Prince George, BC
Four years ago less a month I was running a huge Open Space event here in Prince George, in fact in the building that right outside my hotel room window. Called “Seeds of Change” the event was a kick off for the urban Aboriginal Strategy, a community driven and led process intended to begin and seed projects that would make a difference in the lives of the urban Aboriginal community in this northern city of 80,000 people.
One of the participants at that event was Ben Berland, who was at the time working with the Prince George school district as an Aboriginal coordinator. Ben had a vision of doing something really different within the education system here in PG. He built upon a long standing recommendation to start a different kind of school. He attracted a number of interested folks at the Open Space and moved his project idea forward.
A couple of years later, a task force was struck to study options for systemic change in the school system and one of their recommendations was to establish a primary Aboriginal Choice School within the school district.
The choice school idea is based on some very successful models in Edmonton and Winnipeg. Getting it rolling has been a lot of work for many people here in Prince George, but tonight was the first of four consultation cafes we are running with four inner city school communities to find out what it would take to make a choice school successful in this city.
Ben, who is now working with the local Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council showed up tonight to hold some space with us and help run some small group conversations. When he saw me the first thing he did was to remind me that this whole idea – four years in germination – had started at the Seeds of Change event.
This whole choice school initiative is a huge undertaking and it feels like in many ways the community here is just beginning its work, starting to engage in earnest with the complexities of finally implementing the idea that gained momentum across the street four years ago.
Things take time. It’s interesting that we know that and we forget it at the same time. We crave immediate results for our ideas. When we forget that things take time, we forget everything that has gone on to take us to the point where we are finally able to start something and we forget the people that laid the groundwork for things. So tonight I am sitting here grateful for Ben’s reminder about where things come from, and what it takes for big shifts to happen. It takes hard work, and a firm conviction and most of all, it takes time.
I was working with a group yesterday that was making a number of small decisions as they worked their way through an agenda. The meeting was semi-formal and my role as facilitator was mostly to hold space and draw attention to process where appropriate.
I let the group talk, asked questions from time to time and noted the decisions that they had made. As I was observing this group working, I noticed something interesting about their process.
Frequent readers will know that I use the diamond of participation often as a map to organize and design meeting processes. One feature of the diamond is the three phases that groups go through, from divergent thinking through emergent thinking to convergent thinking. There are noticiable transitions between these three phases, with groups becoming quiet when the hit the groan zone, and the energy becoming lighter when concrete proposals and decisions begin to emerge.
Yesterday I was watching the pattern of the conversations in the group and I noticed that the language changed. Participants began and ended each journey through the groan zone using lots of “I” language and while they were in the middle, there were lots of “we” statements. A typical agenda item began with one partcipant introducing it with a personal statement or a question. The group listened and then replied with further I statements. These responses were a combination of personal questions and personal responses to ideas. Typically I heard things like “What I\m wondering about is…”, “I don’t like that idea very much…” “I can see your point…”
As the conversation unfolded however, there was a shift to “we” and group members began exploring ideas that were in the best interests of the group. People seemed less preoccupied with their own ideas and began working on the emerging ideas that were capturing energy. There was the occasional drift back to “I” language but for the most part I heard things like “We could do it like this…” “We don’t have the time or resources for that…” or “How else could we do that?”
Finally, you could tell the conversation was coming to a close when people started discussing the personal implications of the emergent decision. “Okay, so I will make that change to the timetable…” “I like this choice…” and so on.
Not just a flow from I -> WE -> I, but I also noticed that the conversation went from curious to concrete, and that this map took the form of quadrants, similar to the ones I have worked with before. This observation is in line with Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, and this diagram above shows the path the conversation took also shaped like a U, with the group going from inquiry which opened up options to concrete decisions and implementation plans.
The cool thing about this map of patterns is that it gave me enough for to be able to hold very lightly the conversational space that the group was in. I watched them go through this process something like 15 times over the course of the day and only a couple of times did they get stuck. When they did, it was simply a matter of consulting the map to see what to do. I intervened at least one in each of these four quadrants, something like this:
- Asking for more clarity in personal introduction of agenda ites, and alos inviting the person introducing the item what they are curious about.
- Helping the group see emergent ideas as they were taking shape and asking about the nature of the ideas rather than people’s personal preferences or thoughts.
- Inviting people to concretize what they were hearing, and to explore the implications of one option over another.
- Inviting personal responsibility and ensuring that implementation plans were in place for each decision.
Simple, but this is value of having maps at your finger tips to help find your way through the wilderness of emergent conversation\
Update: Dave Pollard has built on this thought and redrawn the map and I like his thinking. I will say though tha tthis version of the map stops at decision making, and my interest is in seeing the way the individal comes back into the fold as implementation takes over. We’ll be talking more about this I think at the Art of Hosting this month here on Bowen Island. At any rate, here’s Dave’s map:
Thanks Dave!
Jean Sebastien Bouchard writes about the birth of Grisvert his new company. He uses the five breaths design model that we teach within the Art of Hosting to tell the story of his journey from idea to launch over two years. ALong the way, he uses Otto Scharmer’s work on Presencing and U Theory and Dave Pollard’s Natural Enterprise thinking to find clarity. To me this is a great story about what is possible with maps, intention, friends and openness.
It’s a brilliantly told case study, a great story and Grisvert is a great offering to the world.
Congrats JS!
Day three at Shambhala and I’m humming. The artists staged what I heard was an incredible improvisational performance today that took the idea of being together in a field to a whole new level. I was in a conversation with some Art of Hosting mates at the time that was alos about fields and we were cracking open some deep learning about the ways in which we work together as friends, but the upshot was the same.
At the faculty retreat last weekend I sat in with the artists and had a conversation that was about the kind of work that art makes possible. I posited the assumption that fields cannot be created without art, an assumption we explored both in conversation and with an improvisational piece. Today one of the artists in that conversation, Wendy Morris, told me that one of her takes on the rock balancing thing was that the rocks make visible the very fine lines of balance. In the same way, art can illuminate the fine and subtle dynamics in systems and in seeing them crystalized with beauty another level of awareness and possibility becomes visible. This is certainly true in my expereince using poetry and graphic recording to harvest meaning from conversational process.
I am learning this week to enter deeply into the practice of “process artist” and to invite other who might be deep practitioners of conversational arts to explore other forms as well and integrate it with their practice. It’s simply a way of seeing differently, and sense making in a way that invites collaborative beauty.
As a taste, my rock balancing student, Jean-Sebastien posted lovely video today which is worth a look – and yes this means you Thomas.
So it’s been more than thirty days that I have been on my 30 day learning journey, but here is a harvest from some significant conversations. Consider this the tender early sproing greens. There is more to follow.
I began this learning journey leaning into thinking about what role I can play in taking change to scale. My reasons for this inquiry have to do with the fact that I am increasingly working with systems, beyond organizations and beyond groups. Also, some of us in the Art of Hosting community and the Berkana Institute are deep in this inquiry as well, wondering how we extend to influencing systems.
Two major insights have come to me this past month. First, working with my deep friends Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Phil Cass and Tim Merry on the Food and Society conference in Phoenix back in April we found ourselves very much playing at various levels of scale. This was a gathering of the Good Food Movement, and our intention as designers and process artists was to create a container in which the movement could experience itself as a movement, as a learning community working towards shifting a large food system. We were brought in not just to work with the conference as facilitators, but to help build a field among the hosting team and the organizations involved to do this work of having the movement expereince itself. For a number of years, Kellogg has had an intention to shift the percentage of healthy, fair, affordable and green food from 2% to 10% of the total amount of food in the American system. It is the Good Food Movement, such as it is, that is doing this work.
Moving from pioneers to systems of influence.
On the final day of the conference we had Debbie Frieze and Tom Hurley share the Berkana perspective on taking change to scale. Debbie and Meg Wheatley cracked a very simple model, called the “Lifecycle of Emergence” of doing this that names four phases in evolving a system of influence. First, pioneers in an emerging system give themselves a NAME which makes it much easier to find one another. Before the local food movement started to take hold there was no name for the people that were running farmers markets, creating community shared agriculture, and promoting local menus. Through the 1990s, a movement sprang up, which we now know as the local food movement (and some people are becoming increasingly “locavores,” promoting 100 mile diets and such). Once a network of practitioners is named it can find itself and begin to CONNECT.
Humberto Maturana is quoted as saying that the way to make a system more healthy is to connect it to more of itself. In this model of emergent scale, connecting is how the network emerges. Think of all the networks that have propagated through web technology since blogging began a new practice of naming, which Google helps along by making it easy to find one another. Networks themselves are useful, but it is only when they deepen to communities of practice, do they begin to exert influence. Community of practice form when people NOURISH networks, by offering to a shared centre for example. A network is relationship neutral, a community has a quality of relationship that takes it to another level. At this level we are able to do work together, support each other and create opportunities for new things to happen, born in the social space of collaboration.
As communities of practice do more and more, and they tell their stories and ILLUMINATE their work, they become systems of influence. A system of influence is able to do more than a community of practice, and it strikes me that it is less intentional. There are however, a set of practices that are useful for journeying through this ever scaling world. Tom Hurley spoke to those at the Food and Society conference, and Toke, Monica and I have been thinking about them from the perspective of what Hosting practice has to offer.
The journey of the practitioner at increasing levels of scale
As people move from facilitation to organizational development and beyond, I think there are five kind of archetypal levels on which facilitators or hosting practitioners work. There is a strong correlation between our own learning journey and through the ways in which works moves to scale. Of course there are many ways that people come to the work of large sclae change, through management, activism, advocacy, spiritual tradition and systemic analytics. he journey I am describing here is the one I am on and seems widely shared by people who learn about organizations and systems by first working with groups.
So this journey can be summarized by five basic archetypal fields. in short these are individual, one on one, group, organization, system.
In many Art of Hosting retreats we talk about hosting oneself. This basically means being in active inquiry with oneself. A thirty day learning journey is one way of hosting oneself, as is Byron Katie’s work, Otto Scharmer’s Presencing and Angeles Arrien’s Four Fold Way. These are all ways of conversing with oneself, staying open and in inquiry and noticing what is alive.
When we bring ourselves from this space into conversational space, we show up present and open and able to see new things emerging, even in small one on one conversations. We enter these conversations as open listeners, which is what Adam Kahane’s work has been about. To enter a social space as a listener is to attend to what could be born in the possibility of open social space. This is the beginning of a journey that takes us to a different place than if we show up talking.
The next level, the level of hosting the group, is the first experience we have of letting go. If we host as listeners, we begin to cultivate the practice of holding space, which is fundamentally different from showing up in a group as a directive, authoritarian presence. The host – the one who can hold space – practices a form of leadership that is able to attend to the emergent, exactly the capacity that is needed to see how work can scale. As we move through these levels we begin to let go more and more into these social spaces, while staying very rooted and present to our own self.
Once we have worked with groups, a consciousness emerges that asks the question about whether what we know about groups can apply to organizations. Harrison Owen made this leap with his Inspired Organization, seeing the scaling up from one Open Space meeting to a way of working together. Michael Herman did the same with the Inviting Organization. The Appreciative Inquiry world seeks to apply this worldview to asset-based community development and positive organizational scholarship. We start seeing that the things we know about self-organization, emergence and collaborative creativity can actually be encoded into organizational structures. Chaordic design becomes possible.
Finally there comes a time when we begin to ask if large systems can operate this way, and of course many do. Harrison points to the work of Stuart Kaufman who has studied self-organization for decades as evidence that Open Space is the operating system of the universe. Juanita Brown and David Isaacs and the World Cafe community are exploring the implications for conversational leadership and “the world as cafe.” Systems CAN and DO operate according to these principles, but at the level of the practitioner, we fall further and further away from controlling outcomes.
Instead, what we need to learn to do is to give up entirely to “the field.” My friend Monica has been saying “only a field can hold a field” and this is our experience from the Food and Society conference. We are still holding space for the emergent results of the Food and Society gathering, and we are finding it impossible to do this except in a field of practitioners. No one person is capable of this work alone.
And so our journey comes to this: host oneself into inquiry, listen with others, host conversations that matter, co-create organizations together, and participate in the field that can host the field, doing work that is greater than any one person can do. This is how we can show up in initiatives that begin to scale quickly to the level of systems of influence. Control will act as a brake on the acceleration of scale, letting go propels it forward.
There is a saying in the Tao te Ching: know the male, but keep to the female. In other words, know power and creativity, and keep to the receptive and open. Know creation, be open to emergence. This small phrase sums up everything I have been learning about how to practice to create shift. If you want to change the world you have to be able to disappear into the field that is doing the work without losing your capabilities, your contributions and your gifts and without being tied to your personal vision for what the shift will be.