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.
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Jack Martin Leith on how to do rapid innovation using Open Space Technology:
We hear a lot of talk these days about Open Innovation (American academic Henry Chesbrough wrote the book), but not very much about Open Space Innovation. I’m not talking about new developments in the field of Open Space Technology – I’ll leave that for another day – but rather using Open Space Technology to accelerate the process of new product development and other forms of innovation.Jeffrey Hyman and I did just that for a global food manufacturer a few years ago, and it worked so well that we seriously considered forming a company to commercialise the process. Fate had other plans for us, and Jeffrey became the founder and chairman of the Food & Drink Innovation Network. Now that the statute of limitations is no longer in force, I am able to show you the mirrors, hidden levers and trapdoor so that you can work the magic for yourself.
What follows from there is a very cool post detailing the whole process. A must read.
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Photo of the rock wall at Window Rock, on the Navajo Nation, where I was visiting and working last month.
Links that I have come across recently:
- A comprehensive list of theories about how we think, feel and behave.
- From Vision in Action, a long piece by Elisabet Sahtouris on a Tentative Model for a Living Universe – parts one and two. Thanks to Dave Pollard.
- Otto Scarmer on The Blind Spot of Leadership.
- Jordon Cooper prints his list of useful (and mostly free) tools for Windows machines.
- Peter Merry’s blog. This is my friend Tim’s brother. Helen Titchen-Beeth is also on Gaia. Plenty of good reading at both.
- More Samurai wisdom: the Hagakure
- Kurt Hahn’s writings, via Michael Herman, who writes more here.
- Dustin Rivers explains Skwxwu7mesh leadership.
- A really good guide to formal consensus decision making. My own method for decision making follows this map, although I rarely have call to use a process this formal. Still, it’s a great redux. Another hit from Pollard.
- Dave Snowdon on archetypes and stereotypes.
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So I’m a map maker. I am a cartographer of my own learning, and I love making maps to help me understand where I am, where I have been, and where I might go.
Since being an active participant in the community of learners working with what we call the Art of Hosting, I have been fascinated with the maps we use that represent our ways of making sense of the world. I have been trying various ways to draw a grand map of all of these things, and here is my latest effort, a sketch I did today based on learning as recent as last week. Click here to get the large version of this, so you can read it.
These are drawn as a circle, to address the idea that the way we have been drawing our maps was too linear. This is a map that charts the territory of working in long term, large scale change efforts within complex living systems.
There is a lot here, so let me go through it is some detail. It’s a draft, a sketch and it changes about as fast as the territory does, so I’d appreciate your thoughts and noticings about it.
Circles within circles (black)
The two black circles are where we begin the one with the cross in it stands for the individual and the larger one stands for the social sphere. The personal sphere is divided into four quadrants and these extend out into the social sphere as well. Wilber’s integral quadrants map on to here if you put individual at the bottom and collective at the top and internal at the left and external at the right. It is this interaction that is what the Art of Hosting is all about.
The four stages of developing leadership in community
The naming of the quadrants in this map comes from Meg Wheatley’s and Debbie Frieze’s work with the Berkana Institute on the Lifecycle of Emergence. The green words are four stages for developing leadership in community and they translate well into individual leadership practices as well . These four stages are naming, connecting, nourishing and illuminating. These are practices that are alive in the relationship between people and the lives of groups.
Navajo concepts (light brown)
The light brown words delineate five spaces that reflect the Navajo cycle of collaboration, moving from Creation Space to Intention Space to Vision Space to Action Space to Renewal Space, again coming around to Creation Space again. In actual fact, this is a map of the unfolding of Creation Space, so if it helps, picture the point at which the two circles intersect as an infinite point.
These concepts are based on Navajo philosophy but are not orthodox interpretations of the same. They are simply the way Navajo facilitators and hosts are making sense of their work from a traditional context. These concepts were developed by the Shuprock Health Promotion team that we have been working with over the past year.
The Diamond of Participation redrawn (dark blue)
While the circles do look nested one within the other there is another shape tat they create together that is important. Travelling clockwise from the bottom of the diagram you will notice that the space between the circles grows and then shrinks away again. This is intentional. I have named these three phases after Sam Kaner’s three zones in the Diamond of Participation: Divergent phase, Groan Zone and Convergent Phase. This is the shape of an overall project, and it is a pattern that scales.
The Five Breaths (red)
In looking at large scale change, we work with a pattern called “The Five Breaths” which is a pattern of the life of a project, be it a meeting or a systemic shift. The five phases of this process are Call, Clarify, Invite/Design, Meet and Act. Each of the breaths is nested in the other and each one is experienced as diamond, with a divergent, emergent and convergent phase to it. Hosting and Harvesting as practice grounds live deeply in these diamonds.
On either side of the five breaths, in the spaces that are called Intention Space and Renewal Space, there is a think thread. On the left, this thread represents the call that is alive in someone from the moment of inspiration (or the threshold of longing, that red line at the bottom left) until the call is made. This thread, even held as an intention grows and attracts attention to work until a call blossoms. On the other side, beyond action, the thread fades away in what could be called the art of stewardship, an art that is about letting go of things once they are done. This line grows ever fainter until the thread of consciousness passes over the threshold of memory and all of our work is gone and forgotten. The ideal result of such a fading away is ripples of action and influence that emanate out as the legacy of a project or a life.
The Chaord (purple)
Chaos and order interact in Creation Space, where the chaos of the world intersects with the order we as individuals bring to making meaning of our world. This dance is generative and is both the source of all great work and the place to which it all returns. The chaord lives in the space between the threshold of memory and the threshold of longing, on the other side of doing. It is unintentional but conscious being-space.
The Chaordic Stepping Stones (light blue)
The chaordic stepping stones are some ways we help make sense of the journey. We use different stepping stones, and there are some that aren’t on this sketch that are listed elsewhere. All of them emerge from the lenses developed by the Chaordic Commons. They lie on the outside of the model more because they are tools. They are points of order in the chaos that surrounds work.
If anyone wants to take a crack at a more beautiful way to draw this, I’d love it. We could probably use it for the module Monica Nissen, Toke Moeller and I are doing at the Shambhala Institute this June, where we will be teaching much of what is on here.
Note: I’ve updated this post to reflect Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze’s ideas here. I had wrongly attributed them to my Navajo friends.
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Photo by Nathan Ward
Little elements that showed up lately:
- A beautiful periodic table of the elements by printmakers
- A reason why I love the web: Indian cooking on YouTube
- Johnnie brings it on with a great find on power. Bonus is that he also introduces me to Greater Good magazine.
- Dustin Rivers on unschooling as decolonizing liberation. Dude rocks my world.
- Jack Martin Leith, a fellow Open Space traveller, has been providing interesting resources on collective genius and innovation for years. This is his recent offering, an engaging power point presentation on world views and pathways to collective innovation.
- I’ve pointed to her before, but here again is Kavana Tree Bressen’s facilitation resources. Tree is a long time member of intentional communities and so these resources have especially useful application there. But I love her deep practice of consensus.
- “We come up the hard way, and blues is the way you feel…”
- The Mindmapping Software weblog
- Niyaz: new music for the 21st century.
- MungBeing magazine: worth a look and a listen.