This afternoon, Toke Moeller and I are hosting a little session on Art of Hosting basics at a gathering for emerging indigenous leaders. We decided this afternoon to bring real design challenges into the room and we improvised this simple, simple design checklist. In some ways this is the simplest form of the chaordic stepping stones. Here’s how it works.
In my experience good participatory meetings result from good design and preparation. In this diagram the meeting itself is the last thing we design. First we design the bookends: Purpose on the one hand and harvest/action on the other hand. Once we know that, then we can develop an invitation and finally choose processes that bridge the two sides. The meeting itself therefore become the vehicle by which a group of people reach a harvest and wise action ground in a purpose and a deep need.
Purpose
What is the big purpose that we are trying to fulfill?
A meeting that has too small a purpose has no life in it. It just seems to be a mundane thing done for it’s own sake. To design creatively, keep purpose at the centre and ensure that everything you do is aligned with that.
Harvest
What do you want to harvest?
– in our hands ( tangible)?
– in our hearts ( intangible)?
Not every meeting needs to have a report and an action plan, but every meeting does have a harvest. This question is the strategic conversation that helps us focus our time together. We need to think about the shape of the harvest we can hold in our hands (reports, photos, videos, sculptures…) and those we hold in our hearts (togetherness, team spirit, clarity, passion…).
Wise action
How will we make action happen?
– who will help us tune in to the reality of the situation?
How will you keep people together?
It is easy to make a list of to do’s at the end of a meeting and feel like something has been accomplished, but that is a naive approach to change. If action is required get really clear about who needs to be involved to make it happen. Think about who enables action or who can stop it and what resources are required. And if the resources aren’t available or accessible, then make a different action plan.
Also, never forget to make a plan for how people will stay together. If sustainability is important, then strong relationships are important. Building a process that doesn’t enhance relationships does not contribute to sustainability.
Invitation –
What is the inspiring question that will bring people together?
How will we invite people so they know they are needed?
Good participatory gatherings depend on the quality of the invitation. A lazy invitation attracts confused participants. A clear and powerful invitation accompanied by a powerful personal invitation gets participants who are ready and eager for the work. Invitation is a lot of work. It SHOULD be a lot of work. A good invitation process makes the meeting easy.
Meeting
What will you do to make the meeting creative and powerful?
Once we know all of this we can choose a meeting process that helps move from purpose to wise action. We can use pre-existing processes like Open Space or World Cafe or design new ones particular to our needs. Today we are using the group pattern language card deck to inspire creative thinking about meeting design.
If we really want to create a new normal, we shouldn’t settle any longer for boring meetings. If the processes we are using aren’t serving us, or helping us crack the deepest questions that confound us, then we should stop using them and start being more creative and powerful.
This little tool has the feeling of a portable, quick and dirty design checklist, that allows core teams and process designers to get working pretty quickly. Use it and let me know what you learn.
This week I was hosting at a moderately sized conference in Victoria BC with 100 regional public sector union members. The purpose of the gathering was to increase the number of active members and to inspire members to engage and improve local communities. These union members all work in the public service and so they have a close ear to the ground on the issues facing communities from homelessness to addictions to environmental degradation to service levels in health and education. Many of them took public service jobs in the first place because they are caring and committed people, intent on making a better world, especially for the most vulnerable.
This is the fourth year we have done this conference, and the structure has remained pretty much the same over the past four years. The first evening there is a keynote from the union president (who then stays and participates through the whole two days) and a special speaker, in this case a well-known progressive lawyer who is currently running for office in a local federal by-election. That is usually followed by a plenary panel, which this year featured some provincial politicians from the labour movement and the current legislature and a journalist.
Day two begins with morning workshops on community organizing. in the afternoon we begin with a World Cafe. This year we took the Cafe through the following flow:
- Two rounds on the question of “What does all of this inspiration mean for my own community activism?”
- One round on the question “what do I still need to learn to deepen my activism?” The harvest from that round was a post it note from each participant outlining some of their learning needs, which union staff will use to help support the members with resources and materials.
- Following that round I invited participants to reflect on an area of focus for their activism, such as homelessness, environment, youth engagement and so on. Participants wrote their focus on the blank side of their name tags and then milled around the room and found others who shared those areas of focus. We ended up with about 12 groups composed of people from across the region who didn’t know each other and who were interested in working in the same issue area.
- Using this network we next invited the participants to consider the question “What are some of the key strategic actions we can take in this sector?” The harvest from this was simply to inspire and connect each other in preparation for the next day’s work.
That was the end of our days work. A quick poll of the room showed that perhaps 20 people had some ideas for action that were considering.
This morning was devoted to a ProAction Cafe. We had 21 tables in the room and I opened up the marketplace. It took about 20 minutes for 21 hosts to come forward and for everyone to get settled. From there we followed a standard ProAction Cafe format. During the reflection period, when participants are given a break and hosts are able to take a breath and make sense of all the advice we heard, three people all working on engagement strategies got together to compare notes. This helped them a lot before the fourth round as they were able to point to work the others were doing. The action networks were already taking shape!
We finished in just under 2.5 hours. In previous years we ran Open Space meetings on the last morning, but this year the shift in format gave a more concrete set of actions and surfaced more leadership in the room. With a quarter of the room engaged as hosts, we topped the average 20% of the room from previous years using Open Space. ProAction Cafe, used at the end of a conference to generate and develop concrete actions is so far the best process in my practice for getting good ideas out of the room with passion, precision and participation.
I have used Open Space in almost every way conceivable and what Lisa Heft wrote on the OSLIST today about using it with traditional conferences strikes home. This is good wisdom, friends:
My experience is that – if doing a mix of ‘traditional’ format conference and Open Space – the most ideal situation is traditional, (recreation day before or after that or after the whole conference) and then Open Space.
I have seen that if Open Space happens first – when there is the switch to traditional, participants feel uncomfortable and ‘edgy’ because they have tasted the power of self-organization and physically being able to move to what they need and find who they need – so they are not happy or focused sitting in an audience listening after that. If you do OS as the last day (or whatever) then there are two extra values of people being able to host conversations about what they are learning and exploring in the previous days of the conference as well as whatever your theme question / task will be. Nice integration and self-organized continuation of learning, networking, community. Plus, the close of the Open Space makes a very nice close for the conference – it really feels like reflection, comment, participant voice to close.
The most difficult thing I know is to start and stop Open Space / break it up within a conference – really, it destroys the reason for doing OS and completely changes what OS can do. When I am told that by a conference I simply switch to some other lovely interactive dialogue stuff – for example I will do World Cafes within a conference with themes that will help participants as they move through the arc of learning and the several days of the conference.
The other most difficult thing I know is to have OS at the same time as other things in a conference – because usually there is not a good, focused opening (for all participants who wish to join), arc of learning and thinking across time, and not a good sense of closure. So it all feels like a big room where conversations can happen but just like any other sort of coffee house environment, no reason to do Open Space. You could just as well give people signs to put on their tables to gather around a self-organized topic whenever they come into that room, if they like. No process or facilitator needed. (this is sometimes referred to as ‘Birds of a Feather’.)
Oh yes and I personally think that all formalities in a conference must be seriously considered – do 100% of the participants need to do that voting or decision, or is that for a small leadership group, do people really need a keynote speaker or is the wisdom in the group, are speeches really good for anyone other than the person speaking ;o) … do people walk away from conferences going ‘gee I loved that formal gala and it really changed how I do my work on Monday’ or do they get more from participant-driven co-learning – all things to consider when deciding on overall conference design
One of the great pleasures of the weekend I just spent in San Francisco at the Applied Improv Network conference was hanging out with good friends, Caitlin Frost, Amanda Fenton (who is blogging up a storm these days), Viv McWaters and the inimitable Nancy White. While we were eating lunch one day, Nancy interviewed me on the subject of group sizes for a class she is teaching. Here is my off the cuff response:
If you want to see more thoughts on group sizes, I wrote a post on this a while back. See this as an invitation to practice and notice. No science was involved in the creation of these ideas!
Was in a quick coffee conversation this afternoon with one of our local artisan metal workers on Bowen Island. He has been fascinated by bicycles for a long time and is thinking about how to build one that fits his 6’6″ frame. He has been scouring the net for information about building oversized wheels, and has decided that, as much as people are already doing it, there is something to be learned from “reinventing the wheel.”
Occasionally innovation has to go back to first principles. Often in the group work I do there are two approaches to innovation: stand on the shoulders of giants or reinvent the wheel. Both these approaches have some validity.
Almost anything you can think of doing has been done before by others. That doesn’t mean that “best practices” can be easily applied from one context to another, but knowing that someone somewhere has taken on the hard work of pioneering innovation – be it a product, a tool, an approach or a design – helps us to jump off from a starting point.
But sometimes going back to the beginning can be fruitful too. Often groups who have the time and resources can benefit from starting from scratch, thinking about how they could redesign what they were looking for if they had to do it from first principles. Groups that do that become resilient and build capacity, but it takes more time, and people will often accuse you of being inefficient.
I wouldn’t throw out either approach in doing innovative work. Be conscious about which approach will best serve and assemble the resources you need to build out from there.