Yesterday Ashley Cooper posted a question on the OSLIST about the enigmatic principle of “whatever happens is only thing that could have:
Feeling those gathered in San Francisco, swimming in the hearty open space soup, I find a myself pondering a topic I would host if I were there… a topic I’d love to have a conversation around.
I’m curious about the wording of the principle, “what ever happens is the only thing that could have”. I know John Engle brought this question up in the past http://www.openspaceworld.org/news/2007/05/11/whatever-happens/ and I’m still curious about it.
I find that people sometimes use it as a block to reflection, a reason to not look back and learn from what didn’t happen because “whatever happens is the only thing that could have.” Yes, and…
I love the principle for the acceptance that it invites. And I struggle with it because there is a sense of finality that it also invites (if you want to let yourself go there). We did what we did and that’s, that. Which is true… And…
I appreciate how in Haiti they are playing with What Happens is what happens – learn and move forward. I like the learn and keep moving part.
Are there other ways that people phrase this principle? How do you invite the spirit of acceptance and invitations to be with what is alive and happening in the moment, while also inviting reflection and learning from what has and has not emerged?
If anyone at WOSonOS is reading this and you find this conversation springing up in your face to face time, please do share your harvest with us. I’m contemplating posting a skype session tomorrow morning on this topic… and I’ve not yet been able to commit myself to being inside at the computer tomorrow morning!!
I put the question to a few folks here and recorded about a half hour of their answers. Wisdom follows from Larry Peterson, Michael Cook, Viv McWaters, Peggy Holman, Susan Kerr, Michael Pannwitz, David Barnes, Jeff Aitken, Lisa Heft, Aine Corrigan-Frost, Alan Stewart, Phelim McDermott, Elwin Guild, John Engle and Brian Bainbridge, You can listen to the interviews here:
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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.