Since the spring I have been wrestling with an evolution in my practice. It was prompted by a series of exchanges with Dave Snowden in response to his strong exhortation that those of us who say we are working with complexity should truly reflect on our practice. At the heart of the challenge, as I took it on board, is the claim that a hosted container is a consequential intervention in a system, but it is not the system itself. And from a complexity perspective, that also means that as a host I have an obligation to understand the effect that my role and choices have on the groups we are working with. Especially if I am making claims to be working in systems change, I need to understand that distinction more rigorously so I can become a better host and a better contributor to the change work that is being called for in the world.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a letter to Dave from the perspective of an Art of Hosting practitioner, about why his challenge moved me and why I took it on board, and also what I think this practice, the Art of Hosting, offers to the world.
This letter is to my mates within the Art of Hosting community, to share where I have been challenged in thinking through this work and what it means for how I practice the Art of Hosting. And it’s an invitation to all of us to engage with these questions with each other and with those we teach, support, and serve.
Dear mates:
For nearly 25 years the Art of Hosting has been my practice home. The Four Fold Practice (being present, participating, hosting, and co-creating) offers key reminders to me about what helps create conversations that matter. The large-group methods we use and have developed make a meaningful difference to the organizations that I work with.
As a community we have accumulated authentic practitioner wisdom and knowledge about invitation, conditions for convening, the power of questions and inquiry, and the effectiveness of co-creation and collective harvesting. We have explored and documented an approach to facilitation that does not concern itself with the outcome, but attends to what shapes the container. We have extended that into forms of leadership, organizing, and activism that hold participation at their heart and find a home amongst those who long for inclusion, democratic governance, and better workplaces.
These are distributed, experimental, and messy lines of thought and practice that billow out from our core inquiry about hosting. For me now, the question is, “What exactly is working, and how?”
The distinction: the hosted conversation is not the system
Those of us who have been lucky enough to work in larger contexts and over longer periods of time will recognize that the dialogic container we are hosting is not the system. It is sometimes the hardest thing for me to hear when a participant says, “This is great, but what about the REAL world?” I get defensive. I insist that this IS the real world. Change can happen at many scales, including right here and now, in the midst of dialogue. And while that can be true, I have noticed that it runs the risk of dismissing what a person is saying: “I have real problems and I need this meaningful conversation to make a consequential difference now, or I have to do something else.”
For longer-term and deeper work in complex contexts, a hosted gathering creates a temporary set of conditions inside of which a group of people is gathered: I call this a dialogic container. Of course, these people and their questions are a part of the bigger context of work, but the container is not the system. It is not even a microcosm of the system. It is just a group of people with varying connections and influence in relation to the issues at hand.
A humble approach to my work invites me to consider these realities:
- People from a system are not THE system.
- Diverse perspectives alone are not representations of the system.
- Emergent insight is not the collective intelligence of the system.
- Changed relationships are not changed structures.
- Powerful experiences are not system change.
This isn’t to say that my work doesn’t matter. Temporary hosted conditions can indeed result in different interactions that can create new possibilities. It is true that small changes in a complex system can eventually lead to larger changes. But we cannot know that in advance, and making the link between different scales is especially vulnerable to exaggeration.
My engagement with complexity, including the work of Snowden and others, has brought me to a critical point in my practice where I am seeking to understand the bounded applicability of the work of hosting, while extending my practice in other ways to get at some of the real challenges associated with working in complex systems. That includes being clear about the influence that the host and the hosting team have when designing and employing methods, shaping the harvesting, choosing the questions…all of it.
Reconsidering the container
I think it is easy to be lulled into the hope that a meaningful conversation can generate what we call the “magic in the middle” that takes us to new vistas. So much good can happen in a well-hosted and meaningful conversation, and learning how to convene these moments is a good and important skill. We talk about creating and holding a container in which something beautiful can emerge.
This work comes with a tremendous amount of responsibility. When we shape an encounter, we are shaping what is possible. Surprising, moving, and genuinely novel work can legitimately arise, even while it is conditioned through the architecture out of which it emerged. Because of the power we carry into hosted spaces, we shape that architecture in every move we make before and during the gathering. The nature of our methods and practices can sometimes have us believe that what happened was genuine collective intelligence, but the design, hosting choices, and harvesting work shape what is possible.
It may be true that under the particular conditions of any specific hosted gathering, participants became capable of seeing, saying, or doing something that had not previously been possible. We use methods because they create particular conditions for emergence by shaping the interactions of participants in particular ways. But the methods aren’t the sole source of emergence and change. World Café does not reveal collective intelligence. Open Space is not system transformation. Circle does not eliminate status and influence.
For change work, this is critical to understand. Groups of people are capable of finding and developing their own solutions to problems, even within the constraints of the structural systems that they inhabit. A well-hosted process positioned as essential to change work runs a deep risk of making the group’s outcomes dependent on the host, the tools, or the process. For me, this role is seductive. I like to think that I am a good change maker because I host conversations on important topics and people often leave feeling positive, creative, and motivated.
But what is the cost of that?
Hosting is an exercise of power
One of the core contributions of the Art of Hosting as a community of practice and a body of work is our deep collective inquiry into the idea that a group of people can know more than a single expert or facilitator, given the chance to use their agency. The Four Fold Practice reminds us of the conditions that can help enable that. Methods help us practice. Circle helps us slow down conversations. Open Space gives participants extraordinary agency. World Café surfaces many perspectives on common questions, making more ideas available to a group. These are legitimate contributions of our suite of practices.
However, the presence of agency, deeper listening, and diverse perspectives does not eliminate the power that a host wields in the container. In fact, my deepest fear is that it hides it.
Good hosting can create the conditions for self-organization, but critical hosting practice needs to remember that someone called the meeting, someone made the list, someone framed the purpose and selected methods, someone made logistical choices, and someone decided on the harvest plan. Even if these decisions and choices are made and held by a hosting team drawn from and informed by collective need and purpose, the container is still shaped.
Our methods may look like they fade the power of the host into the background, but the architecture of the hosted container carries the power. That power can shape possibilities, often invisibly. My own hosting practice is especially vulnerable to what I cannot see because I deliberately remove myself from engaging in group dynamics and shaping the output.
If my deeper learning of this last year (and maybe my whole career) has landed on anything, it has landed on the unsettling realization that I and we need to do a lot more work to take responsibility for our power as designers. This matters partly because I am often playing the role of an expert in process work when I am working with a client, and so my decisions are trusted. But it is also important because my presence in working with a group of people usually comes with the sanction and mandate of people more powerful than me who have chosen to work with me, chosen to endorse the design that I have suggested, and chosen to commit to what we think might happen.
The host has meaningful power because we are sanctioned by power to do what we are doing, in the way in which we are doing it. As I began to realize that my own self-reflection wasn’t going deeply enough into the effects of this power, I started to look for ways that I could account for it, be honest about it, and make better choices about it.
Three kinds of constraint, three expressions of power
If you have been following my work in the past few months, you will have seen these two posts in which I describe a way of looking at the architecture of a held container. This triangle has become extremely important to my practice because it gives me a place to locate my own power in relationship with the distributed power of a group and the power embedded in the structures that pre-exist a hosted conversation.
Briefly, the three points of this triangle define a space and ask us to locate our work within it based on the way power shapes a participatory process:
Interactions (distributed power): We hold it as a deep principle in the Art of Hosting world that the group has collective wisdom, collective knowledge, and the ability to co-create. People are entirely capable of organizing, collaborating, being in relationship, creating and responding, and making change without a consultant or a host coming into their lives. It happens all the time, and I find it incredibly hopeful. As a host I like to think that, whatever my work is, I am serving this.
Structure (contextual power): It would be great if groups alone could just go and do the work, but every group of people is constrained by the existing structure in which they operate. Folks in organizations work within resource constraints, chains of command, organizational purposes and policies, and time boundaries. People in communities are subject to laws, biophysical constraints, and the reality of the scale they find themselves working at. These structures are critical and not always visible, and they convey tremendous power. They can squash or enable good ideas. They can alienate people (or imprison them). And importantly, especially if you are a host who is hired to do this work, they implicitly and explicitly shape possibilities through mandates and permissions.
Design (privileged power): As hosts we do not operate independently of the above two sources of power in a container. We are enmeshed in the collision of constraints, and we bring our own small but significant source of power to the conversations. These are the intentional constraints we introduce into a space: the purpose of a gathering, the choice of methods, the invitation, and the design work that goes into shaping the experience. There is privilege in this position because someone, or some group, has the power to make these decisions in the room. Even if we are hosting an Open Space, the shape of the question, the choice of the harvesting template, the purpose, and subsequent uses of the work are all choices made by someone.
Distributed power, contextual power, and privileged power intersect in every hosted conversation we are involved in. Making this space visible has been tremendously helpful in my practice. It helps me see what is needed for meaningful conversations to become truly useful conversations, and it is helping me become much more aware of the choices I make as a host and how those can disempower distributed power from doing its work.
In the Art of Hosting world we focus a lot on the Design <—> Interaction axis, thinking about how our methods and designs will shape the interactions and experiences of participants. I think we have approached the question of how the existing context structures what’s possible, but the Art of Hosting alone, and a well-hosted process in particular, is not sufficient for sustained systemic change. Even developing participatory leadership skills still leaves leaders confronting the very real problems of power, resources, and politics within their settings. When we claim that our work contributes to systems change, the test of that cannot end with what emerges in the room. We have more to learn about whether and how the work we do in rooms contributes to change in the systems around them.
Contact with context
The Art of Hosting offers promise because the ways in which we use the practice to design and host conversations, lead teams, structure organizations, and work with power seem to provide immediate ways to engage the diversity of the system. A well-hosted gathering is often thought to be essential to finding new solutions.
But a well-hosted process and a powerful conversation that do not survive contact with the strategic context they promise to shift are a problem. While two days in Open Space, for example, can often unlock some important actions, it takes a tremendous amount of resources and commitment to make such a thing happen. If the promise is fulfilled, that participants will have transformative experiences and the organization or group will be better able to deal with their problems, then the investment is worth it.
But if that’s not what happens, then even a gathering with positive evaluations might have just delayed the ability of a group to activate its distributed capacity and, worse, may have made it seem like only good hosting can provide the conditions for engagement with complex problems. That can be costly where time is an important constraint on the context. The thing I most worry about in my practice is an outcome where people loved the process and the work, but nothing in their world changed.
What I am demanding of myself now is an honest accounting of the role I play as a host. It is easy for me to look at my own discrete contribution and say, “We did a good thing,” while leaders go back to the office shaking their heads and worrying that nothing has changed. This is an ethical facet of our work and one which we can always get better at.
When I was recently working with the Evans School for Public Policy at the University of Washington, my hosting colleague Amanda Bankston told me that the research literature on public policy and engagement is shockingly silent on the role of facilitators, consulting groups, and process designers in how policy gets made, or how it doesn’t get made. Consulting firms are often evaluated on their deliverables, but we know very little about the wider effect they have on whether resources were wasted, time was misspent, or distributed agency was trampled in the name of outcomes.
When she told me that, I realized that I don’t even have a framework for understanding my own role, and hence the triangle above. It helps me interrogate and name the boundaries of my work and influence, and it helps me to be more aware of the ways in which our work is shaped by the context. It has meaningfully changed my practice, most notably through the fact that I no longer do larger-scale work without doing a complexity-informed narrative capture and sense-making process with people in the system before we decide on a design for interventions. And often, just doing this work up front means that the interventions can be less reliant on the Designer and more embedded in the Interactions of people finding ways to make change within the Structures that no longer serve.
My Art of Hosting practice taught me to be aware of these things. My complexity-informed practice has brought me to a place where I am deeply discerning about the solutions I offer for convening.
The invitation
So this leaves me with an honest invitation to you, my mates.
Increasingly, some of my most important learning comes from people outside our community whose questions and observations expose assumptions I didn’t know I was making. Taking those questions seriously has not diminished my trust in this practice. It has made me more discerning about when and how I use it.
Questions like:
- What are the boundaries of the spaces I help create, and what can they genuinely affect?
- What forms of power am I exercising through design, hosting, and harvesting, and how can I account for their effects?
- What structural constraints shape the context in which my work is embedded, and how do they shape what I can or cannot do?
- What happens when what we are doing in any given conversation encounters the world outside the meeting room?
- What else do I need to learn to contribute when the work requires something that the Art of Hosting can’t provide?
This has been a year of honest accounting and reflection for me. I find myself with a deeper appreciation for the core of our work and the genuine contribution it makes, while becoming more careful about the promises I make for it. I want to know more clearly what this practice can do, what it cannot do, what power I exercise when I use it, and what else I need to learn. I offer you these questions too, in that spirit of curiosity, learning, and mateship.
The Var River below the high village of Touët in France.
This is going to continue the series of posts that began with The Inundated Delta, which was a response to Dave Snowden’s thoughtful position of the Art of Hosting in the context of anthro-complexity.
I want to name the four most influential streams that have shaped my professional life. This is important because it names my intellectual and practitioner lineage so people understand where I am coming from and what questions have formed my practice. This post focusses especially on how I arrived at anthro-complexity as a theory-informed dialogue practitioner and it connects it to the longest standing curiosity I have had which is essentially “What are you going to do about it?” That question has driven every inquiry in my life. It is important to talk about where one is coming from.
The first: my work with Friendship Centres and other Indigenous organizations through the 1990s gave me a practical experience of applying what I learned during the five years I spent at Trent University in what was then called Native Studies, with an emphasis on community and organizational culture. That already shaped much of the way I approached working with people. My practice was further formed by the organizers, facilitators and leaders in the Friendship Centre movement who had built an influential national grassroots movement in Canada.
The second: I’ve talked before about how Open Space completely changed my approach to group facilitation by introducing my to a mode of working with groups that was rooted in the people, their own intelligence and knowledge and not the performative or interventionist nature of the facilitator. Learning about Open Space fundamentally changed the way I looked at organizations, governance and facilitation, and it led me into an inquiry with a wider group of people who were asking questions about what self-organization, complexity and participation meant for these milleaux.
The third: In 2003, at a gathering called by Harrison Owen and others we spent five days in Open Space and I came into the Art of Hosting community through an explicit invitation from Toke Møller who was one of a small number of people forming a community of of practice around the idea of the Four Fold Practice. This appealed to me because I recognized right away that the communities of practice associated with process methodologies were too limiting in terms of trying to understand what happens in a groups space that is truly complex. I was looking for what I later called “communities of praxis” where theory and practice were meeting.
The Art of Hosting itself – the four fold practice – provided a useful heuristic for facilitating practice (and design of participatory facilitation work) and was disruptive enough to the understood norms of facilitation that it was named “hosting.” This naming pointed at the idea that it wasn’t the people or the process that was being actively facilitated by the host. Rather it was the conditions of interaction that were being shaped by the host. The work of the dialogic container was done by the people themselves. The work was not just tools, but rather developing principles of practice.
Several threads from different large group method practice found their way into this nascent understanding of what hosting seeks to generate. It is about highly participatory work, rooted in dialogue and shared meaning-making. From the World Cafe, it was about the “magic in the middle: as Finn Voldtofte named it: the emergent possibilities of what happens in truly participatory spaces. From The Circle Way practice of Baldwin and Linnea, it was “leadership in every seat.” From Harrison Owen and Open Space it was about self-organization and “trust the people, not the process.” All of these point to something that didn’t yet have a mainstream frame of reference, but we understood them to be rooted in complexity.
At that time complexity in humans systems was tied more to the chaos science world, and my own understanding had been informed by the sources the Open Space practitioner community pointed to: Capra, Gleick, Kauffmann, Isaacs, and Bohm. I was less enamoured with Senge et. all’s systems thinking stuff with its causal loops and leverages and flows. In the Art of Hosting world, Tøke and Monica had spent some time with Dee Hock in a Kaos Pilot cohort in San Francisco in the late 1990s and his idea of the dynamic relationship between chaos and order (producing chaordic space) helped us to understand that hosting was a process that helped address the volatile and unknowable nature of true complexity. Hock formulated that thinking in the 1960s when he was trying to create a currency – the VISA cared – and he struggled to find organizational structures that could provide some stability while allowing for self organization. Hock’s work, formed in the 1960s, was more in line with the living systems/chaos theory approach to complexity rather than the more mechanistic systems thinking stuff that Senge and Meadows and others were producing.
Still my curiosity about how complexity happened in groups and organizations and what implications it had for facilitation practice and leadership – and what I was going to do about it – continue to seek deeper understanding And that’s where the fourth big pivotal shift in my practice happened.
Sometime in 2008 I became aware of Dave Snowden’s work and the Cynefin framework entered my awareness. I had been searching for a framework that helped me to understand all the different ways humans systems work and in particular the need to be context specific when doing all of this. My degree in Native Studies had taught me that; context is so much bigger and more important that anything that might happen within it. Maps were central to this understanding.
During my years at Trent, the medicine wheel was perhaps the first framework that was introduced to me to help me understand how context operates. We talked about holistic ways of seeing and working, and be aware of the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of all that we do. Medicine wheels were extremely powerful frameworks used in the cultural revitalization movements of the 1970s and 1980s when I was studying this work. They represented a way of seeing that recovered Indigenous perspectives on conditions and situations and demanded a deeper accountability to the interconnectedness of living and non-living things in order to create healthy lives. HOW they were used was important though.
I actually wrote my honours these on this, looking two Indigenous organizations and how they were expressing Indigenous culture in the their work. One used the medicine wheel in an almost fundamentalist way, structuring everything according to directions. So it assigned roles to people who lived in the north, east, south and west not according to ability but according to where they lived. Action, healing, vision and strategy had nothing to do with competencies or need, and everything to do with the structure. This was an abject failure and created confusion, conflict and despair in the organization. It was led by two Anishinaabe Elders and cultural practitioners and it was a blanket application of an Anishinaabe values onto a national organization made up of people from many different cultures, spiritual traditions and ways of working.
By contrast, the other organization – the National Association of Friendship Centres, for whom I later worked – organized itself along traditional non-profit ways of doing things. It had a representative board, a standard staffing model, with an Executive Director and a small staff and a pretty clear mandate. The form was light, the staff was small, and it allowed for the organization to be agile and flexible in pursuing funding and program opportunities with the federal government. The work was deeply cultural as well, and the organization had many different cultural practitioners, spiritual leaders and Elders within its ranks and every meeting was supported by this role. We had Elders like Bruce Elijah who attended to our national board meetings and our AGMs were full of ceremony, appropriate to the territory in which we were meeting or supported by people who stepped up to take responsibility for caring for the spiritual and cultural life of the organization. The light, grassroots, member driven structure gave rise to a rich organizational cultural life that was able to handle depression conflicts, emergencies and crises, but also to create a movement in which people were cared for and chose to spend their careers.
The conclusions that stayed with me from the year long piece of research were essentially that culture does not live in imposed frameworks, no matter how sacred or rigidly applied they are, but rather lives in the ways in which people can bring their skills, themselves, and their experiences to bear on the situation at hand. There were many medicine wheels used at the NAFC, but they were used to orient us and make sense of what was happening and to ask questions about what we might do, not to prescribe action or, horror, demand outcome accountability.
This is the backdrop to how I saw and used maps. (I even mashed them all together at one point in what is clearly a whimsical folly.)
Of all the maps I saw, Cynefin said this most explicitly: “horses for courses.” And also, one of Dave’s important principles “data precedes the framework.” Do the appropriate thing given the context you are working with. Don’t impose anything on people that forces them to make meaning according to your frame. And beyond that, Snowden’s work on complexity was exactly what I was looking for to explain how to work with human systems. Hock’s chaord and the way we talked about it in the Art of Hosting mapped well enough onto what Snowden called “linear Cynefin.” I still use this framing to lightly introduce people to complexity, becasue the idea that we default to control when confusing things get unpredictable rather than leaning into a “shallow dive into chaos” is still – and maybe increasingly – radical to most people. The Chaord and Cynenfin are NOT the same thing at all though, and this point will be explored in a subsequent post.
After many years of reading, teaching, and trying stuff out, I took my first Cynefin course in London in 2014. I was especially interested in how complexity would change my approach to harvesting and evaluation, but it did so much more than that. What became “anthro-complexity” offered a significant redirection to my own hosting practice and changed (and continues to inform) my practice of the Art of Hosting. This redirection was strong enough that it knocked me outside of the mainstream practice of the Art of Hosting community of practice. This included the way methods are used (and the primacy of methods), the way training happens, and the way we use this approach for making change. The lessons of that course still resonate with me to this day and have shaped my Art of Hosting practice.
I find myself now in a world that straddles both approaches to this work and I believe that there is a very fruitful area of overlap and generative engagement to be had, the inquiry of which is the basis of our Complexity Inside and Out program.
I also recognize that I am very nearly alone in this inquiry. Many folks in the Art of Hosting community disagree or just don’t understand some of what is core to my practice, and Snowden has made it clear where he understands the limits of the Art of Hosting to be, as he understands them. The confluence of anthro-complexity and the Art of Hosting has distorted my own practice in a way that I feel honours the depth of what both bodies of work are getting at, but it hasn’t left me too many close colleagues. I am still and active member and global steward of the Art of Hosting community of practice, but my stewardship focuses on the Four Fold Practice. I believe that, with use and experience, that framework is incredible helpful for facilitators and leaders to expand their practices deeply into complexity. It helps us to convene better participatory meetings and it helps leaders to lead more engaged teams and organizations, all of which is much desired. Learning to convene well, to host dialogue and to lead in an inclusive way is worthy work.
This commitment to the Four Fold Practice is shaped by what I have learned from anthro-complexity over the years. My next post will dive into some of the specific ways that principles and practices of Snowden’s (and Cynthia Kurtz’s) work have influenced mine, and why I feel like these are important lesson for Art of Hosting practitioners to take on board, especially those of us working explicitly with complexity and change. And following that, I’ll write more on what I think are valuable and important contributions that the Art of Hosting makes on it’s own with respect to convening and learning.
So this post is one of a series that is seeking to describe some of this development in a little more detail. It is also intended to invite Art of Hosting practitioners to further develop our practice especially as we use it within organizations and communities to support change and strategy work. More to come.
I was having a great conversation today catching up with colleagues from the New Jersey Education Association who have long used the principles and framework of the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting for their work. One of their offerings is the NJEA Teacher-Leader Academy which is an accredited course in participatory leadership for New Jersey school teachers. It is anchored entirely in the four-fold practice.
In chatting today, I was sharing with them some of the published peer-reviewed and other research that has been done over the years on the Art of Hosting specific to or adjacent to education. I threw a bunch of links in the chat, and before I close the tabs, I thought I’d record them here for posterity.
- Practicing the Art of Hosting: Exploring what Art of Hosting and Harvesting workshop participants understand and do. A paper by Jodi Sanford, Nicholas Stuber and Kathryn Quick looking at the results of several Art of Hosting workshops done in the early 2010s at the University of Minnesota.
- Cultivating Change in the Academy: Practicing the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter within the University of Minnesota. An open source ebook on teh application of this work throughout the university.
- Learning to facilitate deliberation: practicing the art of hosting. By Kathryn Quick and Jodi Sanford and published in Critical Policy Studies in 2014. This paper talks about how deliberation practitioners learn deliberative practice through this training.
- What the f…has research got to do with the Art of Hosting. A video of Jodi discussing this research from a gathering on harvesting in 2017.
- Hosting humanizing practices in times of complexity: Lessons to be learned from Paulo Freire. This is Elizabeth Hunt’s master thesis which links the Art of Hosting to Friere’s work.
- The Art of Hosting in Education – Shifting mindsets using participatory methodologies and practices by Laura Weisel, which documents especially the role of participatory methods in educational settings
- Parent Cafes: The Gift that Keeps on Giving. A interview with Lina Cramer who spent many years using World Cafe to convene Parent Leaders within and around public school in Illinois.
I’m struck at how much of the research here focuses on methods. There isn’t A LOT on the four fold practice as a scaffolding for leadership and facilitation practice. My friends in New Jersey are underscoring the importance of that, and I hope at some point they will contribute to this body of knowledge with their own reflections on the work.
We continue to explore this world, most recently through an annual Reimagining Education offering that is called by Jennifer Williams along with me, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle. This has been a truly amazing offering the past three years and we will offer it again in 2026 in a new location in the fall.
We are deep in the rainy season here on the west coast of North America. I’ve been reflecting on my year of work and noticing a few patterns that are coming to mind as I think about the kinds of questions that our clients have been confronting this year. I don’t know that these observations are especially novel, but they do represent patterns that I have seen this year. they also represent places where I think our work can be helpful.
Something of the bigger context.
As it always has been. But that bigger context is currently full of austerity, fear and polarization. Much of our work is within the non-profit and public sector, and our clients have all been facing declines in funding, uncertainty about the future, skyrocketing need from their own clients and a deep questions about using their leadership to confront polarity and division in their organizations and communities.
It used to be that we were confronting a “scarcity mindset” where we feel to recognize the wealth of ideas and leadership that we actually have. This leaves leaders and organizations retreating into their own shells as they try hard to shoulder the responsibility of the work. Often in our organizational development work, we could do things that lift our eyes up a bit and help activate the leadership throughout the organization.
These days, on top of that dynamic, I think we’re facing an “austerity mindset” whereby that wealth of talent, attention and money is still present but it is actually locked away and not available to us. It has been concentrated elsewhere and everyone seems to be preparing to simply do without it.
I’m certainly not 100% sure of this shift, but it feels like the issues leaders are confronting are shifting in ways that we continue to explore with them and their teams, and my colleagues as well. What helps at this time is continued connection and sophisticated situational awareness to see and name what is happening and to be honest about what is available to work with. Maybe, dear readers, you are seeing it too. All work happens in a context and being able to name this context is important, without getting lost in it. I wrote about this back in September.
Five year strategic planning is dead.
The Covid-19 experience seemed to finally put to rest the typical five year strategic planning process. Everyone now has practical and tangible experience of how the best laid plans can be knocked sideways. And in the last year or two, as organizations have been recovering from Covid, they have no been hit with massive uncertainty in the world, including cuts to their funding. And it very much seems irrational, arbitrary and determined by bigger dynamics that are outside of the control of the organizations we get to work with.
In response, the kind of planning I have been asked to do more and more this year is about scenario planning and arriving at a set of practice principles that can help organizations lead towards a variety of futures. I do love this kind of work. It has relational benefits of visioning and dreaming together, but is rooted in deep and practical need for on the ground responses. I’m not an expert at operational planning – and there is always a need for that kind of work – but bringing people together to think about futures and develop some shared resourcefulness about responding to what might happen is useful.
Connection is needed but trust is shaky at the centre.
I have had a blog posts sitting in my drafts for a little while that talks about how we can move from centralized planning and control towards a more networked form of leadership. Ever since I ran across Open Space Technology in 1995 I have seen the need for this, because as Harrison Owen (who we lost in 2025) observed, Open Space activates an organizational structure of shared leadership and responsibility that is latent in any group of people. He called it “The High Performance Organization” and it checks a lot of boxes for what leaders want: engaged staff, ideas and responsibility sprouting up all over, connected and self-organizing teams that are working in a common direction, but meeting challenges where they are at.
The problem is that such networks really depend on the ability and willingness of organizational leaders to open up space for that to happen. We spend a lot of time in our longer engagements working with senior leaders to help them sustain their ability to truly trust the folks in their groups to do the work. It is sometimes a hard thing to bootstrap, but once it gets going, these types of networks can be quite powerful. Central leaders and organizations become conveners rather than resource sinks, and work becomes meaningful. It requires leaders to do the work they are uniquely positioned to do but to release to the community work that can be better done at the edges.
In the little supporter-owned soccer club I am a part of we do this but having our core leadership care for the fiduciary and technical responsibilities or the club and the rest of us live by the principles of “Assume your talents are needed, and proceed until apprehended.” In this way we activate community and true ownership over what we are doing.
And speaking of polarities…
This kind of things means that polarities abound: centralized control and distributed responsibility; continuity of tradition and new responses to emerging conditions; maintaining fiduciary obligations while stretching beyond; focus on the core external offering and building interior connections and development. Every planning process I have been involved in this year seems to hang on one or more of these polarities. Often the conversations about need and purpose start with an acknowledgement that both sides of the polarity are needed and the challenge is to lean into the skills and talent we have to do both. As contextual uncertainty has increased, our clients seem more willing to wrestle with these polarities rather than simply seeing their current conditions as a problem to be solved.
As always, we need to be thoughtful about how we think about change.
We are living in a world which seems to be revelling in ignorance about complexity. Every problem now seems to have a simple answer, with predictable and brutal results. We are fed this line in our civic conversations too, organizational realities and personal lives too. Social media algorithms have shaped our ideas about what is happening in the world and what we should do about it. I think complexity literacy is more important than ever. Just being able to think about the different kinds of change out there TOGETHER helps us to make sense of things in a more useful way and in a way that builds more relationships and therefore more resilience. Some of my go to frameworks for helping folks understand how change happens, the Cynefin framework and the Two Loops framework, continue to be extremely useful for helping people describe the spaces they are in, and chaordic planning has stood the test of time for collaboratively designing responses to these kinds of conditions.
AI is helping us delude ourselves into believing that we don’t need craft, or the ability to confront uncertainty with relationality.
It used to be fairly common that a client would discover that I was a facilitator and hand me an agenda and ask me to facilitate it. Its the reason I wrote the chaordic stepping stones guide in the first places, so that we could explore the possibility space together and design something that was fit to needs instead of simply rolling out a best practice. This year was the first time I received agendas generated by ChatGPT and asked to facilitate those. It took me a moment to figure this out, but I think that many people are probably asking their favourite large language model to give them an agenda for a two day strategic planning process. We are witnessing a massive cultural crises stemming from the destruction of craft across all the arts including music, writing, visual arts and process arts. Designing and facilitating participatory work is a craft. the two go hand in hand. One would never give an accomplished artist a paint-by-numbers set and ask them to use their technique to fill it out the way one wanted. Or hand a musician a piece of music to play that has notes in it, but no sense of development, harmony or rhythm.
Artificial intelligence is excellent at giving one the impression that the uncertainty they are confronting is easily solved. The tools that we currently have access to are extremely powerful aids to help with facilitation work, but they simply cannot replace the craft of relationship building and the time it takes to do work that generates meaningful contribution and ownership and sustainability. Facilitators and participatory leaders need to continue to develop the skills to work with groups of people in increasing complexity, within decreased time frames and a climate of austerity, polarization and uncertainty. Our chatbots are incapable of understanding what we know when we enter a space like that, but those of us that fear the ambiguity of these spaces can find ourselves retreating into the comforting certainty of a set of answers that come from what appears to be a divine and omniscient source. We just have to be careful not to lose the ability to sit together and figure something out. Keep watching sports like soccer and hockey. Keep making music with each other. Exercise the feeling and abilities that we have to make and undo things together without knowing where we are going or what might happen next. Move together, slightly slower than you think you should be, and seeking surprise along the way.
Stories and shared work are helpful.
I had a lovely call the other day with Cynthia Kurtz and Ashley Cooper are some folks Ashley is working with around using Participatory Narrative Inquiry to work with stories in communities and organizations. I continue to use that collection of methods for dealing with difficult and complex situations, including future scenario planning, because my experience has been that making sense of grounded stories together is the best way to engage with the uncertainty and opinionated conversation that passes for civic dialogue. I’m interested in methods and processes of civic deliberation and address conflict with process design. How can we bring difference into governance without confusing it with conflict? How can we work with conflict without confusing it with violence? This is not an area I have ever been comfortable in, but I have found that stories and circle are the best way to have a group of people dive in together on shared work that helps differences become resources and helps conflict become co-discovery. In watching the current kinds of conversations we are having in Canada around things like Aboriginal title, it’s clear that folks with opinions not rooted in actual experience have a hard time even beginning to understand issues, let alone seeing ways in which reconciling differences can be the work of a mature politics, and a potentially defining characteristic of the Canadian project.
So these are some of the things I have seen this year and I expect that these are threads that will continue to grow and bloom in the coming year too. I’m really interested what YOU have noticed?
A chonkster of a seal resting on logs at Wakes Cove
Happy Lunghnasa! Our last day out on the water. Caitlin’s observation is that being on a boat puts one deeply in touch with what living on the west coast is all about. Indeed until very recently all life on the coast was oriented to the sea. Historical names refer to sites accessible from the sea and — surprisingly to many settlers — islands don’t necessarily have names. Instead place like Valdes Island, where we anchored last night, are covered in names relating to bays and points and fishing spots and clam beds.
The waters around the north end of Valdes Island and the south shores of Gabriola Island are churning narrows full of rapids and upwellings and whirlpools when the tides squeeze through the narrow passages. That makes these waters rich in nutrients and full of seals and pigeon guillemots and kingfishers scooping up fish. The pier’s around here are covered in plume-nosed anemones and giant barnacles raking the currents for plankton. We are anchored in Wakes Cove which is connected to a provincial park. We walked yesterday through that park, on an old logging road that winds through coastal douglas-fir and arbutus and Garry oak forest until it reaches the gates of the Lyackson reserve lands. Along the eastern shore of the island there is a trail with views out across small rocky islets to the Strait of Georgia and an old midden site on the shore. Today we headed out through the narrows called Hwqethulhp in Hul’q’umi’num on our way to Nanaimo harbour. This passage was traditionally a place for the harvest of herring roe in the spring and oceanspray wood which is used for bows and other tools, including herring rakes. The passage marks the boundary between the Hul’q’umi’num speaking tribes and Snuneymuxw. Outside of Gabriola Island we came across four humpbacks feeding in the Strait.
Here are a couple of blog posts with useful questions and principles. Dan Oestreich shares some guidelines for giving and receiving feedback in the context of a more durable relationship. Lynn Rasmussen offers some questions to ask to see a system you are a part of a little more clearly.
I’ll never get tired of promoting RSS as a way to read blogs. Molly White provides a good introduction to RSS here. My own blog publishes an RSS feed and you can subscribe to the blog by email as well (it’s not a newsletter) and receive featured posts that I send to subscribers.
Richard Wagamese, from What Comes From Spirit:
True silence is more than just not talking. It’s responding to that deep inner yearning I carry to feel myself alive, to exist beyond my thinking, to live beyond worry and frustration. True silence is calm being. True silence is appreciating the moment for the moment. Every breath a connection to my life force, my essence. It’s the grandest music I have ever heard.
Richard Wagamese is the John O Donohue of Canada. In many ways.
“You can’t spreadsheet your way out of injustice” writes Coty Poynter in the Non-Profit Quarterly. This is a critical set of observations about how the neo-liberalisation of the non-profit world has undermined its ability to create lasting and participatory initiatives all in the name of accountability. I am struck by the way that the inappropriate measurement of “impact” and other things is itself never factored in to why initiatives fail. Jara Dean Coffey’s Equitable Evaluation Framework helps to address this.