Depending on who you ask, the Art of Hosting as a community of practice has been around since about 1999. Since that time, it has evolved and morphed and changed and developed. It does so based on the inquiries that come from practice and that are captured in the workshops that are delivered by various people all over the world. It is a community and a movement of learning that I have never quite seen the likes of, although I am sure that there are others. It focuses on dialogue, participatory leadership and making tools for these things accessible to everyone, while at the same time disrupting the field of facilitation with strange terms and language and ideas that are drawn from everything from organizational development, to sociology, psychology, anthropology, complexity theory and a variety of spiritual paths and experiences.
It’s is really hard to pin down, so I appreciate the efforts of the researchers out there who have been trying to understand the shape of this morphing mycellium of a community.
Elizabeth Hunt (@elizpercolab) is one of these researchers. Grounded in Frierian pedagogy, she has just submitted her Master’s thesis in which she explores the Art of Hosting pedagogy. Her research was based in interviews, reading and through being a practitioner with percolab in Montreal, one of my favourite groups of professional colleagues in my network. (Full disclosure: I really love these guys!). In her thesis she identifies four assumptions that underlie the bigger invitation that the Art of Hosting embodies:
- We are living a crisis of immense complexity;
- Finding appropriate solutions requires us to shift our thinking;
- Dialogue enables us to access collective intelligence;
- We can identify and learn from recurring patterns in our work
The more I look at these assumptions, the more I recognize them in my work. I can reflect on how each of these live in me and my work. The crisis I feel drives the urgency of my work, but it’s probably a different version of the crisis than it is for you. The shifts in thinking for me reflect my own shifts in thinking. I try to embody the changes in mindset that I speak up for without becoming an evangelist and a fundamentalist. that’s a hard line to tread when I believe so strongly that complexity thinking and conscious action are critical for survival in this world at any scale.
I also have often said that “I might be wrong, but I’m basically staking my life on the idea that dialogue is the social technology we need to all become good at.” At this point in my life, I’m pretty far down that road, and I’m not sure I’m going to be doing much else in the next half of my life. So that’s my bet. You go ahead let my epitaph be a pithy assessment of how well that worked.
And finally on the fourth assumption, I think the dynamic nature of this is what keeps this community of practice so rich for me. It is always changing and the patterns of dialogue are shifted by context, technology, thinking and the new challenges. Showing up at Occupy Wall Street is as illuminating for me as watching a Trump rally, helping organize participation in the supporter’s section of my beloved Vancouver Whitecaps FC, or sitting in the Snug Cafe here on Bowen Island, kicking around ideas with my neighbours. It is endlessly fascinating to see how participation, dialogue and leadership intersect. The richer my experience observing and experimenting in a variety of contexts, the more I learn. And that’s what makes this a worthy pursuit for the rest of my life.
So a huge thanks to Elizabeth for this research and being a high level observer of our community. And good luck with the thesis!
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” — Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
This. And a small vignette.
In our circle yesterday, Caitlin arrived a little late, and took a seat on the outside of the rim.
The one who noticed was a Chinese-Vietnamese woman who had come to Canada as a child refugee in the 1970s, stuffed into a dangerous boat with hundreds of others fleeing war and fear. She turned and saw Caitlin and moved her chair to make room for her in the circle.
She knew intuitively how to fit one more person in, how to welcome, how to alleviate the feeling of being outside. How to bring wholeness. It was a moment in which our threaded hearts were stitched together.
In these days, when a cultivated fear of the other is what passes for politics, this quote and this story landed.
A small elevator speech I shared on the OSLIST yesterday:
Self organization works by a combination of attractors and boundaries. Attractors are things that draw components of a system towards themselves (gravity wells, a pile of money left on the ground, an invitation). Boundaries (or constraints) are barriers that constrain the elements in a system (an atmosphere, the edges of an island, the number of syllables in a haiku)
Working together, attractors and boundaries define order where otherwise there is chaos. We can be intentional about some of these, but not all of them. Within complex systems, attractors and constraints create the conditions to enable emergence. What emerges isn’t always desirable and is never predictable, but it has the property of being new and different from any of the individual elements within the system.
Self-organization is where we get new, previously unknown things from.
I was working with a couple of clients recently who were trying to design powerful questions for invitations to their strategic conversations. Both organizations are dealing with complex situations and specifically with complex changes that were overtaking their ability to respond. Here are some of the questions that cam up:
- How can we be more effective in accomplishing our purpose?
- How can we create more engagement to address our outcomes?
- What can we do to innovate regardless of our structure?
- Help us create new ideas for executive alignment around our plan to address the change we are now seeing?
Can you see what is wrong with these questions, especially as they relate to addressing complexity?
The answer is that each of these questions contains a proposed solution to the problem, buried as assumptions in the question itself. In these questions the answers to addressing complexity are assumed to be: sticking to purpose, creating more engagement, innovating except structurally, aligning executives around our plan. In other contexts these may well be powerful questions: they are questions which invite execution once strategic decisions have been taken. But in addressing complex questions, they narrow the focus too much and embed assumptions that some may actually think are the cause of their problems in the first place
The problem is that my clients were stuck arguing over the questions themselves because they couldn’t agree on solutions. As a result they found themselves going around and around in circles.
The right question for all four of these situations is something like “What is going on?” or “How can we address the changes that are happening to us?”
You need to back up to ask that question first, before arriving at any preferred solutions. It is very important in discerning and making sense of your context that you are able to let go of your natural inclination to want to DO something, in favour of first understanding what we have in front of us. Seeing the situation correctly goes a long way to be able to make good strategic choices about what to do next. From there, planning, aligning, purpose and structure might be useful responses, but you don’t know that until you’ve made sense of where you are.
Tim Merry‘s work on collaborative advantage:
My friend and colleague Tim Merry is sharing some of his most recent thinking on project design and development here in Columbus at the Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics retreat we are doing. This is a really useful and interesting introduction to his approach:
