Last year in Slovenia, a group of Art of Hosting practitioners gatherd for a week at a well loved 17th century manor to be together. I suppose you could call it a “conference” but we all called it a “Learning Village.” And it was a learning village. The agenda we set was for a five day Open Space gathering. there was music and local wine drinking and a learning journey on the land, and the teenagers cleaned out an old stone chapel that hadn’t been dusted for 300 years. We talked about our work, did tai chi and aikido, played football and made art. Our kids fell in love and broke up!
It was a village, and there was tons of learning. And no action plans, no next steps, no commitments, no necessary reports. A few months later there was a harvest document lovingly stewarded by a few people. This is all appropriate and good.
And sometimes, there are gatherings where next steps and action plans are important and necessary and are the reason why we are gathering. But always? No.
I have begun to notice that when I see conference agendas with “next steps and action plans” attached to them (and especially attached to the end of the last day when everyone is tired and most people have left), I become sad. Actually and emotionally a little sad. i think it is because doing this unconsciously reduces the pure experience of being together and intenstly learning into something “productive” in order to justify doing it.
So please, think really carefully about whether or not you gathering needs action steps, especially if you are planning a conference where the purpose is for people to simply be together learning and connecting. That alone is significant action. Do we really need to justify it any further?
A couple of days ago I was invited by Transition US to discuss the Cynefin framework and what it means to work with complexity in a one hour teleconference. The recording of that call is now available if you’d like to listen in.
The Groups Works pattern lamnguage deck is now available for the iOS mobile platform. You can download the app here: Group Works for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store. Or you can also run an Infinite Canvas on your iPad as well. Learn more here.
The Group Works Deck team has released these apps as a protoyping exercise and wants feedback on how people are using them.
My initial assessment is that the do a terrific job of reproducing the deck with the added benefit of have related patterns hyperlinked within the cards themselves. What I’d like to see is a link on each card to the underlying pattern. I think the patterns in this project are very important because they are the source of the card titles, images and desciptions and although the level of detail varies at the moment in teh pattern language, this information is very important. Having access to it on the app would be a huge resource.
Download the apps for yourself, or get a copy of the deck itself, a beautiful tactile design tool for group process facilitation.
There is no way you can learn the art of facilitation, the art of hosting, by simply coming to a workshop. It happens from time to time that people show up for a three day workshop and expect that at the end they will be competent hosts of groups process in any situation. To get good at arts you have to practice.
Last week in Montreal, I saw 120 people come to an Art of Hosting with an overwhelming desire to practice. The invitation to them was to attend if they were wanting to develop and improve their practice. It made for an incredible experience. When people are invited to come to learn because they are ready to host, they are open wide to what is offered, not only by us as teachers, but more importantly by the group itself. This is an excellent ground from which to develop a practice of hosting, and the relationships that are formed are the critical supports for competency in that practice to unfold.
Somehow, the view of learning in the world has been confused with the kinds of quality control that is attached to manufacturing. We imagine that a learning experience will have specific achievable outcomes and that upon completing a course, we can be certified in the competency in which we have been trained. While this can be true for technical training, such as how to operate equipment, with things like art and strategy and leadership and communications and other practice based arts, the opposite is actually true. When I leave practice based learning events I recognize that I am a baby, just starting out, and with a lifetime of practice ahead of me. I can’t be certified to be competent, because there is no way to guarantee that I will be perfect. When we first begin to practice, we always make mistakes. Over a lifetime we develop our own styles and we get better at it.
Hosting is practice. The willingness to embrace it this way is the biggest indicator to me as to whether someone will eventually develop a competency in this art. Expertise is developed, not given or bought.
This afternoon, Toke Moeller and I are hosting a little session on Art of Hosting basics at a gathering for emerging indigenous leaders. We decided this afternoon to bring real design challenges into the room and we improvised this simple, simple design checklist. In some ways this is the simplest form of the chaordic stepping stones. Here’s how it works.
In my experience good participatory meetings result from good design and preparation. In this diagram the meeting itself is the last thing we design. First we design the bookends: Purpose on the one hand and harvest/action on the other hand. Once we know that, then we can develop an invitation and finally choose processes that bridge the two sides. The meeting itself therefore become the vehicle by which a group of people reach a harvest and wise action ground in a purpose and a deep need.
Purpose
What is the big purpose that we are trying to fulfill?
A meeting that has too small a purpose has no life in it. It just seems to be a mundane thing done for it’s own sake. To design creatively, keep purpose at the centre and ensure that everything you do is aligned with that.
Harvest
What do you want to harvest?
– in our hands ( tangible)?
– in our hearts ( intangible)?
Not every meeting needs to have a report and an action plan, but every meeting does have a harvest. This question is the strategic conversation that helps us focus our time together. We need to think about the shape of the harvest we can hold in our hands (reports, photos, videos, sculptures…) and those we hold in our hearts (togetherness, team spirit, clarity, passion…).
Wise action
How will we make action happen?
– who will help us tune in to the reality of the situation?
How will you keep people together?
It is easy to make a list of to do’s at the end of a meeting and feel like something has been accomplished, but that is a naive approach to change. If action is required get really clear about who needs to be involved to make it happen. Think about who enables action or who can stop it and what resources are required. And if the resources aren’t available or accessible, then make a different action plan.
Also, never forget to make a plan for how people will stay together. If sustainability is important, then strong relationships are important. Building a process that doesn’t enhance relationships does not contribute to sustainability.
Invitation –
What is the inspiring question that will bring people together?
How will we invite people so they know they are needed?
Good participatory gatherings depend on the quality of the invitation. A lazy invitation attracts confused participants. A clear and powerful invitation accompanied by a powerful personal invitation gets participants who are ready and eager for the work. Invitation is a lot of work. It SHOULD be a lot of work. A good invitation process makes the meeting easy.
Meeting
What will you do to make the meeting creative and powerful?
Once we know all of this we can choose a meeting process that helps move from purpose to wise action. We can use pre-existing processes like Open Space or World Cafe or design new ones particular to our needs. Today we are using the group pattern language card deck to inspire creative thinking about meeting design.
If we really want to create a new normal, we shouldn’t settle any longer for boring meetings. If the processes we are using aren’t serving us, or helping us crack the deepest questions that confound us, then we should stop using them and start being more creative and powerful.
This little tool has the feeling of a portable, quick and dirty design checklist, that allows core teams and process designers to get working pretty quickly. Use it and let me know what you learn.