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.
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.
A combination of quotes from two different emails today on certainty. First from Ashley Cooper, quoting Daniel Sielgel:
“When we are certain we don’t feel the need to pay attention. Given that the world around us is always in flux, our certainty is an illusion.”
And then this, from Tenneson Woolf, who currently has my copy of Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview. From that books is this is a story of Keetsa, an Ahousaht whaling chief who runs into trouble when the space is no longer held for him:
Every protocol had been observed between the whaling chief and the spirit of the whale. Keesta had thrown the harpoon, and the whale had accepted it, had grabbed and held onto the harpoon according to the agreement they had made through prayers and petitions. Harmony prevailed, whaler and whale were one, heshook-ish tsawalk.
All of a sudden something went wrong, some disharmony arose, some disunity intruded, and the whale turned and began to tow Keesta and his paddlers straight off shore. Keesta took inventory. Everyone in the whaling canoe remained true to the protocols – cleansed, purified, and in harmony. Prayer songs intensified. Still, the great whale refused to turn toward the beach, heading straight off shore. Keesta and the paddlers had kept true to their agreements, and now there seemed nothing left to do except to cut the atlu, the rope attached to the whale.
Keesta took his knife, and as he moved to cut the rope, Ah-up-wha-eek (Wren) landed on the whale and spoke to Keesta: “Tell the whale to go back to where it was harpooned.” Keesta spoke to the whale, and immediately the great whale turned accourding to the word of Wren, the little brown bird, and returned to where it was first harpooned, and there it died.
After the whale had been towed ashore, Keesta discovered, as he had suspected, that the disharmony and disunity had intruded at home. When his wife had heard that the whale had taken the harpoon, she had roused herself and prematurely broken away from her ritual in order to make welcome preparations. At the point when she began to go about her life in disharmony from the rest was exactly when the great whale had begun to tow Keesta and his paddlers off shore.
Drawing by ritwkdey
I have been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the living systems vs. the mechanical systems worldviews. It’s interesting that there is a clear distinction between these two kinds of systems – a system is alive or it isn’t, at least in this point in time – and yet the way we humans think our way through being in these systems seems to fall on a continuum.
My conversation with Myriam Laberge here has pointed this out. I initially wrote a post that put facilitating up against hosting as two words to describe different ways of working with groups within human systems. I advocated for a new way of thinking about the role of facilitation (especially as it is perceived by mainstream and unspecialized views, which describes a large number of the clients of facilitators). Myriam rightly called me out on the stark polarity of my conceptualization, seeing instead that facilitation and hosting (not the words, but the actual work that we both articulate) are on some kind of continuum of approaches to groups.
Now I’m thinking that a continuum is even too limiting a way to talk about the variety of possibilities in working with groups. Humans in relationship with each other are, after all, living systems, and as such even a group of two people can be an incredibly complex system, bouncing between high degrees of chaos and order. So there is nothing whatsoever mechanical about human beings, and therefore any approach to working with humans – and life in general, is by definition a living systems approach. Instead of a continuum, we facilitators (or hosts or whatever) simply work from a cloud of approaches, as distinct and unique as each of us are. This makes the work of facilitation difficult to describe. Some, like the International Association of Facilitators, have tried to define the field and provide certification around a specific approach, but this is by no means an exclusive definition. The variety of ways of working with people is as various as people themselves.
And so I am led instead to think about the attributes of living systems so that I might better understand effective ways of working with people. I am not breaking any radically new ground here, except in my own practice. I began my professional life of working with groups specializing in chairing meetings, which I did from a young age. As a teenager, I was involved in all kinds of groups thet met, and I chaired many of them, enjoying being a position of power and control (I mean, let’s be honest, shall we?) but growing into an enjoyment of the kinds of good things that skilful conversation can produce. I was aware from the age of 16 that the way a meeting was run could have a significant impact on its outcome.
As I grew in my practice and curiosity about this field, I discovered chaos and complexity theory and became very interested in methodologies like Open Space Technology that place this world view at its core. To me watching groups in Open Space was unlike anything I had ever seen. Large groups of people, sometimes in the hundreds, could manage an entire conference themselves with only a few simple directions, some elementary pieces of form and a question or issue for which there was real passion. Over the years, I have witnessed this experiment running literally hundreds of times, and it continues to amaze and delight.
So if Open Space really works, then what is it that makes it work? Harrison Owen has been consumed with studying self-organization for many years now, because his experience of Open Space led hm to the same conclusions – humans are living systems and they behave much more like nature than machine. There is no mechanical approach that will work with humans – witness the recent trend for instance away from Business Process Re-engineering due to the deemphasis on the human factor. What works BETTER in a living system is an appreciative approach. What if an appreciative world view was a more relevant and therefore a more generative world view for determining processes for working with humans than a world view that seeks to engineer human engagement?
As I was flying in Denver Yesterday on my way home from Phoenix, looking down on the land on final approach, a question went through my mind: How do living systems make use of resources? I was reflecting on a recent appreciative summit I facilitated last week, where I was explaining the appreciative world view as being essentially a way to understand the resources we have among us and figuring out ways of deploying or channelling them where they are needed. The brown prairie below our approach path, and the dry streams leading out of the front range of the Rocky Mountains made me aware that in living systems like the one below me, all resources go to creating life. There is no waste in a living system at all. Everything that lives, eventually dies and in death it becomes, in the words of William McDonough, nutrition for the system. The resources that exist within the system flow towards life and life itself aggregates and grows around resources, creating an ever upward spiral of living matter that is limited only by the constraints of the system itself. When a critical limit is reached, the system seeks balance. If a catastrophy strikes the systems becomes something else, an emergent self-organizing order will take place. But it never dies, for the earth itself is a living system. Even rocks, locked in statsis for millions of years eventually supply the minerals that are needed for life itself.
Resources flow where they are needed and they attract life to themselves. This is fundamental. The system acts with a kind of intelligence, but it is not control. What can we learn about this for working appreciatively with small living systems of human beings?
Notes collected this week:
- Here is a link to a story of a most remarkable wedding between two lovely women who met on LiveJournal, found help through Craigslist and had it all documented on Blogger, Blogware and YouTube. And what is so remarkable about this story is that it is a story of how these technologies helped people find warmth and kindness and love in a company of strangers. The new world is blossoming, and we are finding one another, and discovering that we are highly pre-disposed to friendship and connection. del.icio.us!
- If, like me, you are addicted to TED talks, then you might also develop a craving for Scitalks, Humtalks and Busitalks.
- You know all those stats about “X is incresing at so much per day”? Here’s what it looks like all toted up. Interesting to see how bicycle production outpaces car production and how abortions run at about 60% of births. That helps to explain why this CBC poll was hacked this month.