When working in complexity, and when trying to create new approaches to things, it’s important to pay attention to ideas that lie outside of the known ways of doing things. These are sometimes called “weak signals” and by their very nature they are hard to hear and see. At the Participatory Narrative Inquiry Institute, they have been thinking about this stuff. On May 31, Cynthia Kurtz posted a useful blog post on how we choose what to pay attention to: If you think of all the famous detectives you know of, fictional or real, they are always distinguished by their …
I was happy to be able to spend a short time this week at a gathering of Art of Hosting practitioners in Columbus, Ohio. People had gathered from across North America and further afield to discuss issues of racial equity in hosting and harvesting practices. I’ve been called back home early to deal with a broken pipe and a small flood in my house, but before I left I was beginning to think about how to apply what I was learning with respect to strategy and evaluation practices. I was going to host a conversation about this, but instead, I …
Two links in the feed this morning had me thinking about democracy, participation and local governance. Duncan Green provides a review of the new book How to Rig an Election, by Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas. There are many ways to hack a democracy, including gerrymandering electoral districts, influencing or straight out hacking of polls, manipulating voter registration and making it difficult to vote. The authors in this new book point out an important truth: Leaders are most likely to try and stay in power when they believe that their presence is essential to maintain political stability; in cases when they …
Erich Fromm studied love and connection as his life’s work. Along the way he was able to study and learn about the art of some of the core capacities of loving. From a blog post today on Fromm’s work, comes this simple set of principles for deepening the art of listening (in his own words): The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener. Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed. He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to …
Over the past few years, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to develop artistic mastery in facilitation/hosting practice. It’s an important topic to me because I teach this work, and it’s not always easy to design deep learning when people are expecting to become instantly good at facilitation after a single workshop. The Art of Hosting is a practice founded on tools, rooted in theory. It takes time to understand and integrate this practice and become masterful at it. I often draw parallels between learning the practice and development of mastery in the arts. Today I …