This week I was hosting at a moderately sized conference in Victoria BC with 100 regional public sector union members. The purpose of the gathering was to increase the number of active members and to inspire members to engage and improve local communities. These union members all work in the public service and so they have a close ear to the ground on the issues facing communities from homelessness to addictions to environmental degradation to service levels in health and education. Many of them took public service jobs in the first place because they are caring and committed people, intent on making a better world, especially for the most vulnerable.
This is the fourth year we have done this conference, and the structure has remained pretty much the same over the past four years. The first evening there is a keynote from the union president (who then stays and participates through the whole two days) and a special speaker, in this case a well-known progressive lawyer who is currently running for office in a local federal by-election. That is usually followed by a plenary panel, which this year featured some provincial politicians from the labour movement and the current legislature and a journalist.
Day two begins with morning workshops on community organizing. in the afternoon we begin with a World Cafe. This year we took the Cafe through the following flow:
- Two rounds on the question of “What does all of this inspiration mean for my own community activism?”
- One round on the question “what do I still need to learn to deepen my activism?” The harvest from that round was a post it note from each participant outlining some of their learning needs, which union staff will use to help support the members with resources and materials.
- Following that round I invited participants to reflect on an area of focus for their activism, such as homelessness, environment, youth engagement and so on. Participants wrote their focus on the blank side of their name tags and then milled around the room and found others who shared those areas of focus. We ended up with about 12 groups composed of people from across the region who didn’t know each other and who were interested in working in the same issue area.
- Using this network we next invited the participants to consider the question “What are some of the key strategic actions we can take in this sector?” The harvest from this was simply to inspire and connect each other in preparation for the next day’s work.
That was the end of our days work. A quick poll of the room showed that perhaps 20 people had some ideas for action that were considering.
This morning was devoted to a ProAction Cafe. We had 21 tables in the room and I opened up the marketplace. It took about 20 minutes for 21 hosts to come forward and for everyone to get settled. From there we followed a standard ProAction Cafe format. During the reflection period, when participants are given a break and hosts are able to take a breath and make sense of all the advice we heard, three people all working on engagement strategies got together to compare notes. This helped them a lot before the fourth round as they were able to point to work the others were doing. The action networks were already taking shape!
We finished in just under 2.5 hours. In previous years we ran Open Space meetings on the last morning, but this year the shift in format gave a more concrete set of actions and surfaced more leadership in the room. With a quarter of the room engaged as hosts, we topped the average 20% of the room from previous years using Open Space. ProAction Cafe, used at the end of a conference to generate and develop concrete actions is so far the best process in my practice for getting good ideas out of the room with passion, precision and participation.
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Heard a great story today.
I’m at a conference of union activists who are working to build their activist muscles up and do work in communities. One of the presenters here is Jason Sidener, who I’ve enjoyed spending a couple of hours with. Jason is the Member Mobilization Coordinator for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). he is abased in Madison, Wisconsin and played a key organizing role in the upheavals there in 2011 when public sector unions successfully stood up to Governer Scott Walker’s anti union agenda.
Jason told a story today about some of the work he did long before that high profile action. He was brought up on a farm, a conservative rural young man who was raised Republican and came from a Republican family. He changed as he grew up, and when he started working for the union he discovered that in the AFSCME about a third of the members are Republicans. They like their guns, they are social conservatives and they don’t trust outsiders.
Jason noticed that at union meetings and conventions, these conservatives, who nevertheless were supporters of fair wages and benefits for public sector workers, often found themselves silenced, ostracized and marginalized. The temptation is to argue with conservative union members and try to convince them that their politics are wrong. But Jason took another approach. He saw that the split between conservative and progressive members was dangerous to the unity of the union, so he set about creating a Conservative caucus within the union, where Conservative members could have a safe place to discuss their ideas.
Although counter intuitive, this initiative paid dividends when Republican Scott Walker tried to pass his radical legislation last year. Many of the members of the Conservative caucus started coming to Jason saying “take me off that list.” They were realizing that the guy they had elected was no friend of theirs after all. They appreciated the Conservative caucus but saw that in this case, the bigger movement was more important.
I was struck by Jason’s unfettered approach to this work. His confidence in the right thing to do, his commitment to inclusion and his presence of mind to care for the bigger movement is inspiring.
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I have used Open Space in almost every way conceivable and what Lisa Heft wrote on the OSLIST today about using it with traditional conferences strikes home. This is good wisdom, friends:
My experience is that – if doing a mix of ‘traditional’ format conference and Open Space – the most ideal situation is traditional, (recreation day before or after that or after the whole conference) and then Open Space.
I have seen that if Open Space happens first – when there is the switch to traditional, participants feel uncomfortable and ‘edgy’ because they have tasted the power of self-organization and physically being able to move to what they need and find who they need – so they are not happy or focused sitting in an audience listening after that. If you do OS as the last day (or whatever) then there are two extra values of people being able to host conversations about what they are learning and exploring in the previous days of the conference as well as whatever your theme question / task will be. Nice integration and self-organized continuation of learning, networking, community. Plus, the close of the Open Space makes a very nice close for the conference – it really feels like reflection, comment, participant voice to close.
The most difficult thing I know is to start and stop Open Space / break it up within a conference – really, it destroys the reason for doing OS and completely changes what OS can do. When I am told that by a conference I simply switch to some other lovely interactive dialogue stuff – for example I will do World Cafes within a conference with themes that will help participants as they move through the arc of learning and the several days of the conference.
The other most difficult thing I know is to have OS at the same time as other things in a conference – because usually there is not a good, focused opening (for all participants who wish to join), arc of learning and thinking across time, and not a good sense of closure. So it all feels like a big room where conversations can happen but just like any other sort of coffee house environment, no reason to do Open Space. You could just as well give people signs to put on their tables to gather around a self-organized topic whenever they come into that room, if they like. No process or facilitator needed. (this is sometimes referred to as ‘Birds of a Feather’.)
Oh yes and I personally think that all formalities in a conference must be seriously considered – do 100% of the participants need to do that voting or decision, or is that for a small leadership group, do people really need a keynote speaker or is the wisdom in the group, are speeches really good for anyone other than the person speaking ;o) … do people walk away from conferences going ‘gee I loved that formal gala and it really changed how I do my work on Monday’ or do they get more from participant-driven co-learning – all things to consider when deciding on overall conference design
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One of the great pleasures of the weekend I just spent in San Francisco at the Applied Improv Network conference was hanging out with good friends, Caitlin Frost, Amanda Fenton (who is blogging up a storm these days), Viv McWaters and the inimitable Nancy White. While we were eating lunch one day, Nancy interviewed me on the subject of group sizes for a class she is teaching. Here is my off the cuff response:
If you want to see more thoughts on group sizes, I wrote a post on this a while back. See this as an invitation to practice and notice. No science was involved in the creation of these ideas!
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A light summer of digital production, but a few things are coming my way that have my attention. Today, it’s a chunk of an email from my friend Kathy Jourdain who is evolving into one of the premier Art of Hosting bloggers out there. We were in a group email conversation about safety and comfort and the hidden dynamics of groups, and Kathy’s reflection on the distinction between the unnamed and the unknown was this:
The first is this difference between the unnamed and the not knowing. The difference is something I feel or sense and am not sure I can articulate. In hosting work we often sit in the not knowing – not knowing what will happen next, sometimes the not knowing of what is happening in this moment. In ourselves, as we host ourselves, we know stillness will help bring us through the not knowing into clarity. In groups, holding the space and consciousness of the not knowing – which often looks like chaos and often is the groan zone – will host the group into the knowing or clarity that emerges. In both these cases, naming things also helps to bring clarity. There is a subtle difference though in the naming of what’s in or emerging from the not knowing (like when we name the groan zone for a group) than how I am understanding the unnamed although this is a bit more mystifying and maybe even mystical to me. The naming of things changes our relationship to whatever it is we have named. I’m just wondering if there is a whole stream of things/stuff/experiences that we can’t name, will always be unnamed and allowing it to be unnamed allows a different experience of it – and maybe that’s what I mean by a spiritual experience. And maybe mostly, in how I’m thinking about it, it happens in the silent places, the silent experiences. It happens in connection with the divine or connection to that which is greater than us – the experiences we have that are beyond words, individually and collectively.
I find this distinction immensely helpful. I seem to have a built in desire to name everything around me, and to label and identify what is happening, but sometimes, as Lao Tzu reminds us, what can be named is not often what is actually happening.
I have been working with many spiritual leaders lately in a variety of Churches around North America. One of these leaders pointed to this unnamable mystery by referencing a “heresy” he holds about the Eucharist, the ritual sacred meal that evokes the last supper Jesus Christ shared with his friends. My friend, who is a gourmet chef in addition to being an influential spiritual leader, said that his heresy is that the Eucharist is not about the elements – the bread and the wine – but instead about the unnamable moment that arises between close friends who have just shared a meal together, on the eve of the impending death of one of their closest comrades. That sense of an electric space between us, of a rich field of love and affection and togetherness is what Jesus was pointing to when he said “do this in remembrance of me.”
Confusing the elements with the mystery is a great way to drain a moment of that ineffable quality that makes the impossible possible. It is important to learn how to host this distinction and name what needs naming and leave the mystery alone.