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?
My friend Jon Husband is alive for the signs that new organizational forms are upon us. He found one today that really rang out for me. It seems that Amerian bloggers having been using distributed networks of readers to find the patterns of organization in a government conspiracy.
This is not tin-foil hat stuff. It’s the real deal, with an alarming plan to engineer the firing a number of United States Attorneys for political reasons. The bigest challenge for the bloggers who are following the story is to stay on top of the thousands of documents a day that are being released, almost in an effort to flood the public with disclosure. How do you find the gems? Well, if every reader of these well read blogs were to pick a couple of pages and harvets the nuggets, they could almost discover the actual plan pretty quickly, in theory anyway. And in practice, that is what’s happening. Within hours, the bloggers had begun to make some serious findings.
I’m quite interested in this, and thinking about how it might be a model for building things as well as taking them down. For example, I’m wondering how we might use a community of stakeholders/readers to sift through harvests from an engagement process to find the meaning that points the way forward. It would be a collective harvest of people’s own work, fed back into the system so that it may be developed further. From that, an emergent, collective set of patterns can be made visible, upon which something new can be designed.
As I think about this, and how the process would work both for uncovering a gpovernment conspiracy and building a new approach to social services for example, I am left with the following principles of practice:
- Agree collectively as to the purpose of the joint inquiry (uncover a government plan, build a new community-based approach to child and youth mental health, etc.)
- Conduct getherings to collect a lot of diverse wisdom and thinking about the inquiry.
- Harvest detailed notes from initial conversations, but don’t make meaning from them right away.
- Invite anyone to read whatever they want of the documents and select the pieces that seem to have the most relvance and benefit to the inquiry at hand. It would seem to be a good idea to have a large and diverse number of people to do this, especially if you had a substantial and complex inquiry and body of thought.
- Make this second level harvest visible and begin pattern finding within what is emerging, all the while feeding that back to the system to both show progress and te help people go back and find additional meaning and wisdom to support what is emerging.
- Have a further inquiry to tap creativity to fill the gaps that are being noticed.
Just a sketch at this point, but I have a place where I might be able to try it on a smaller scale. One could use this anywhere one had a large number of people that were contributing to a project that affected them. Wirearchy changes public engagement and makes it more democratic.
Very cool indeed. Thanks for the heads up Jon!
[tags]wirearchy, governance, public engagement[/tags]
More on action systems, but this time from a poet, Anais Nin:
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
That describes shift perfectly…when the status quo becomes more painful than the move.
[tags]anais nin, transformation[/tags]
Photo by Ernie*
In the last couple of weeks I have been in deep and important conversations about the work of facilitating change in the world. I am just back from another Art of Hosting gathering, this time in Boulder, Colorado and, among the many many things that were on my mind there, the subject of talk and action came up.
This was especially a good time to have this conversation as this particular Art of Hosting brought together many deep practitioners of both the Art of Hosting approach to facilitating change and the U-process approach to action and systemic change. One of the conversations I had related to solving really tough problems and I had a deep insight in that discussion.
I think first of all that there is a false dichotomy between talk and action. To be more precise I should say that there is a symbiotic relationship between talk and action. We can act any way we choose, and that is just fine, but when we want to take action that is wise, we need to be in conversation with others. We may also be in conversation with context as well, which looks like a literature review, a market study, an environmental scan and so on. Regardless, wisdom follows from being with the insights of others. Wise action is what we do after we have talked well together.
The question now is, what role does wise action have in solving tough problems? It seems to me that every system that responds to something has an action system within it. The action system is what the system or community uses to move on any particular need. And so, in Canada we have a legal system that creates action to resolve disputes between parties. We have a food system that delivers food to our stores. We have a health care system to care for us when we are sick. Within these three systems, there is a discrete action system and there is a lot of conversation. In the legal system conversation and action are raised to high and almost ritualistic arts. The formal conversation of a courtroom is so far beyond regular conversation that one actually has to hire a specialist to engage in it. And judgements, court orders and sentences are the mechanisms by which change takes place. Various bodies enforce these judgements so that there is accountability in the system.
Similarly, the food system and the health care system have conversational forums, meetings and so on in which wisdom and strategy is discerned, and there are trucks and doctors to do the work.
The problem is that neither of these three systems contains an action system that can reduce crime, prevent malnutrition or lower patient wait times. In other words thare are problems that are too big for the curent action system of any given community, society, or world. These problems become known as “wicked problems” or intractable problems, and they are often met with much despair.
When we are faced with these problems, we need to ask ourselves what to do. Do we use the existing systems, even in novel recombination, to try to tackle the biggest problems? Or perhaps is the biggest problem the capacity of the action system itself?
This is an intriguing idea to me. This is what I jotted down this morning in an email to some of my mates about this:
If we take the biggest, toughest and most intractable problem of any community we see immediately that the reason it is so is clearly that the community does not have the ability to deal with it. Water quality is an issue only in places where the community action system has been unable to deal with it. That might be because the community action system is not big enough to address it from a systemic basis, or that the leadership capacity is not strong enough or the collective container is not robust enough, or any combination. Ultimately the biggest problem for any community is: what do we need to do to get our collective power and action working on our toughest problems so that they are no longer our toughest problems?
I wrote a short note on the plane coming home from Denver, and it relates to how absolutely critical harvest is, in terms of focusing our eyes on the ways in which any conversation or meeting might affect a community’s action system. This is an attempt to caputre a simple form of the pitfalls of a false action/talk dichotomy and the necessity for learning, reflection and inquiry in a system.
“If we are wanting stuff to get done by any system, the first question is an appreciative inquiry into how things usually get done in the system so that we know what we are harvesting intoand we understand what forms of harvest will best serve the actions we want to take as a result of any conversation.
But what do we do when the system itself is not up to the task of taking action on a large problem? In that case, the inquiry has to find a way to get the system to act on itself to create the conditions and change necessary for it to become powerful enough to move into action on the intractable problem. This is difficult because it requires “bootstrapping” the system to see itself and then teach itself to be bigger and more powerful.”
I don’t know how to do this. But I feel deeply that THIS is the challenge. We can solve global warming IF we figure out how the world community action system can develop the capacity to address the problem. If we don’t develop that capacity, we won’t solve the problem. We can break it into more manageable bits and pieces that fit what we can already do, but global warming is an emergent phenomenon and it needs an emergent response. So what is the biggest problem? Not global warming…it is us…the biggest problem is the inability of our existing systems to address it. And to me, daunting as it is, that seems like work we can actually do togather.
So that is where I am currently, as a facilitator of deep conversation, interested in how we can connect inquiry, talk, harvest and action to find and use the power we need to make to big changes our world needs.
Your thoughts? What seems especially interesting about this take on wicked problems?
[tags]wicked problems[/tags]
One of the key skills in deliberative dialogue is figuring out what we are, together. This is often called “co-sensing” or “feeling into the collective field.” There are many ways to talk about but the practice is on the one hand tricky and subtle, and on the other, blazingly obvious.
In general, in North America and especially among groups of people that are actively engaged in questions about co-sening the collective field, a speech pattern I have notcied goes something like this:
- I feel that we need to…
- My thoughts are that we should…
- I just throw this out there for consideration…
- I’m not sure but I think we…
In other words, oin our efforts to discern the collective, we very often start with a non-definitive statement about our personal relation to what might be held collectively. Very often these kinds of statements serve to keep us stuck in individual perspectives. What we end up talking about is our own perspectives on things. Instead of sensing into the whole, we are negotiating with the parts. There is no emergent sense of what we have between us.
Last week, I was working with some ha’wilh (chiefs) from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth nations of the west coast of Vancouver Island. (We were in this building). Although this was a somewhat standard government consultation meeting, these ha-wiilh are quite practiced in traditional arts of deliberation. Much of the conversation during the day conformed to the above pattern, but at one point, for about a half an hour, there was a deep deliberative tone that came over the meeting. We were talking about a government policy that is aimed at protecting wild salmon, an absolutely essential animal to Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities.
When talk about the policy, the pace of the conversation slowed down and the ha’wilh entered this pattern:
- We need to support this policy. I support it.
- We have to find a way to involve the province in this. Here’s who I know on this.
- Logging in our watersheds affects these fish and our communities are affected as well. What can we do about that?
The essence of this pattern is that one waits for something to be so obvious that a dclarative statement about “we,” “us” or “our” begs to be stated. And once it is stated, it is supported with a statement about how “I” relate to that whole.
This produces a number of profound shifts in a field, and very quickly. First, it slows everything down. It is not possible to rush to conclusions about what is in the collective field. Second, it builds conidence and accountability into the speech acts. It is very, very difficult to say “we need to support this” if you are uncertain of whether we do or not. This shift takes us from random individual thoughts and speculations into a space where we need to think carefully, sense outside of our own inner voice and speak clearly what is in the middle.
This is a very abstract notion, but anyone who has driven a car or ridden a bike in traffic knows what I am talking about. When we are driving our cars together, we are actually creating traffic. Traffic is the emergent phenomenon, the thing that we can only do together. In order to create traffic that serves us, we need to be constantly sensing the field of the road. This involves figuring out what other drivers are doing, noticing the flow and engaging safely but confidently. You need to both claim space and leave space to drive safely. Anyone who offers something into the field that is too focused on the individual disturbs the field significantly. They drive like road hogs, dangerous, not fully connected to the field around them.
So the teaching of the ha’wilh is very straightforward for any form of deliberation and co-sening: quickly go to the “we.”
[tags]co-sensing, deliberation[/tags]
Photo by Wam Mosely