near Diest, Belgium
We have begun, and now concluded our first day here at Heerlijckyt, snugged in with 26 mates investigating all sorts of questions about the Art of Hosting as it is manifest and practiced here in Europe, as well as elsewhere in the world.
We spent much of the day experimenting with sensing the collective field, using a combination of methods including a long and juicy opening circle (during which Toke asked the questions “what called you here? What has called us here? and what might we accomplish together?”). This circle was carefully harvested for larger themes. From the circle, we spent time in dyads sensing the collective questions in the field here and then converged some sense of the patterns in the room. After the dyads shared the harvest of the new collective questions, we saw some even deeper meta-patterns. One that came quite clear, was noticed by Sarah Whitely who offered a tarot map for understanding where we currently were as a community. Led by Sarah and Maria Skordialou, we paid some attention to five distinct stations, and we actually held a small collective tarot card reading to sharpen our intuitive sense of the map. Five cards were drawn, one each for what is currently at the heart of things, what is visible and manifest, what is invisible and in our shadow, what is needing to be let go and what is emerging. We then also drew a card for one piece of overall advice. This process was also mapped and harvested and actually served as a nice way to end the day.
All of this is in aid of a deeper exploration tomorrow of the questions that people have brought with them which we will look at in Open Space. It feels like we have framed our collective field of inquiry and now we are moving to seeing how the collective inquiry is supported through the expression of individual questions.
I was participating in the process all day but also trying to operate at a level of trying to see what was happening at the deeper level so that I could harvest a bass note that might be of some use in making sense of the torrent of content. I had a couple of quite powerful personal observations. What follows is quite detailed and drafty, but that is what blogs are for, so sit back with a cup of tea and give me a few minutes of your attention.
First, I noticed a profound sense of how process itself seems to determine the kinds of engagement that a group of people undertakes. What I mean is that as humans we have a deep relationship to various forms of conversation and relationship. Twenty six people sitting on a train engage differently than 26 people in a circle or a world cafe, or an Open Space. Sitting in circle, it’s not uncommon to hear some really big hairy audacious questions such as how can we contribute to the healing of Europe or how can I unite the world or how can the Art of Hosting be of service in activating human potential at the next level of co-evolution. It might be easy on the surface to dismiss these statements as fanciful wishful thinking. After all, upon what basis does a group of 26 people think that it can heal Europe?
But looking past this simple longing of the group to make a difference, I was struck by how much this particular stance was related to the process itself. Human beings have been meeting in circles for most of our time here on earth and we use forms of council like this to make decisions about important questions facing the community. It’s almost as if the fact of sitting in circle contributes to our expanded sense of what is possible, or the influence we might have. Traditionally we would not have sat in council unless there was some chance of affecting the outcome and so the conversation would have gone directly to what was possible to do to preserve the life of the community.
For this group of people, we live in both a small community of practice, but we all operate in a global context. There are people in the room who work with some of the biggest human insitutions ever created, global companies like Siemens and Boeing, decision making bodies like the European Commission or massive community movements like the Estonian White Tulip movement, aimed at national reconciliation and peace. When we talk from these realms of influence and sit in council something seems awakened in us that takes us far beyond what we are likely to accomplish as just 26 people. The potential of the collective is seen and it comes to life as individual aspiration for massive influence.
And this brings me to my second observation which is that this audacious senses of collective self could easily be dismissed as pollyannaish and overly optimistic, or it might be skillfully worked with to make it possible to influence change at the broadest possible level but to preserve the audaciousness by channeling it into a deeper intent and a powerful sense of purpose. Part of being able to do this, it seems to me, is for the collective to have available to itself the resourcefulness to skillfully work with both open curiosity and specific invitation. If you think of these as poles on a spectrum, we can easily map everyone’s wish for our gathering. Thinking of this as a spectrum of being helps to overcome the possible tension of those who appear to have no purpose versus those who seem bent only on looking for results. The spectrum treats these ways of being as resources for the collective.
In our gathering open curiosity is taking the form of untrammeled wonder: “I’m just here willing to see what might happen, not tied to anything, open to any outcomes, happy to wait and see.” Specific invitations arise as statements that invite that energy and attention to specific places like harvest for collective evolution of the group or asking for specific conversations to understand the deeper pattern of the Art of Hosting. Taken on their own, as statements offered by individuals, there is little that is guaranteed to happen. But what if we could marry open curiosity to specific invitation to invite the whole spectrum to amplify itself?
I think to do this, we have to invite those with open curiosity to move to a level of deeper awareness of what is emerging. If you are open, then we thank you for that and we invite you to pay attention to what is emerging in the field and to offer your curiosity mindfully to the specific invitations that arise so that passion and responsibility may be supported. Without deepening curiosity to inviting awareness, people run the risk of simply hanging out and not contributing to responsibility for the collective.
At the other end, those who have specific invitations can deepen their invitations by also sensing what the field is able to support so that those invitations move beyond individual desires to become group aspirations and actual tasks that the collective itself might undertake. This means shifting the offering of those invitations from self-centered place to a community centered place so that those with open curiosity can be caught by the passion that is coming forth.
This probably all seems hopelessly intricate and ambitious. What I’m really doing is taking a very careful look at what the simplest offering might be to catalyse a collective awareness from a circle of individual statements. I think that Open Space Technology actually is the masterful application of this catalysis, but Open Space tends to invite much more grounded invitation because it helps us go quickly to what is possible when we connect passion and responsibility. Action and purpose is often dependant upon the realms of influence of those in the room. Audaciousness can die on the vine, which makes OST very practical and useful for cutting through wishful and magical thinking and getting down to the work at hand.
However, the gift of the circle, as I’ve been trying to say, is that it somehow invites a much bigger sense of ourselves which, if worked with skillfully, can result in an Open Space event later that has a deep and powerful harmonic, a bass note of possibility that is indeed the group’s highest and unspoken aspiration for it’s own work, that transcends what is even known to be possible. In this respect this little spectrum exercise becomes a map out of which hosts might invite deepening awareness to preserve the benefits of “magical thinking” as deep purpose while inviting resources to support the work of collective emergence.
It’s perhaps an esoteric observation about the power of circles, but I’m certainly interested in what you might have to say about it. How do we keep depth, protect and guard it and use it to keep us deeply committed to our work and avoid the trap of getting swallowed in that depth so that we fail to sense more precisely where the opportunity for change and emergence lies? How can we do good work and not lose our deepest calling? How can we honour that call and not get carried away?
Yesterday, in preparing for two days of teaching and training I spent the morning over breakfast reading some of th stories of Clayton Mack, the grandfather of my friend and client Liz Hall. I was reading about the way in which Nuxalk people gathered food from the land, whether it was the fish, game or plants and berries. He talked about the way the amlh – the spring salmon – were harvested using fishtraps. At one time there were 22 traps on the river. These traps would form barriers that the salmon would need to jump. When they jumped they were caught in a trap on the other side. There they would wait and the fishers would just gather them up. Whatever was surplus was let go upriver to other traps and villages.
This is a beautiful way to harvest fish, because it preserves life and delivers fresh animals to all who need them. It is the essence of a Nuxalk way of doing things.
Later that morning in the opening circle I asked why people had chosen to be in this training rather than anywhere else. From that conversation came a powerful statement. One woman, who works at the transition house in the community said quite simply and powerfully that leadership is simple revealing our own beauty to each other. We talked about the profound nature of that statement with respect to individual leadership but also in terms of the way communities lead as well. What would it mean if an organization within a community revealed it’s beauty in it’s work? What if communities exhibited leadership that way too?
From there we dove into a deep exploration of the power of appreciative inquiry. We went through the 4D process and then played with the Discovery phase by pairing up to look at another theme that emerged in the opening circle: the idea that Nuxalk culture should be at the centre of everything. A community reveals its beauty through its culture, and so we asked the question of each other: tell a story about a time when Nuxalk culture inspired you?
In encouraging people to interview on another, I invited people to practice the role of the Elder and the student. All of us will be Elders one day and the mark of an Elder is when you are called upon to tell your story as a teaching. And so, especially with some of the younger adults in our group, being invited to tell a story as if it is a teaching is a powerful invitation. And be invited to listen to a story as a student is a gift. When appreciative interviews are structured this way it creates a mutual relationship of gifting and support, and invites us to practice being both teacher and student.
The response to this set of interviews were very powerful, including stories of people who first saw their culture in all it’s glory after they were liberated from residential school. From those conversations we harvested a small set of principles around the teachings that we jokingly called “How the Nuxalk Nation saved the world.” The wisdom contained in these teachings is ancient, powerful, reality based and available. It provides a concrete set of principles around which people could design Nuxalk programs or organizations that are in line with a cultural perspective on the world.
On the second day, we spent time looking at leadership as an act of courage. We are playing with etymology in these days, looking at heart based leadership that proceeds from seeing. Heart-based leadership has courage at its root, derived from the French word coeur, meaning heart. We talked about the chaordic path as a path of finding the courage to encourage others and keep moving in the face of discouragement. Strengthening heart is a powerful leadership capacity and one which is in short supply in indigenous communities that have lived through decades of discouragement.
Leadership also comes from seeing. Spectare is the Latin worked that gives rise to the words speculate, inspect, respect and perspective. These are leadership capacities, the ability to see something that touches your heart and convene a conversation around it is a leadership moment available to all in which any member of a community can step up and start something. In fact it is truly the only way anything does happen.
This afternoon, we concluded our day with a world cafe on the question of “If you could do one thing to improve the lives of children and families in this community what would that be?” The idea was to demonstrate how The World Cafe can be a powerful process for getting a group through the groan zone by building shared perspective. What I didn’t expect was the harvest we took from this cafe. In an hour the group hatched an idea for a community house, in which people would be able to come and shine – radiating their beauty and their leadership, to cook and eat together, hang out together and learn the Nuxalk language and culture. Such a building could be built by the community and an enthusiastic team of people may well step forward in our Open Space tomorrow to lead the way on this project.
It has been a good two days of teaching and learning here, and tomorrow we run an Open Space with the community on what it will take reclaim control over child and family services for th Nuxalk Nation. With the capacity that is building here and the enthusiastic leadership, I’m looking forward to the day.
Starting a new regular type of posting. These are a series of short notes and thoughts, too small to warrant a post, but looking for a home nonetheless, and possibly becoming more. I invite your curiosity on any of this…queries may set me to growing these little guys into something more substantial.
- Conversations that matter is the home for the world cafe Europe blog. Good reading there.
- Dave Pollard on the distinctions between dialogue and debate. Dave wrestles with his conscience on this one and comes up with a finer grain analysis as a result. Interesting as usual, and deeply in tune with some stuff I’ve been thinking about lately regarding politics and conversation.
- Sitting outside by the fire last night, I realized why the human eye can preserve its night vision when it is exposed to red light. The dying embers of the fire that were keeping me warm did not in the least affect my ability to peer into the forest at the passing deer, or to scan the heavens for globular clusters. That seems like a useful survival tactic. I wonder what the 21st century eye is able to see that will preserve our species?
- You have to read this to believe it. The Sock-A-Month knitting club gets shut down by a bank after the gnomes suspect a scam. You see? If I didn’t have a little notes category, where would I have blogged this?
- Music at the moment: One-named Canadian singers Feist and Issa (formerly Jane Sibbery, new album forthcoming). My ten year old daughter is listening to Avril on her iPod. My goodness, they grow up quickly. (Psst, Alex, I snuck some Zero 7 on there as well. She loves The Pageant of the Bizarre!)
I learned a new word this week: teechma. It’s the Nuu-Chah-Nulth word for heart, but it conveys a deep meaning when you hear an Elder in her village talking about why she thinks something will work, why she is hopeful about changing the system solely because we spoke about it from our hearts, our words coming from teechma.
I was with my mates Wally Samuel, Kris Archie and Kyra Mason this week in three isolated villages on the north west coast of Vancouver Island, Oclucje, Ehattesaht and Ka:’yu’k’t’h’. We were travelling there on behalf of VIATT to hear what these communities, so forgotten in many ways, have to say about the work we are doing to reclaim the decision making authority over Aboriginal children and families.
These communities lie far away from the mainly populated east side of Vancouver Island. To get to the west coast, you have to drive an hour or so over a graded logging road to the little town of Zeballos, perched at the head of Zeballos Inlet. Zeballos was a gold mining town almost a hundred years ago and there is a little fishing there now and mostly logging. In the summer, there are tourists who roll into town heading out for fishing charters or kayak trips. Zeballos itself is a funny town…everything there seems to be in a state of half renovation. The Zeballos Hotel, in which you can get a great meal (french fries being a speciality) has tables that are too high and banged together out of particle board, which makes you feel like a kid when you are tucking into your burger. It forces one to have something in common with the Ehattesaht kids who mill around IMing on the two computers in the corner. They even have half finished haircuts, which was amusing for my friend Kris who found kindred spirits! Across the lobby, the bar is a great place for a bottle of beer, still smoky and also half finished. Across the street is a general store run by a cranky Bulgarian who makes you test the batteries you buy from him before you leave the store. His shop is also half finished, and a half eaten jar of pickled sausage sits on the counter next to the cash register. And the batteries fail on you anyway, the moment you put them in your camera.
This is the end of the world – most regulations don’t apply in practice. Even when the RCMP strides in from across the street, nothing really changes and no one pretends that anything is otherwise.
From Zeballos, we headed out to the communities which lay around the town. Each of the three meetings was a little, different, each held in slightly different kinds of buildings, each with different people there. At Oclucje, a small Nuchatlaht village about 30 minutes from Zeballos, we met in a building that had been condemned. The guy fixing the floor was a Heiltsuk carver who stopped his banging away at the mold and took off to go work in his shop, returning a half hour later with a moon plaque for me. During the meeting, my mates Wally and Kyra and Kris talked to the Elders and I lay on the floor with the kids drawing on some flipchart paper. We drew pumpkins and snakes and men and women and they borrowed my fine Staedler pens and coloured in a “Welcome to the Hall” sign, the hall that was falling apart under our feet. When we asked them what we could bring for the meeting, they said “donuts,” and two dozen Tim Horton’s trucked all the way from Campbell River were consumed in short order. Once the sugar rush hit the kids they all streamed outside and I rejoined the meeting, listening to the tale of a seven year struggle to have one child returned to the community. The effort involved everyone, and the goal posts have changed all the time, so the job is still unfinished. This is what our work aims to change.
That night we drove back to Zeballos and held a meeting in the half-finished youth centre at Ehattesaht, which is on the other side of the inlet from the town. About three dozen people showed up, most of them kids initially, but after supper arrived – chili and spaghetti and ham and salad – more adults and some youth showed up. The kids kept running around, in an out of a door that led to the top of an unfinished second story staircase. I had paranoid visions of them plunging off the landing onto the gravel below, but it didn’t happen. One of the kids, Margaret, took my camera and shot all kinds of great pictures of her friends and cousins. It’s sweet to see the world through her eyes.
On the way home we passed a sign that warned us to watch out for children and wildlife. In the middle of the road was a deer skull, and a bike lay tipped in the ditch. There are great signs around Zeballos.
We lodged at the Mason Lodge, where I took my half-filled room reservation, letting myself into room number four only to find it already occupied by a suddenly nervous man. This was remedied by Kris and Kyra sharing a room and I took Kris’s room. Customer service is sort of a novelty in Zeballos. Hospitality means that the guests are free to self-organize their sleeping arrangements. It worked out just fine and breakfast in the morning was quite nice.
After breakfast we headed over to Fair Harbour to catch the water taxi to Ka:’yu’k’t’h’. Fair Harbour got battered by 11 hurricanes this winter. The worst of them, which actually had an eye, topped out at winds of 159 knots, strong enough to rip the top off one of the wharves and to pick up gravel and sandblast all the trucks in town right down to the bare metal. Wednesday though, the weather was beautiful, the water glassy calm and the wind just a zephyr.
The water taxi trucked us through some beautiful little islands and inlets and we got our first glimpse of the open Pacific Ocean. Wally’s mum was born here and although she died when he was three, he spent his summers in the area and he has a name from this territory, so it’s like a second home for him. We took a little detour to visit the old village site of the Ka:’yu’k’t’h’ people. One one side is the ancient village and the present day summer village, a broad beach with a grave yard at the top, on the lee side of a little island that backs onto some reefs and the open ocean. Across the water is the old reserve village with some houses still standing. The people left this community thirty years ago, moved because of fresh water needs to the present site which is actually on Vancouver Island proper, on the very northern tip of Kyuquot Sound.
After we noodled around the old village, we headed for the present day one and sat with Elders parents and hereditary and political leadership in a circle and talked about our work of putting children at the centre of the system of child and family services. On our more optimistic days, we call this work “practical decolonization” and judging from the response we get from the Elders especially, this label is my favourite. The Elders all week have been talking about the hope that they have taken from hearing about our work and hearing how it comes from our teechma, helping communities and agencies to be able to serve children and families without the provincial government making all the policy decisions. That’s what makes this stuff worthwhile to me and what drives me and my mates to a high level of accountability.
We are planning on visiting all 52 communities across Vancouver Island this year, including a batch more on the west coast around Clayoquot Sound. I’m looking forward to it.
If you have been following along with the story of threats against Kathy Sierra, this will likely be no news to you. But if you haven’t you can start by reading her blog post about this situation in which she was vilely and violently threatened by an anonymous blogger, the act and response to which launched a flurry of bad feelings everywhere.
Yesterday, Kathy and Chris Locke, one of the bloggers she had singled out held an actual conversation and the harvest is here is a dual set of Coordinated Statements on the whole affair. What is important to note is that they enjoyed the conversation with one another, they met, truly and openly as human beings who had a common purpose that overrode their stories about one another. And it seems like they discovered each other for the first time.
This sort of goes to show that, as lovely as the internet is for helping us have conversations, the conversations that really matter are the ones that are face to face (or mouth to ear, in this case, the next best thing). No amount of virtual back and forth can substitute for the genuine progress that can be made in two hours of storytelling. The internet helps us do this, but it is not a proxy for doing this. I applaud Kathy and Chris for their simple act of grace.