Some upcoming learning opportunities in the British Columbia and Washington state areas…
News from my dear friend Peggy Holman that she and Steve Cato are offering their Appreiciative Inquiry facilitation training on February 1-3, and it’s not too late to register.
Toke Moeller is hosting a FlowGame at Aldermarsh on Whidbey Island in the middle of March, after which we are penciling in an Art of Hosting primarily with Aboriginal youth, but open to the public as well on Vancouver Island.
Michael Herman and I will be offering a retreat to support practices for Open Space faiclitation in April, during the week of April 17th here on Bowen Island. We’re almost ready to make a formal announcement and invitation, but if you’d like more details leve a comment or send me and email.
And tonight, Christina Baldwin is reading from her new book Storycatcher: Making Sense of our Lives Through the Power and Practice of Story at Ayurveda in Vancouver at 3636 West 4th Ave. from 6-8pm. That event is free, so if you’re in the area you shouldn’t miss the chance to hear Christina read. I might get down to that if I get a chance.
So with all this good hosting learning going on, here is a great hosting song to add to the playlist:
A friend sent me a piece called “There has to be a Big Crises” by Michael Kane about what it will take for Americans (and I would say Canadians too) to wake up to Peak Oil. The article paints a disparaging picture about the ability of North American leadership to wake up to the creeping decline – James Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency” – before it’s too late.
Having spent the past two weeks in the States, and the better part of next week there too, I agree that the signs are not good. In Maui the radio is filled with ads for loan companies and car dealerships aiming to finance or sell you the “sharpest looking trucks and SUV’s on this Island.” Even as Americans are dying for hegemony in the Middle East, as the country bankrupts itself for a war to secure oil, conservation seems the last thing on the minds of the mainstream. The American way of life keeps chugging along, hastening the decline rather than seeking to stave it off.
So perhaps it will take a crises to change minds, but if that’s the case, I don’t like America’s chances at the moment. Katrina was a wake up call, if ever there was one, for how America might handle a big crises, and it didn’t fare too well. One of the big things that was missing was an active community sector that was able to take care of itself. The centralization of FEMA, the States and the local government was a bottle neck for action, and eventually the stories of real help and coping came from people that took it into their own hands to steal buses, distribute food care for children and tend to the sick and elderly.
That was in contrast to the way in which parts of Sri Lanka survived the tsunami last year. In two talks (mp3s at audiodharma.org), Joanna Macy told the story of Sarvodaya, a Buddhist organization that cultivates a spiritual practice of giving and community building called Sharmadana. The lessons learned from how Sarvodaya dealt with the tsunami include the fact that biggest way they had prepared was simply but cultivating these practices over years and years of work. When the tsunami struck, they simply went to work as usual, able to cope with the massive demands on organizers because of their training and practice.
I have spoken with David Korten and others about this, and all agree that practice of community is the thing that will mitigate the inevitable emergency. As facilitators this can become our prime responsibility. After Katrina hit, Peggy Holman, Tom Atlee, Mark Jones and I convened a series of conversations with leaders in the dialogue and deliberation community to see what could be done about helping people in the Gulf Coast implement wise action. Since then, a larger group of people have done all kinds of work down there, using conversation cafes, appreciative inquiry and other processes to bring the community into a space where it can participate in rebuilding its own future.
America in particular has a grand tradition of helping in community. Traditionally Americans helped each other out when times were hard, raised barns together, shared food with one another, created great institutions of philanthropy, charity and care. But in the last century these quaint customs were sacrificed as the country became more urbanized and as a result, there is a loss of knowledge about what it’s like to live in community. Suburbs and exurbs and car and consumer culture do not contribute to this community. Mega churches and gated communities are examples of a “turning in” to help, not “turning out” to lend a hand. The fragmented and insular nature of American (and Canadian) urban and suburban life is the Achilles heel of dealing with crises that the leadership says is coming.
So let’s not wish for this crises before its time, and let’s not expect the leadership to be prepared. Anyone who works in community, be they helpers, facilitators, or others has a treasure to offer, and that is to seed and practice the art of community now. Whether you invite people to come together to build something, play music, feed people, improve things or just talk and muse upon things, these practices are the key to communities surviving. Cultivate intimate connections and community locally RIGHT NOW and then let us turn together to face the crises. By then, as the Sarvodaya teachers tell us, we’ll be able to handle it.
I was in a meeting yesterday, a policy consultation actually, which went quite well. As expectations are sometimes low for these types of meetings, and ours came off as a pretty good time, I spent some time thinking about how we made it work.
This was a very typical kind of policy consultation. Government creates a policy, in concert many others, and checks back with the “stakeholderss” (a term I loathe) as to where we should go from here. In this particular consultation, history has made relations between the government and the participants particularly rocky. Consultations are often characterized by lots of yelling, demands and disrespectful dynamics at meetings, mutual distrust and unchecked assumptions and misperceptions on all sides. In addition, information is very difficult to communicate and there are often several levels of language and understanding in the room. So all told, very complex, lots of passion, lots of urgency.
Perfect conditions to make something happen.
My client wanted a very standard type of meeting, with presentations of four aspects of the policy and open discussion from the group of 50 or so participants. It was a tight agenda, but we had an hour for each of four or so presentations and feedback. I felt we could work with that, if we got the right questions. We spent time in the pre-meeting getting to the heart of the matter and we recast the consultation as more of an intelligence gathering or learning process. Being open to the possibility that the participants would be interested in helping craft the policy helped to overcome defensiveness. There was nothing to defend. We were simply open, curious and learning and building together.
By and large, that is how it came off: presentations were collegial, feedback was cynical but constructive. Accusatory questions came forward, but we had a container created that allowed us to turn those questions around and seek out the underlying heart of the matter. There were rants and speeches, but we heard people and extracted the heart of what they had to say.
So upon reflection, here are some things we did that made the day flow relatively well:
- Be prepared and curious. Come into the meeting room curious. Be curious about the people who are there, about how the day will go. Genuinely want to find out stuff, get interested in the discussions and ask stupid questions. Maintaining a role of respectful curiosity, grounded in good preparation will allow you to be detached enough to see the possibilities as they unfold over the day.
- Acknowledge that the heart speaks truth. People that care deeply about an issue will become quite emotional if they see that something bad is going to happen to that issue. They will speak out in emotional ways. It is a true reaction. You can’t lie when that kind of passion arises. So hear the truth, acknowledge that what they care about is real, and that it needs to be heard. It’s important that the client know that there is a real issue at the heart of the intervention.
- Reflect what is being said. All those communications courses where you practised active listening and reflected back what you heard felt contrived, right? Well, in practice it isn’t contrived – it actually works. When people say something, especially in a situation where they are “speaking truth to power” the most significant act you can do is to repeat what they said. To feel heard is a powerful salve. To BE heard is the goal of good consultation. So reflect back and ask questions for clarification or to test out a theory that what you have just heard connects to something that someone else said earlier. Then you are really engaged and your interlocutor knows it too.
- Build wholeness and sense the emerging story. There is nothing more frustrating than a consultation that is simply a set of speeches. Encourage people to connect their thinking with what has come before. As a facilitator listen for the emerging story and see how people are connecting their comments to that story. At the end of the day it will mean that you have something truly valuable, much more so than a collection of comments that stand alone and make no sense. Wholeness should be the goal. That is what makes consultation useful.
- Do not be attached to anything other than the container. Your client might have spent years working on the thing that is being ripped to pieces in front of them, but that is not your concern. If it is out there for feedback, you have to let the feedback come. As a facilitator, pay attention to the container, and ensure that as the piece is being ripped up that it is done so respectfully and constructively. Don’t let people get away with being “terrorists” in a meeting. Passion bounded by responsibility, leading to wholeness is what you are after. If there is anger, ask about what might be done to move forward. If there are dismissive comments, challenge them and invite people to share the alternative. Building and holding a well formed container, one that, as Williams Isaacs says, hold safety, possibility and energy, is your job.
- Coach, affirm and soothe. Your client might be raw before, during or after a difficult gathering. Coach them to listen and see what is being said, and help them to understand that it isn’t personal. And if it is personal, and there was a reason, get really honest with the personal behaviour that triggered the attack and help to move forward. Affirm their work, and help them to see that the people who gave time to provide feedback, in whatever form, are committed to what is happening, and as such, they are actually allies. It’s about seeing differently.
- Be honest. There is no faster way to get people angry than to lie to them. When bullshit detectors go off, the reaction comes fast and furious. As a facilitator I have ethical standards for working in these kinds of meetings. If something is a done deal and the consultation is just window dressing, I won’t do that job. If a client betrays the confidence or the trust that has been built with a group, in an ongoing process, I will quit the job. Honesty and trust are the only things you need to move past difficult public meetings. It is surprising how many people choose to go the other way, into deceit and mistrust.
- Ask real questions. Get really clear on what you want from people and ask them real questions. When folks provide feedback, probe with real questions that are aimed at drawing the conversation forward into something bigger. Real questions are questions with which something is at stake. If you can get your client to say “we really don’t know and your feedback will help us move forward” then you have overcome many of the hurdles that prevent collaborative relationships from evolving. Asking real questions means asking questions that put us all on the same side of something.
- Turn around cross examinations. You would be amazed how many people learn conversational techniques from watching courtroom TV. It’s appalling. Whatever benefit the adversarial legal system has for society, its form of debate is toxic. In many meetings people will ask impossible questions about decisions long past, or worse still, will ask a series of questions which can only be answered with “yes” or “no.” These questions are loaded with assumptions, and the good news is it’s a simple matter to turn them around. When someone says “Have you taken into consideration that your building will destroy this forest?” you have a tremendous opening to begin a conversation with that person about values. Ask “So for you it’s important to preserve that forest. How do you see this project negatively impacting the forest? What kinds of ways might we mitigate that impact? What do we need to know about the forest that seems to be missing?”
- Debrief the deeper learnings. After the meeting is over, build in time to reflect about the content and the process, but do it in a deeper way. Talk about the story that emerged, the places people were attached to that story and the reasons why heart showed up. Think about what made the meeting work well and get a handle on the strategies that were used. Reflect on improvements for next time.
All ten of strategies got put in play on this project that I worked on yesterday. I don’t like doing these kinds of meetings in general, but when I do, this set of ideas helps to make the most of them. Feel free to add some below.
Today a post by Peter Buys on the OSLIST caught my eye…
I am fully convinced that Open Space is a marvelous tool to stimulate individual creativity; spontaneous collaboration (for the duration of the Open Space event); and an expression of trust in people by the client (in other words the ones who bought / decided for the Open Space event)…Many if not most Open Spaces are only very short blips (events) in typically much longer processes of change. But the Open Space does not really address that issue nor does it really offer (as far as I know) options on how to proceed beyond the time-bound Open Space event.
I am not a professional facilitator of short term events, in the sense that I only live of assignments for such one time events. Rather I work as a facilitator of long term processes in a specific sector (since 8 years the water sector). When dealing with long term processes of change, as a facilitator, one is obliged (I feel) to think beyond one time events and
rather constantly look for options and ‘most appropriate’ facilitation methods and tools for specific phases or steps in such processes. That means that one time Open Space may seem adequate, another time it can be one of the many other methods, tools, instruments that are at the disposal of a facilitator….
At times, I must admit, I feel ‘professional facilitators’ of one-off events (like an Open Space event) think fairly lightly about what will happen next and what kind of facilitation may be appropriate. It is not in their terms of reference, so why bother. Do I see this correctly?
I agree. Organizations and communities have a life long before an event and a life long after the event. One event does not create change.
As an OST facilitator I spend easily 75% of my time with a client preparing the ground for an Open Space event and getting very clear about how action is to be supported. The process is not magic…what makes it sustainable is the practice before, during and after the event. If a leader can work with participants and members of the organization or community to develop practices that support Open Space, then the results that one experiences in an event such as emergent leadership, passion and responsibility, deep engagement and so on, can be supported moving forward. It is then that the people in the organization become learners of practice and practitioners of their learning.
Open Space is powerful often because it challenges traditional notions of control, management and leadership. People get excited because they see what happens when we do things a little differently. But with no sense of how all of this gets grounded into the life of the organization and community, there is no harvest of the benefits, and no tendency towards change.
Michael Herman and I have called this part of working in Open Space “Grounding” and that represents a whole set of practices that is about supporting action, aligning work with the natural flow of work in the organization, and making it all real – “getting it out of the room with integrity.”
Grounding practices complement the other practices we teach and write about: Opening, Inviting and Holding. Without grounding, the work stays in the ether.
I think this is true, by the way, of any short term intervention aimed at facilitating “change” in the organization. Working with leaders and participants in Open Space needs good coaching and needs facilitation that not only opens and holds space but, in the words of the International Association of Facilitators, teaches new ways of thinking. It is for this reason that I believe we facilitators have to align our use of Open Space as a process with the practices that we also live in our life. If we view OS (or any process) as simply a tool without being in ncomplete alignment with it, then it doesn’t provide the fullest possible potential ground for work.
I am not an advocate of using OST for everything. I am a strong advocate of using OST where leadership is willing to practice opening and invitatation, where they hold and trust people and have a stroing sense of how the work can be grounded. If we have those conditions and we have urgency, passion, complexity and diversity, then we can play marvellously, everytime, with results that last.
From Doug at FootprintsintheWind.com:
“Conversation changes the world. To suggest to someone that their ideas will be heard and acted upon is the most radical thing we can do. Any time we listen to someone that is what we are conveying”
One of the most fundamental teachings for me from the Art of Hosting is about attention to design. When we sit down to consciously create conversational spaces in which people are invited to show up whole, we can have a significant impact on the work at hand.
Meetings are popularly knocked for being all talk and no action. Business magazines are full of strategies for getting the most out of a meeting, or better yet, determining how important a meeting is, and finding ways to blow it off. This is the result of meetings that are planned and hosted with no attention to the quality of the conversation that is to go on. Most companies and organizations seem to save quality only for the “real work” – producing goods or providing services. For some reason, conversation and the skillful design and conduct of productive conversations aren’t seen as work and so they don’t get the same attention as “results.”
And yet, everything we know about innovation, creativity, competitive advantage and responsive service talks about how critical it is that these be incubated in an atmosphere of quality social interaction. Convening meaningful conversations is hard work but the effect of skillful dialogue is real talk and real talk is real results.
As a facilitator, and a designer of conversational and learning process, I like to be intimately involved in the creation of spaces for conversation. Oftentimes clients will call me with an agenda pre-set and want me to “facilitate” by which they mean keep people on track, take notes on a flip chart and do little more than chair the meeting. Without exception, these kinds of meetings seem to always fall short of expectations. When I can begin working with a client before anything is written in stone, we can design process that takes our conversations to a generative place, a place where meaning, emergence and innovation happens. And this is accessible on a daily basis, even in the mundane conversations of day to day organizational life. This kind of conversation is satisfying, and people leave feeling like they have done some real work.
These days, my most satisfying projects are ones where we begin with a conversation about the project that is well hosted. If talk really is results, then every conversation we have in the project needs to be this way. Conversation that springs from what really matters engages both the heart and the feet – passion bounded by responsibility – and becomes a powerful catalyst for the kinds of changes we are looking for.
Although creating these kinds of conversation is an art in itself, there are several things you can do to design conversations that matter:
- Be present. Full conversations occur when we show up whole and offer our full presence to the work at hand. This means relieving yourself of any distractions, and giving the gift of real attention to the conversation and the people within it.
- Work with real questions. A client yesterday provided me with a set of questions for a consultation meeting that were abstract and academic. For a consultation, my concern was that the questions would reach the edge of learning for both participants and the client. They were good questions to start with but we quickly moved to questions that were real, questions which were actually on the minds of people doing the work and questions to which no one knew the answer. When we can invite people to converse around questions like this, engagement goes very deep very quickly.
- Invite the edge. There is an edge in every good conversation that makes it real. It is the edge between known and unknown, control and emergence. When we sincerely invite people to join us in an exploration of the unknown, and we let go of expectations for outcome, we get on the same side of an issue. It’s a scary place to be, but it is the edge at which new ideas emerge, ideas which were never present in any one mind at the beginning of the meeting but which leave the room in everybody’s minds, and with energy around them to boot.
- Pause, reflect, discern. A capacity to steer plain old discussions to meaningful conversation is the capacity for discernment. Instead of judging what you are hearing, sit with it. Invite a pause: “Wait a minute…let’s just reflect on this for a second.” And then really give some silence to this. Invite people to sense what is going on and perhaps take personal notes about what they are sensing. Then invite the conversation to resume and watch how meaning suddenly arises out of the more attentive social space.
- Harvest deeper learnings. Once the business of the meeting is done, take a moment to reflect on the deeper story. What happened? How did we get from the beginning to the end? How did ideas and innovation arise and under which conditions? What is replicable here? This kind of learning is known as second loop learning, and it is how we practice and learn and then practice again. I am now doing this with projects as a whole, especially where the projects engage powerful emotions and feelings. When we are done the substantive work, we head into a retreat, which could be a day or just a few hours, but it helps to do it away from the regular business environment to harvest the deeper learnings. The result is a much deeper commitment to what has happened and a better appreciation of the ways in which conversation has helped the change.
There are many ways of mapping and designing good process, whether you use appreciative inquiry, Sam Kaner’s diamond of participation, focused conversations or other dialogic methods, but what matters is practice. Continually seek the opportunity to refine your practice of both hosting and engaging in real conversation. The practice field is vast: it appears every time you speak with another human being. Take every chance to understand how it is that talk changes everything and soon you will begin see it happening.