual acts. Reverance and wakanza are products of the collective context, they are responses that are woken up in us by the times.
Our children our the gift we make to the future, they are the long stake in the long view, the holders of wisdom, those carriers of what we have learned about how we have lived.
We are the ones we have been waiting for, and we have been waiting for lives and times beyond our own, living in lives and times beyond our own. We see ourselves as the gift to ourselves when others make it clear in relationship.
Our conversations touch every single other conversation. The world unfolds as one point presses upon another in a great chain of implication and connectivity. The technology of interconnection is vulnerability – the capacity to be open to one another. In that small open space, influence takes root. Ideas enter in that seem to have always been there.
I move and leave pieces of myself behind, and I have no story of grieving? No way to midwife the new in the hospice of the dying? What is being born when things are dying, what enters in when there is a puase in the breath between generations, between conversations, between breaths and between heart beats?
In the moments of silence that open between sounds, there is a chance for the smallest voice to be heard. The babble dies down and there is a pause and a small call has its chance to invite. Judgement kills that voice – sometimes aborts it before it even ever enters the world.
All we have are ideas – take a stand, do what you can to help others to stand. You can reach back to the head of every river to see why it is full of what it is full of. Every tributary signs its joining with specific minerals, with salts and metals, with vegetation and fish. You can find home by simply following the taste of it.
Host others, but host yourself first. Listen to others but first learn to listen to the wind, to listen to the birds and the way the ground moves beneath the feet of the deer. Learn to listen to why people say the things they say. To what soil or water fills their syllables with longing.
Presence. When you host you can become the vehicle through which the world speaks its story. And you hear what you are built for and you speak what you see in yourself.
We are not too busy for change, we are instead addicted to avoiding what is real and what needs doing. People are the agents for their own freedom. But that freedom cannot be won without something being let go. We are in a culture that doesn’t end things very well, but instead loads layers and layers of more on top of the foundation. With no rite of passage available, nothing gets completed and ushered out, there is no way to make space for the new. Honour and reverence.
We are crying for passages through and for the rites to understand them and to be invited into them.
Can you be authentic in your work if you’re not authentic in your personal life? How do you discover you are not aware of yourself without rites of passage and ceremonies that acknowledge what is coming and what is gone, what is to be picked up and what is to be put down.
How do we foster self-awareness when we perceive crises and emergency? We tell the truth and we tell all the stories, even the ones that represent success and resilience and that buck the trend of the depressing scarcity that keeps us embedded in fear, we insert pauses where previously we would rush to solutions.
We are a greedy culture, but we can be greedy for community and that hurts no one because it only activates the abundance that sleeps in a cradle of scarcity. We can’t afford to throw a few things on the grill and offer some to the neighbours? Come to me in the late sun of the evening when the wind is still and the birds think before they sing, and cars pass by quietly in the languid air. Come and share a meal, and tell me what is in your heart.
Like Meg says,
Notice what is going on.
Get started.
Learn as you go.
Stick together.
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Back in Monticello, Minnesota on the banks of the Mississippi River where we are running the third residential learning session in collaborative leadership for a cohort of groups working to improve health in their communities.
The river is high here, and the channel is full. Downstream, in the rest of the United States, the Mississippi is challenging communities and families who are in a fierce struggle to learn how to live with the river’s whims, with the river’s power and its overwhelming desire to renew the floodplains that stretch away from the main channel.
Sitting by the river yesterday it felt right to offer a blessing to the water so that as it travelled it would use its fullness for good, and it occurred to me that at the end of this nine month period of training and working together, our participants are also full and ready to move out and do serious work. So the dialogue poem I wrote this morning, a harvest of the check in circle, was offered as a blessing to the river of leadership that was flowing through this room.
I have grown more open
to new ways of working and meeting
collaborating, fabricating ideas
I have a garden where I relax
and am relaxed about taking time
having fun while I get things done.
Gradually graduating
expanding myself settling myself
knowing you as friends, partners and allies
tend to what’s starting, the group that tries to change the world
starts the work.
The river connects us,
sends a shiver of recognition
through names that come down to us
between the banks,
a thanks that is my privilege to offer
to this little village.
This is a space of learning,
earning my knowledge in a community that cares
moving forward together further than I ever dared to go
on my own.
I am always asking, who is not here? What do we need to be clear?
Together we can act without fear.
The process is here
and the chance to mentor is at hand.
It’s a transition that is sad on the one hand
but I’m glad to use the ning thing and get face to face
to learn how much more we can do.
I have comfort and peace, sitting in this chair
much more aware of my triggers and cues
so I know it’s not just a brainwashing ruse.
Instead it seeps into my work,
creeps into my practice, charms and disarms,
I came here guarded and shy
but over time I have started to fly with new skills,
more at home than I ever thought I’d be
in the chaordic space of discovery.
My art has been liberated,
and I can draw on the inspiration of the heart.
Just to come and sit in a room of friends
is an end in itself. But a space that gives so much learning
is the space I have been yearning for.
I’ve learned to fit and use this space to reclaim sanity
that has eluded me in my daily life.
I was feisty when I arrived, wanting to bust through walls,
but now what calls is a gentle opening of doors
and I see so much more.
Your stories change me and my work. Change is good
and growth is inevitable, even though what we are doing is unexplainable,
people know it has worth.
Communicating and collaborating I’m more self aware,
living without fear,
whether tending bar and slinging beer, there is a resilient wealth
that comes in my work public health.
I’m hip to this flip in ways of working
with sedated conversation, co-created presentation,
collective self-preservation.
Thankful and appreciative. I am no longer alone. These four I brought from home
mean the world to me. This has been like the blossoming of bulbs
the flowers reaching for the light through the occasional dump of snow,
always rising, always knowing that the spring is coming
that the flower will open and our power will rise into a glorious summer.
I am more aligned and intentional
more present and keeping a sentinel watch
over what old Swedes and Norwegians can do
posting statements on the doors that we will no longer go through,
and leaving notes about where else we will go, what else we will do.
My story has been one of complication,
each retreat has resulted in an emergency
some urgency that has resulted in surgery.
And that is true in community too, where we have focused on
what needs to be done…we can laugh now, but it isn’t always fun.
The truth is that we sometimes lose body parts that you can’t see,
we are working on invisible health disparities,
privilege and white supremacy channeling the energy
of discomfort from anger to resiliency, and working change to create opportunities
for long term change sustainability.
When I walked in here to see the circle
I knew the work was here, the task is to braid together
what we have made together, but I already grieve
for what we will leave behind when we go home,
and I don’t want to be alone.
I feel worthy to practice here.
The further I walk down the path of vague notions
the more I find oceans of possibility releasing into
In the car, we pool our learning, drink from the clear water
that we found in the place where we now ground ourselves
knowing that we can break patterns and do anything together.
Clarity and calm, and growing personally
has been a healing balm for me own growth and learning;
ideas rearranged by being with strangers
who are friends now and who chatter in the back of the van
that is speeding forward toward.
I can sit here through sun, rain and snow,
see the community that grows
from thirty kind hearts, sat beside a river that ever flows.