I was watching the Cop15 conference at a distance and I have been thinking that big conferences are maybe not what it will take to shift things. Bigger and more may not be what is needed, or what works. One of the problems is the pressure and expectation that comes from big gatherings – it tends to result in a level of planning and pre-ordained outcomes that actually suppresses emergent behaviour, and emergent behaviour is the mechanism I believe we need to evolve our next level of being, if we are to have a next level as a species.
An exception to my mind has always been the Open Space conference which is built on self-oganization as a mechanism for fostering emergent understanding and work. In fact, recently I have been returning more and more to Open Space in its most pure and extended forms to generate emergent results embedded in sustainable relationships. I find that as a designer I am maybe sometimes a little guilty of frankly pandering to the fears of clients who want me to design results rather than process. The inclination to control is a strong one, to feel like there is much at stake and so therefore everything must be tightly scripted. And yet the reality is that in the world outside of conference, innovation and emergence is happening all the time in fact most conferences, even conferences of amazing and talented people, are a let down because a small group of people – the organizers – seek to control what happens, making sure everyone has a good experience, as if people aren’t perfectly capable of a good experience on their own. It’s a bummer, and real life, where people get to make their own decisions and take responsibility for what they care for, is a whole lot more exciting and productive.
Of course a sole four day Open Space, powerful as it is for fostering surprising levels of emergence and action, still requires much skillful design. I place a great deal of emphasis on the quality and mode of the invitation. How we invite people – how we ACT when we invite people – often says more about the invitation than the text of the invitation itself. Assembling the right people around the right call is a deep art, and in fact might be the deepest art of all the arts of hosting. But once they are in the room, I think most folks, and especially thoroughbreds, like to have the space to run. To be scripted and moved around, have conversations prematurely cut off or started around false or half guessed-at topics, is a travesty. To see a group of highly talented and motivated people create their own emergent agenda and go to work offering everything they can is a truly inspiring sight and to see them doing so over two, three and four days is to watch a community get born. I have experienced three and four day Open Space gatherings a handful of times, both as a facilitator and as a participant and without exception powerful, enduring and totally unexpected results have emerged. And these results have lasted, evolved and morphed into amazing things. I have never seen those kinds of results from other kinds of tightly scripted conferences.
I have been thinking about this for a while, and the missed opportunity in Copenhagen combined with some other observations about over the top conference planning has led me to really question whether the ONE ALL PURPOSE GATHERING has not seen better days. We are so muich more able to work in local and disbursed ways that we don’t need to wait for the big conference to do good work. We can just get on Skype and start going at it. In fact I’m surprised how few people actually do do this. Instead they wait for the big gathering to start something. Having said that, Open Space offers the nearest conference based analogue to this marketplace of life. As designers and conveners, we simply need a powerful invitation, the influence to connect to the right people, and then stand aside as skillful and motivated people connect with one another and find the work they are meant to do together.
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As the inner climate villages unfold here and in Copenhagen, the Europeans have cracked a simple set of practices. An email from Toke Moeller in Copenhagen this weekend:
Toke, Ulrik, Lisa and I were part of a workshop at yourclimate.tv today on inner climate. A great experience! The young people were excellent facilitators. They asked us to brainstorm guidelines (Toke reframed this into practices) that could immediately help people to clear the inner climate. First we were asked to brainstorm onto the whiteboard table in silence, then to walk around in silence and make additions and then to talk about what we saw. Also in our group was Lisette, a healer from Holland connected to the MeshWork and Amanji, a Hindi nun who said she had been a monk for 20 years. We were of fundamental agreement, but still had a very rich and deep conversation. We were then asked to boil down what we’d discussed into three salient points.
3 practices that if practiced
by any person on the planet
will help to clear
your inner climate–
Our knowing: There’s enough if we share
Practice: SHARE IT
Our knowing: We all have a choice
Practice: CHOOSE ON BEHALF ON THE PLANET
Our knowing: We are nature
Practice: FIND YOUR NATURAL RHYTHM
&
BREATHE – MOVE – LAUGH – REST
The foundation for these we suggest is an ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE
Simple practices that bring us to the presence needed to host the conversations and shifts that are needed in these days.
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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!
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Yesterday I spent a day with 14 students in the Certificate in Dialogue Program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, teaching World Cafe and Open Space Technology. Whenever I am asked to teach methodologies I always spend a significant amount of time actually talking about invitation and harvest, because it is these practices that actually contribute to a productive and meaningful conversation, rather than just using the methodology.
Invitation has always been a big part of my facilitation practice. From the time I discovered the work Michael Herman had done on invitation both as a practice and as a metaphor for organizations, communities and human systems that work, my practice has been devoted to finding the quality in invitation first and then designing good process to support that invitation.
Over the years I have come to think of several phases of invitation in a process, starting with a flash of inspiration and carrying through all the way to stewarding the dissolution of intention long after an initiative has faded away. When someone experiences that flash of insight or inspiration that drives them to create something, I call this “crossing the threshold of longing.” Before that moment, there is no awareness of anything specific, but after that flash happens, an undeniable urge arises, a longing, which, if it stewarded well, becomes the kernal for beautiful, deep and effective invitation. When we can tap into this, meetings become the easy part.
Yesterday in the Open Space, one of the participants posed a topic called “helping people cross the threshold of longing.” We had a lovely conversation about what it takes to pay attention to and support the arousal of longing that can be used in service of invitation. Several insights followed in this conversation.
Crossing the threshold of longing is a total body experience. When you get struck with inspiration, and a irrefutable call arises in you, it is a full body experience. It often strikes out of the blue, and it quickens the breath.
The longing poses a question, and it changes. The kind of intention and inspiration I’m talking about is possibility based and it often takes the form of a question – “What if..?” It can be an inspiring goal that requires several pathways to get there – Obama’s election run came up alot yesterday. And the thing about a possibility question is that as you step out to where it leads you, the question changes. At the early stages of cultivating intention and invitation, I like to help people find others who can hold their intention with them, give them practice in inviting people into the deep spaces of possibility and create a shared intention and vision. Inevitably the intention and vision will change, but when it’s held by a small core team, it will change in ways that nevertheless deepen the foundation of the intention. One of the participants yesterday used the phrase “following your nose towards aliveness.” That sums it up nicely.
You need to let go to have it develop. As people join you in the call sensing what my friend Phill Cass calls “the disturbance that you can’t refuse” one has to cultivate a skillful letting go of attachment to the invitation and intention. The first act of letting it go, of releasing your closely held inspiration into a circle of trusted friends sets the pattern for how the invitation process will unfold. It almost takes the form of ritual. Getting the letting go right is important. let go the specifics and hold the ground.
Invitation takes shape as we reach towards what once seemed impossible. We talked alot about Meg Wheatley’s questions: How do you call yourself? How do you identify yourself? And have you chosen a name for yourself that is big enough to hold your life’s work? These questions invite us to reach for what once seemed impossible. A good invitation captures this stretch in a way that invites us together into the unknown, onto a little fearful and anxious edge, but somehow cultivates a ground of possibility there.
It’s about relationships and conversation. Elders tell me time and again after years of working in organizations and living in communities that the quality of life and work always comes down to relationships. Younger adults and youth will talk about action and outcomes and getting things done productively and efficiently, but older people, who have time to reflect on their careers constantly tell me that focusing on relationships is more important, for quality, sustainability and effectiveness. With this in mind, invitation needs to be about relationships and conversation too. An one page written invitation is a sterile beast. It does not reflect the mode of being that we are inviting people too. If we want people to enter a conversation, we need to invite them there WITH conversation. So reach out beyond sending out the email, embody and practice invitation with relationship building and conversation.
Invite people to come to gatherings that contain life. A big insight from yesterday: Most meetings make us immune to one another and that is a terrible thing in human communities. We often meet in ways that deaden us to each other’s humanity in the name of efficiency or focus on outcomes. It is possible to focus on doing good work AND do it well with others. An invitation needs to reflect this intention otherwise people will see what you are doing as “just another conversation.”
Never let anyone arrive at a meeting alone. If the goal of good gatherings is to have people leave working together, then the goal of a good invitation process is to have people arrive so that no one shows up alone. Introduce people to one another during the invitation process, have them discover each other and cultivate an interest and curiosity in the potential of meeting and working together.
Always more to say on this, but for now, thanks to all who were in that conversation yesterday.
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There are patterns and rhythms in invitation that help clarify the intention. Sense these and don’t force them because the quality of generative and creative space depends on how well we know and work with these patterns.