This group we are working with in Estonia is cracking a lovely design for a six month learning journey around hosting, harvesting and participatory leadership. They began in September with a little Art of Hosting retreat, are together now in the Art of Participatory Leadership and in February they will gather one more time. In between workshops, they are working on projects in their organizations and communities, deep in real practice and real life. As a result they have much to share with one another and it is only up to Toke and I as teachers to offer a few bones and move out of the way so they can accelerate their learning.
These guys are not afraid to go deep with their work either. This morning we checked in by working with a little ritual. We had everyone go to sleep at the end of Day One with a pillow question: what do I need to let go off to take my work to the next level, and what do I need to embrace? When we began, each of us wrote down the thing we needed to let go of, and then we very carefully placed it in the fireplace. This is always a powerful ritual, and it was for me today too. Following that we wrote a note or two on what we need to embrace, and we joined another person to speak that aloud. The conclusion of those little dyads ended in an embrace of one kind or another: a handshake, a hug, a touch on the arm. It was about making connection and seeing each other in the vulnerability of opening to what we need to let come.
Toke and I offered a little teaching on the art of hosting and harvest conversations and the group released into a set of conversation about the applications of various methodologies. In many Art of Hosting trainings, we refer to this as a knowledge camp, or a knowledge cafe, where people dive deeper into a method or a design tool. Usually we have experienced practitioners host these conversations, but today the learners themselves hosted these conversations. The learning was deep, and each table (Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe, Circle and Powerful Questions) produced some insights which Toke and I riffed on a little. One thing that became clear was that in Estonian there is no word for “Purpose” at least not in the sense that we have been using it. It seems that it is usually translated as “goal” or “aim” and we have been struggling to understand that instead of a goal that lies outside of yourself, it is more like the inner engine that drives you forward. It has been fun playing with the translation of concepts finding that no one word seems to capture the concept, but many words will do!
After lunch, Open Space, and the participants dove into their projects and their questions, also very rich. We finished with a little check out and retired for dinner.
What happened next was astounding. We dined on salmon and carrot salad and rice, and beer and wine and “snaps” began to flow. Conversation was pleasant, but at one point one of our participants, Margus, rose to his feet and began to tell the story of his people. He is a Setu, a tribal indigenous group from southern Estonia, a people that have been in the way of Estonians, Russians and others for thousands of years. They have a tradition of every year electing a “king’s master” who is responsible for producing a type of vodka produced from rye. The drink is very strong and the tradition is that the one who carries it pours a glass for party goers and asks who you are and where you come from. Margus travelled the room offering shot after shot of the spirit, in a powerful and ritual way. That loosened up the voices of the Estonians who broke into song and we sang for hours afterwards. Song after song flowed around the table, folks songs, Eurovision songs, novelty drinking songs (one of which involved us standing on our chairs and singing a verse and then sitting under the table singing a verse!). We sang and told poems and played tunes until the wee hours. As some drifted off to bed, a group of us went down to the sauna and indulged in that Nordic ritual for the rest of the night, singing and drinking and sweating together. It was four in the morning by the time I finally got to bed.
This is the joy and pleasure of a field, of a shared culture, of a group of people who cling to their learning and to each other, and who can explore any territory together. It was a sweet, sweet day.
(Photos are here and the group has started a blog too.)
From Bernie DeKoven, funsmith: Four freedoms of play:
Scot Osterweil (MIT Comparative Media Studies, Education Arcade Project) has observed this truth: play has no agenda. Freedom is central to the experience of play. To understand the anatomy of play, Scot has identified four components that he calls the “four freedoms of play.” If these freedoms are not respected, the play experience is severely compromised or even ruined.
Freedom to Experiment
The player’s motivations are entirely intrinsic and personal. The process is open-ended.
Freedom to Fail
Losing is part of the process.
Freedom to Try on Different Identities
Players aren’t necessarily limited by their bodies or surrounding physical context.
Freedom of Effort
As described in Peter and Iona Opie’s classic ethnography of playground culture, children may scramble around in a game of tag, avoiding being caught for twenty minutes, and then suddenly stop and allow themselves to be tagged once they have reached a certain degree of effort or perhaps want to move on to another activity.
Useful rules for everything from setting up improv exercises to doing rapid prototyping of new ideas and products.
A Harvard business professor asks his students to think about elBulli, a fascinating restaurant near Barcelona
To eat at elBulli, customers must navigate a mysterious reservations system. If they are lucky enough to be one of the 8,000 who get a booking that year, they are then given a date and time to show up. Reaching elBulli’s coastal perch involves traveling to Barcelona, then negotiating two hours of narrow, twisting mountain roads. But then they enjoy a five-hour meal of thirty-some completely original, whimsical dishes prepared by Adrià and his team of thirty to forty cooks. The meal costs roughly 230 euros and represents hours of laborious research, testing, and preparation. In addition to engaging a diner’s five senses, Adrià and his team hope to evoke irony, humor, and even childhood memories with their creations…
Norton asks students to consider the operations and marketing of elBulli. There is much about the restaurant that is inefficient, as MBAs are quick to note: Adrià should lower his staff numbers, use cheaper ingredients, improve his supply chain, and increase the restaurant’s hours of operation. But “fixing” elBulli turns it into just another restaurant, says Norton: “The things that make it inefficient are part of what makes it so valuable to people…”
Because Adrià [the owner] doesn’t adhere to business norms, the elBulli case shows just how broad the spectrum for marketing a “product” can be–and that’s not a bad thing for MBAs to learn. “Marketing is a science, but it’s also an art,” Norton remarks.
“Adrià says he doesn’t listen to customers, yet his customers are some of the most satisfied in the world. That’s an interesting riddle to consider.”
First off, marketing IS NOT A SCIENCE. And art is not marketable, not in the traditional Business School sense anyway. The fact that Adria’s customers are content is not a surprise to anyone that understands how quality works. Norton’s comments strike as either disingenuous or naive.
So MBAs of the world, please look at what Adria is doing and think about what it really means, and use your prodigious talents and influence to fix the bland homogeneity of western consumer culture.
From How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic:
I was intrigued by this line from a new paper by John N. Ivan, Norman W. Garrick, and Gilbert Hanson titled “Designing Roads That Guide Drivers to Choose Safer Speeds”:
The aesthetics or “beauty” of a road environment has also been investigated in relation to traffic safety. Drottenborg (1999) studied the impact of speed on streets that appear as “beautiful” due to the blossoming of cherry trees along the streets in Lund during springtime, and similar streets that lack such beautification. She found that the free-flow mean speed decreased by about 5 percent and the number of vehicles traveling at high speeds between 50-60 km/h decreased by about 12 percent during the cherry blossom period.
One imagines a whole new sub-field of traffic engineering, with myriad questions: Do certain buildings or even architectural styles affect driver behavior? Can beautiful people literally “stop traffic”?
This is a lovely observation.
Lately I have been working as much as possible with graphic recorders who bring a level of beauty into a meeting that has a similar effect. When people work with graphic recorders, they approach the wall reflectively, take care to choose their words and make sure that what they are adding to the record is somehow commensurate with the aesthetic experience being captured.
People want more effective meetings and gatherings and I think a key way to get to effectiveness is to slow down. Slowing down can only happen in a physical environment where there is beauty that can catch our eye, catch ahold of the flow of conversations and cause little swirls and eddies that invite it to loop back on itself, become reflective and therefore effective.
Almost 20 years ago I was a part of pioneering something and I had no idea I was doing that. Gathered under the creative eye of Rob Winslow at The Union Theatre in Peterborough Ontario, a small cast of us put on a weekly improvised soap opera called “The Cactus Hotel: A Western Philosophy” (My God! Here is the brochure for it!) Every Sunday night all summer we improvised a one hour show that advanced the story of a number of characters who found themselves in an imaginary world that owed its existence to the marriage of the Hotel California, Baghdad Cafe, and Trent University’s Cultural Studies department. I now know that what we were doing was a improvised longform that was funny, tender and explored vast emotional and philosophical terrain and character development.
This past week I was in Portland, Oregon at the annual conference of the Applied Improvisation Network, and when I told that story, long time improvisers were surprised and delighted that such a thing was going on in small town Onatrio in 1991. I felt grateful, looking back 18 years to have been a part of that, and I realized this week, just how much of what I know about invitation owes its origins to that summer.
Unless engaging in deep play with a group of 125 giggling, creative and talented extroverts is your idea of a good time, the Applied Improvisational Network is not for you! But show up there ready to learn, eager to test yourself and curious about what is on offer (and willing to offer as much as you get back) and show up to it with Viv McWaters, Geoff Brown and Ann Patillo in your gang, and you have the makings of the most delightful professional development I have ever done for myself.
The gathering was spread over three days at an incredible venue – Edgefield – which itself is an improvisation in action. Once a former poor house, where homeless were rounded up and housed so they could have the dignity of working for no pay, the plae is now an artful quirky and eccentric resort complex with 15 pubs on site and some good restaurants to boot. The owner’s vision was to have people live a pub crawl and then crash in a bed and do it all over again the next day. ‘Twas the perfect venue.
Over the two days we heard from a couple of keynotes including the incomparable Armando Diaz, and the very amazing Nick Owen. Nick should be the standard for keynote presenters. Given that my tolerance for sitting in rows of chairs listening to someone speak at me is zero, the fact that Nick kept me there for there for two hours is unbelievable.
Keynotes aside, there were two days of workshops and breakouts which varied in quality and usefulness to me. My bias was to be there for high play, and so I gravitated towards those sessions that seemed to let me do that. I spent my time the first two days working with Polarity Management and improv, learning about biomimicry and improv with Belina Raffy, exploring Turkish traditional storytelling and its application for improv with Koray Tharhan and Zaynep Tarhan from Istanbul, doing an incredible micro-fiction writing session with denzil meyers, and getting a great grounding in basic improv design with Kat Koppet and again with Gary Hirsch and Julie Huffaker from On Your Feet.
I got to play a little, joining Koray, Zaynep, and Geoff onstage at the Portland Centre for the Performing Arts where we played music for an improv show featuring Special Project Lab and other local improvisers.
On the last day we opened space and a whole slew of other sessions appeared. I dove into music improvisation with Patrick, convened a session with Viv, Ann and Geoff on designing a conference that we are doing in Melbourne and had the most incredible session of contact improvisation with Munir Rashid.
Contact improv is new to me and involves very powerful experiences of working with partners to explore where our bodies want to take us. It is part dance, part martial arts (sticky hands, Tai chi, and aikido are all familiar here) and part real-time non-verbal coaching. It can be as minimal as touching one hand to another and seeing where the movement takes us all the way to rolling around on the floor, lifting one another up and down and discovering how bodies move together. Done with a skillful partner it is an incredible experience of being mentored, led, encouraged and trusted and it can take you well beyond your edge.
Being taught and hosted by Munir was one of the highlights of the entire gathering for me. He is a master teacher and practitioner of this discipline, having devoted 12 years of his life to this. He is able to stand on the edges of safety, intimacy and trust and name the container that will hold the emotional and physical energy of the practice and he is as good a teacher of physical movement as any martial arts master I have ever learned from. I am certain that in lesser hands my experience of contact improv could have been confusing and emotionally challenging. As it was I came out of the session with a strong sense of blissful fearlessness.
Improv of course is all about living the life of invitation in every second. It is about making offers and accepting offers. It is about building on the best of others and contributing something to help them look good. It is a world that works when generosity and attention are activated. And it is instantly accessible. Stories, metaphors, teaching are all at hand. Simply start somewhere and follow it anywhere and see if you don’t surprise yourself. It is in short a new form of old practices I have been doing for a while, but today I am renewed and aligned and excited to see how else we can explore and practice.
Any of you thinking of attending an Art of Hosting with me in the future will be subject to all of this learning I am doing! Expect more games, exercises and improvisational play to explore hosting, harvesting, facilitation, design and collaboration.
It gets fun from here!