Please consider joining myself, Toke Moeller, Sera Thompson, Tim Merry, Vanessa Reid and Stephani McCallum and Richard Delaney from the Canadian Institute for Public Engagement as we host an Art of Hosting training in the Gatineau Hills just north of Ottawa, Ont. We will be there March 5-8 exploring design, facilitation and harvesting from conversations that matter. You can find the full invitation at the Art Of Hosting website.
One of the key skills in deliberative dialogue is figuring out what we are, together. This is often called “co-sensing” or “feeling into the collective field.” There are many ways to talk about but the practice is on the one hand tricky and subtle, and on the other, blazingly obvious. In general, in North America and especially among groups of people that are actively engaged in questions about co-sening the collective field, a speech pattern I have notcied goes something like this: I feel that we need to… My thoughts are that we should… I just throw this out there …
Fresh on the heels of a gathering I co-hosted here on Bowen Island this week, I have begun a year long research project to look at how hosting, facilitating and convening conversations can help shift people, organizations and communities to new levels of awareness, work and changemaking in their worlds. Posts here that relate to this research project are tagged with “CoHo” which is one of things some of us are calling this initiative. It is a contraction of “Council of Hosts” which is how we gathered and constituted ourselves last week. As a Council – a term that refers …
I am pleased to announce the release of a small book I have been working on for the last three years. It is called “The Tao of Holding Space” and it is a collection of interpretations of the 81 short chapters of the Chinese classic Tao te Ching as they apply to my experience of holding space. I started this book three years ago, when I began noting parallels between Lao Tzu’s words and my experience of leadership, facilitation and living in Open Space, something many of us have done. In some ways this book chronicles the essence of my …
At the Open Space List, there has been an interesting little discussion about the evolution of Open Space Technology. Michael weighed in with a lovely observation and then Harrison Owen himself summed it all up: Michael You said, ” i would say that i think there is *definitely* a next generation of ost… and another and another… but it’s not the *process* that’s changing — it’s the facilitator!” I think that is a marvelous insight! It is certainly true for me. The essentials of OST, and the way I “do” them has changed so little in 20 years (with the …