As Marc’s conversation has unfolded at teh OSLIST, he dropped this lovely analogy about holding space into the mix today. Here’s what he does when people ask him why they pay him:
Usually I then refer to my memories living in West Africa. We mostly had a night watchman in our garden (in many ways the reason was also to give another person a job). They were always there, sitting under a tree, brewing tea and they were great to have a chat with – they knew everything that happened in the neighbourhood! But they never actually did something. And that was the point: you have a night watchmen BECAUSE YOU WANT THEM NOT HAVING ANYTHING TO DO and you have the great desire that they never ever will need to do anything – that was precisely the reason why you have (and paid!) them! They are “holding the night” – and your space to sleep free from worries. And you assume that their mere presence creates this safe space.That’s always how I understood – and explained – my role and the space that I hold as a facilitator. People (who have experienced African night watchmen) always understood…
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Back in April, I got to be a part of one of the best hosting experiences of my life when I joined Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Phil Cass and Tim Merry and a bunch of others in designing and hosting the 2008 Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference. The other day Erin Caricoffe, one of the staff members of the core team we worked with sent out this summary of where we are now:
By all shared accounts, the 2008 Food and Society Gathering for Good Food was a success, meeting planning Team goals of providing a relevant, inclusive, and highly participative event, and in the larger, movement-wide goals of defining where our work currently stands, and where it must go to collaboratively progress towards a healthy, green, fair, and affordable food system for all people.
To help weave our work into the national consciousness, we posed hard questions of self-definition, movement-wide strategic thinking, and personal responsibility within the conference framework. Our speakers supported these questions, challenging participants to be inspired towards change and confident in furthering it. Thoughtfully crafted Learning Journeys enabled many to step beyond their desk-bound days to re-examine and experience the shared core of our work. The technologies of Open Space, Good Food Village Square, and Good Food Cafes shifted us from prescribed idea sharing to permit a more personal stake in not mere talk, but work in the moment, of the moment, with long-term vision. We all took our turn asking attendees to participate more than they had before at such an event; thank you for your creative assistance in making this happen to such great effect.
The gathering intended to provide and ignite a crucible for systemic shift towards deeper, more meaningful connections that will sustain the good of our communities; towards co-creating the bigger picture of the Good Food Movement; and finally, towards experiential co-learning through conversations, visual harvesting, performance poetry, dedicated blogging, and sharing nourishing meals at the table. With defined intentions and shared commitments, our efforts to make it so were strengthened, and many goals met. We sincerely thank you for these efforts, your sharing of time and wisdom. And so shall our steps continue, following this collective lead. Together we will continue”
This gathering’s success is quite obviously an achievement earned through the hard work of many, of you: Planning Team members and our talented core of Art of Hosting facilitators, speakers who came from different locales and different backgrounds, authors who overturn the rocks that drive our knowledge, the maverick leaders who embraced ad hoc strategic planning in leading Good Food Village Square Sessions, the many persevering Learning Journey hosts who gave extra effort in order to connect with dozens of visitors, the hard-working Wild Horse Pass Sheraton crew, and last, but not at all least, the welcoming community of Native American generations who graciously hosted us at a most appropriate and inspired location, allowing authentic, challenging work to take place.
We, the Good Food Movement, are a living, breathing model of diversity, heart, and cooperative engagement for common good. Thank you for your efforts in helping us all realize this, and challenging us to maintain our necessary work!
This work was truly the next level of conference design for us, a completely participatory and challenging gathering and I’m so take with Erin’s description of what happened there.
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On the OSLIST, Marc Steinlin posed a few questions that I took a stab at answering:
What means “holding space”? What is the function, if demonstrably one can do without?
The $100,000 question! Several of us over the years have written things on it (I wrote a whole book trying to understand it) but it is an elusive process. And I think it changes with the scale and size of the group AND most importantly with the pre-existing depth of their own relationship.
If I was to generalize I would say that holding space means helping the group find its highest potential realized. For some groups, in some contexts this might be a very controlling kind of thing and for other groups not so much. In my expereince where there is a deep underlying and pre-existing architecture of relationships and collaboration, there is very little an individual can do to control the outcome, so getting out of the way seems the best option. Lately I’m learning a lot about working with fields of learners or people engaged in large scale and longer term change. What I’m learning is that it takes a field to hold a field, as my late friend Finn Voldtofte once said. In other words, at large levels of scale within organizations or communities, the act of holding space is actually all about attending to the relationships of the group of people that are holding the deepest intention for the work. In an organizational development context this means that the core team spends a great deal of time working on its own relationships and in so doing, they are able to hold space for the bigger field of learning.
And then having said all of that, I think there is an art to intuitively knowing how much or how little to “hold.”
Or is it really that the group as a whole can hold space (which seemed to be the case)? Any group?
Yes a group can hold its own space, but not any group. My hunch is that we can let go into groups like this when there is at least a minimal form of relationship in place. How much or how little is immeasureable, but you can sense whether a group has that capacity or potential if you let go of your expectations for the role of facilitator.
Why do we really need any facilitator throughout the event?
I am working a lot these days with the chaordic path, the idea that there is a way forward if we dance between chaos and order. In that respect I think the facilitator can play a valuable role in brining minimal elegant structure to chaos so that the conditions for self-organization might be met. At it’s most basic level, this structure looks like or is an invitation, a calling question that taps passions and responsibility Once passion and responsibility are tapped, the group can look after itself.
And consequently under which conditions can we dispense with it?
Most of our lives are spent without facilitators helping us be around other people. We can learn a lot from those situations. If you engage in a little appreciative inquiry project on your own life, you might remember stories about times in your life when you experienced great strides without a facilitator.and then harvest the key conditions from those stories.
What is the risk? Can this go totally wrong?
The risk is always that it won’t work, that a group won’t discover its highest potential. And although whatever happens is the only thing that could have (and that means you need to pay attention to the space to hold at the outset), if there is much at stake and the group finds itself unable to work without some form and leadership, the stake will be lost, as will the opportunity. But in complex living systems, there is no such thing as totally wrong anyway – everything that happens is food for everything else. If however you have an expectation that there is a right and a wrong result, there is always the risk that a group might acheive the wrong result.
In my experience, it pays to create the conditions in which the host team and the group itself understands this approach to complex systems and self organization. so that you are operating with a learning environment rather than a right/wrong dichotomy.
That’s the extent of my thinking this morning.
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Day three at Shambhala and I’m humming. The artists staged what I heard was an incredible improvisational performance today that took the idea of being together in a field to a whole new level. I was in a conversation with some Art of Hosting mates at the time that was alos about fields and we were cracking open some deep learning about the ways in which we work together as friends, but the upshot was the same.
At the faculty retreat last weekend I sat in with the artists and had a conversation that was about the kind of work that art makes possible. I posited the assumption that fields cannot be created without art, an assumption we explored both in conversation and with an improvisational piece. Today one of the artists in that conversation, Wendy Morris, told me that one of her takes on the rock balancing thing was that the rocks make visible the very fine lines of balance. In the same way, art can illuminate the fine and subtle dynamics in systems and in seeing them crystalized with beauty another level of awareness and possibility becomes visible. This is certainly true in my expereince using poetry and graphic recording to harvest meaning from conversational process.
I am learning this week to enter deeply into the practice of “process artist” and to invite other who might be deep practitioners of conversational arts to explore other forms as well and integrate it with their practice. It’s simply a way of seeing differently, and sense making in a way that invites collaborative beauty.
As a taste, my rock balancing student, Jean-Sebastien posted lovely video today which is worth a look – and yes this means you Thomas.
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So it’s been more than thirty days that I have been on my 30 day learning journey, but here is a harvest from some significant conversations. Consider this the tender early sproing greens. There is more to follow.
I began this learning journey leaning into thinking about what role I can play in taking change to scale. My reasons for this inquiry have to do with the fact that I am increasingly working with systems, beyond organizations and beyond groups. Also, some of us in the Art of Hosting community and the Berkana Institute are deep in this inquiry as well, wondering how we extend to influencing systems.
Two major insights have come to me this past month. First, working with my deep friends Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Phil Cass and Tim Merry on the Food and Society conference in Phoenix back in April we found ourselves very much playing at various levels of scale. This was a gathering of the Good Food Movement, and our intention as designers and process artists was to create a container in which the movement could experience itself as a movement, as a learning community working towards shifting a large food system. We were brought in not just to work with the conference as facilitators, but to help build a field among the hosting team and the organizations involved to do this work of having the movement expereince itself. For a number of years, Kellogg has had an intention to shift the percentage of healthy, fair, affordable and green food from 2% to 10% of the total amount of food in the American system. It is the Good Food Movement, such as it is, that is doing this work.
Moving from pioneers to systems of influence.
On the final day of the conference we had Debbie Frieze and Tom Hurley share the Berkana perspective on taking change to scale. Debbie and Meg Wheatley cracked a very simple model, called the “Lifecycle of Emergence” of doing this that names four phases in evolving a system of influence. First, pioneers in an emerging system give themselves a NAME which makes it much easier to find one another. Before the local food movement started to take hold there was no name for the people that were running farmers markets, creating community shared agriculture, and promoting local menus. Through the 1990s, a movement sprang up, which we now know as the local food movement (and some people are becoming increasingly “locavores,” promoting 100 mile diets and such). Once a network of practitioners is named it can find itself and begin to CONNECT.
Humberto Maturana is quoted as saying that the way to make a system more healthy is to connect it to more of itself. In this model of emergent scale, connecting is how the network emerges. Think of all the networks that have propagated through web technology since blogging began a new practice of naming, which Google helps along by making it easy to find one another. Networks themselves are useful, but it is only when they deepen to communities of practice, do they begin to exert influence. Community of practice form when people NOURISH networks, by offering to a shared centre for example. A network is relationship neutral, a community has a quality of relationship that takes it to another level. At this level we are able to do work together, support each other and create opportunities for new things to happen, born in the social space of collaboration.
As communities of practice do more and more, and they tell their stories and ILLUMINATE their work, they become systems of influence. A system of influence is able to do more than a community of practice, and it strikes me that it is less intentional. There are however, a set of practices that are useful for journeying through this ever scaling world. Tom Hurley spoke to those at the Food and Society conference, and Toke, Monica and I have been thinking about them from the perspective of what Hosting practice has to offer.
The journey of the practitioner at increasing levels of scale
As people move from facilitation to organizational development and beyond, I think there are five kind of archetypal levels on which facilitators or hosting practitioners work. There is a strong correlation between our own learning journey and through the ways in which works moves to scale. Of course there are many ways that people come to the work of large sclae change, through management, activism, advocacy, spiritual tradition and systemic analytics. he journey I am describing here is the one I am on and seems widely shared by people who learn about organizations and systems by first working with groups.
So this journey can be summarized by five basic archetypal fields. in short these are individual, one on one, group, organization, system.
In many Art of Hosting retreats we talk about hosting oneself. This basically means being in active inquiry with oneself. A thirty day learning journey is one way of hosting oneself, as is Byron Katie’s work, Otto Scharmer’s Presencing and Angeles Arrien’s Four Fold Way. These are all ways of conversing with oneself, staying open and in inquiry and noticing what is alive.
When we bring ourselves from this space into conversational space, we show up present and open and able to see new things emerging, even in small one on one conversations. We enter these conversations as open listeners, which is what Adam Kahane’s work has been about. To enter a social space as a listener is to attend to what could be born in the possibility of open social space. This is the beginning of a journey that takes us to a different place than if we show up talking.
The next level, the level of hosting the group, is the first experience we have of letting go. If we host as listeners, we begin to cultivate the practice of holding space, which is fundamentally different from showing up in a group as a directive, authoritarian presence. The host – the one who can hold space – practices a form of leadership that is able to attend to the emergent, exactly the capacity that is needed to see how work can scale. As we move through these levels we begin to let go more and more into these social spaces, while staying very rooted and present to our own self.
Once we have worked with groups, a consciousness emerges that asks the question about whether what we know about groups can apply to organizations. Harrison Owen made this leap with his Inspired Organization, seeing the scaling up from one Open Space meeting to a way of working together. Michael Herman did the same with the Inviting Organization. The Appreciative Inquiry world seeks to apply this worldview to asset-based community development and positive organizational scholarship. We start seeing that the things we know about self-organization, emergence and collaborative creativity can actually be encoded into organizational structures. Chaordic design becomes possible.
Finally there comes a time when we begin to ask if large systems can operate this way, and of course many do. Harrison points to the work of Stuart Kaufman who has studied self-organization for decades as evidence that Open Space is the operating system of the universe. Juanita Brown and David Isaacs and the World Cafe community are exploring the implications for conversational leadership and “the world as cafe.” Systems CAN and DO operate according to these principles, but at the level of the practitioner, we fall further and further away from controlling outcomes.
Instead, what we need to learn to do is to give up entirely to “the field.” My friend Monica has been saying “only a field can hold a field” and this is our experience from the Food and Society conference. We are still holding space for the emergent results of the Food and Society gathering, and we are finding it impossible to do this except in a field of practitioners. No one person is capable of this work alone.
And so our journey comes to this: host oneself into inquiry, listen with others, host conversations that matter, co-create organizations together, and participate in the field that can host the field, doing work that is greater than any one person can do. This is how we can show up in initiatives that begin to scale quickly to the level of systems of influence. Control will act as a brake on the acceleration of scale, letting go propels it forward.
There is a saying in the Tao te Ching: know the male, but keep to the female. In other words, know power and creativity, and keep to the receptive and open. Know creation, be open to emergence. This small phrase sums up everything I have been learning about how to practice to create shift. If you want to change the world you have to be able to disappear into the field that is doing the work without losing your capabilities, your contributions and your gifts and without being tied to your personal vision for what the shift will be.