Some notes from three days of teaching a small cohort of leaders in the art of participatory leadership. —- When we teach the four fold practice of the art of hosting (also the art of participatory leadership) I’ve taken to doing it in a World Cafe. We use Cafe to essentially recreate the conditions that created the insights of the four fold practice 25 or so years ago. We invite people to tell stories of engaging and meaningful conversations they have experienced, look at these stories together for insights about what made them engaging and meaningful and provide and three …
Today, I was working with a client designing a one-day conference for their members. As always, my focus was on the chaordic stepping stones as a way to design, which defers decisions about structure, agenda and logistics until after we have focused the groundwork of the event. Participatory events are not highly engaging without tapping into the group’s urgent necessity and a clear sense of purpose for the gathering. From that point, design becomes easier, and invitation becomes alive. Today, we focused on necessity and purpose. I kicked us off by asking, “What is happening that makes this gathering important? …
A detail from the monastary at Mont St Michel in Normandy showing a person overwhelmed with ripening fruit. He’s probably rushing off to his next zoom meeting. So much has changed since the pandemic began, and it is hard to notice what is happening now. I feel like my ability to perceive the major changes that have happened to us since March 2020 is diminished by the fact that there is very little art that has been made about our experience and very few public conversation about the bigger changes that have affected organizational and community life in places like …
Surfboards inside the museum at Nazaré, Portugal, all of which have ridden the biggest wave in the world. Things I have found while surfing. Have a look at these, and maybe leave a comment about which link grabbed your attention and what you learned there. (PS…the headlines are links! Click for more) John Coltrane’s ideas behind “A Love Supreme.” I adore this piece of music. I think I first heard it about 20 years after it was recorded, which was nearly 60 years ago now. It is a high form sacred music piece, as important and meaningful as anything that …
The three-domain version of Cynefin, originally published on Dave Snowden’s blog. I’m trying to organize my thoughts on containers, complexity and constraints that span a couple of decades of work and grounded theory. In this post, I want to lay out how I see these phenomena in the context of anthro-complexity, largely articulated by Dave Snowden, with implications for complex facilitation, or what we in the Art of Hosting community call “hosting.” I’ll lay out some theory first that I’m working on, link it to facilitation and then share a case study of a recent meeting I hosted to demonstrate …