The Art of Hosting is predicated on a very simple set of practices which we call the Four Fold Practice. This framework emerged from a conversation in the late 1990s between Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Carsten Ohm and Jan-Hein Nillson about what patterns make for a meaningful conversation. After talking about it for days, the clarity that arose was that people experience meaningful conversations when they are present, when they participate, when they are hosted and when they co-create something. Simple.
The next question then became, what if these four patterns were actually practices that could be cultivated both by individual leaders/facilitators and by groups? What would that be called?
The answer was, “That would be called the art of hosting.” And so a collective inquiry was born that has spread around the world and been taken up by tens of thousands of people working in all forms of leadership, organization, and community.
I sometimes feel that the four fold practice doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Sometimes people can confuse the Art of Hosting with the methods we use or the way we harvest conversations or the tools that help us design things. But that’s not what it is. The Art of Hosting, at its deepest essence, is these four practices.
Today we are beginning an Art of Hosting workshop with some community foundations in British Columbia and tonight we began by introducing the four fold practice in some depth, because when all else fails, coming back to these practices will at least remind you how to invoke patterns that make engagement and dialogue meaningful. We began by telling the story of the practice and where it came from (you can learn a bit about that here) and then we led people in a simple exercise to explore it.
Getting into pairs we asked people to spend 5 minutes on the question “Which of these practices are you strongest on, and what’s a story about that?” We heard a bit in plenary about what was strong with folks, and there are lots of assets and experiences in the room
Then we asked people to talk about which of these practices they were weakest on and what they were eager to learn about. These learning questions were captured on index cards and placed in our centre where we will use them to focus our teaching and inquiry over the next three days.
It’s a simple way to dive into these practices, acknowledge that there are lots of ways to come into an Art of Hosting workshop, and build on the strengths that people have. And it allows us to discover the learning agenda in the room and tie it to the practice. It’s a rich harvest.
In the Cynefin framework, the domains are really shades with some clear boundaires. Strategic work using Cynefin is about making various moves between different domains for different reasons. This is called Cynefin dynamics, and there’s an old but good paper on it here.
In Cynefin dynamics there is a strategic move of “taking a shallow dive into chaos” which is useful for strategic purposes when one needs to break pattern entrainment. It is a very useful move in teaching contexts when we are trying to get people to let go of some of their fixed ways of seeing and doing things. Even putting a group in a circle can be a shallow dive into chaos. The idea here is that in complexity you have a system with a permeable boundary with lots of connections between the elements in the system (people, ideas, resources). That allows for emergence to happen. In chaos, the connections break down and you need to hold a tight container – nothing is emerging, everything is breaking. So if you want to take a shallow dive into chaos, the container needs to be very tight, very constrained, and the relationships between people and ideas that are within that container are very open. That’s how you break patterns without creating a deep experience of chamos, which would be when everything breaks down, including the container. Sometimes that is required, but there is a much lower likelihood of recovering from that kind of thing. I wouldn’t call that “leadership.” It’s more like “abandonment.” No one wants to create a deep dive into chaos unless you want to create a civil war or a revolution, and even then you have no right to expect you’ll survive it.
Chaos is a very high energy state, and it costs a lot to be in it. As a result systems (or learners) that are in a state of chaos won’t stay there for long. Typically they will respond to the first person that comes along and applies tight constraints (think about a paramedic arriving on the scene of an accident). From the perspective of the person in chaos, anything that helps stabilize the situation is welcome.
This can make chaos in systems VERY VERY vulnerable to unchecked power. In times of war, fear or conflict, it is very easy for people to choose and trust despotic leaders that bring tight constraints to the situation, because bringing constraints is actually the right move. I have seen meetings and gatherings happen where chaos was deliberately triggered (sometimes under the guise of “there’s not enough happening in this container”) and then people come in and hijack the agenda and apply their own power. In my experience, very few people are deeply skilled at initiating deep levels of chaos to break patterns and then creating complexity responses (rather than imposing their will), but on the national scale perhaps Iceland is an example.
In workshops sometimes participants want to question or check the power of the facilitators. This has happened twice to my colleague Tuesday Ryan-Hart and I when we have taught groups of activists who seized on her power teaching to question the power dynamics of teacher/student within the workshop. In both cases we took responsibility as hosts to hold a tight container in which the relationships could dissolve and so that the group itself could discover what to do next. We did this by suspending the agenda and hosting a circle and a Council. The decisions that came out were both group owned and I think made the workshop a better learning experience for everyone AND proved the efficacy of our tools and processes. I have seen other examples where the hosts did not take that responsibility and instead the participants were left designing their own gathering. That kind of thing is poor strategy in chaos, unless you are planning on just abandoning the situation and letting others take over, in which case it’s an excellent strategy to ensure you’ll never be invited back (I have also done this sometimes intentionally and sometimes accidentally.)
So that is the kind of decision that you have to make from time to time. Working with constraints is what leaders and teachers do. Being conscious about that is good practice.
At his two day class last week in Vancouver, Dave Snowden presented this constraints based take on Cynefin and shared the evolution of the framework. There is now a new version of this known as “liminal Cynefin” that explores the boundary conditions between complicated and complex and complex and chaotic. I like this because it begins to highlight how dynamic the framework is. I use Cynefin to explain systems and I use the Chaordic Path to talk about developing the leadership capacity to stay in the dynamism of flows around these types of systems.
At the end of a couple of weeks in Europe and being here in Glasgow during this past week has heightened my sensitivity to how democracy, devoid of deliberation and focused only on numeric results, has been hijacked and rendered ineffective for making complex decisions related to governance of complex issues. The UK is currently paying the price for a ridiculous decision made in June of 2016 to leave the European Union. Whatever you think of the merits of Brexit, there can be no denying that the method for doing so has been deeply flawed both in its democratic implementation and the subsequent negotiation. Britain is currently mired in apolitical, constitutional and economic mess of its own making.
So how to we make better decisions together? This video has some very interesting hypotheses that combine complexity science with deliberation practice. It’s worth reflecting on.
Last weekend I took a ramble across Bowen Island, where I live, with a friend and colleague, Annemarie Travers. Annemarie and I have been teaching the Leadership 2020 program for a number of years now and we both love walking: she on the long pilgrimages of the Camino and Shikoku and me in the mountains of southern British Columbia. We are also both interested in managing in complexity.
As Bronagh Gallagher and I have been musing about our offering on complexity, facilitation and social justice, we have been discussing the shift in activism from ideology to evolutionary. Ideological movements try to coalesce activities and people along a line towards a fixed end state. Evolutionary movements start with intentions, principles and move outward in multiple directions along vectors. They adjust and learn as they go, and they both respond to and change their context.
This nice post from Network Centered Advocacy capgtues what I’m talking about by first looking at how a lacrosse player’s artistry evolves in changing contexts and then concludes with these important paragraphs:
Being labeled a “movement” is a reflection of evolutionary status. One person or organization does not qualify as a movement, yet there is no set size of a movement. Movements are messy, complex and organic. The movement label is shorthand, an inclusive term of many independent leaders and supporters, their support structures, all that they can tap into, as well as their capacity to disagree as often as they align on work.
Movements are a reflection of self-directed, adaptive, resilient, self-sacrificing, supported and persistent initiatives to work on complex problems. There are no movement structures, but instead a movement is a mass migration of people, organizations, businesses and communities unified in common story, driving to shift culture, policy, behavior and norms. Successful movements build and transform the landscape as they progress providing a base for further progress. A quick scan of the first few pages of google news for” movements” produces a snapshot of the current movements that come to mind, including the movement against fracking, the climate change movement, the tea party movement, Occupy, #blacklivesmatter, the anti-austerity movement, the dump-Trump movement, the maker-movement, the LGBTQ movement–the list goes on.
A key evolution point in a movement’s trajectory is the transition away from any single point of failure, to be loosely structured and resilient enough to absorb setbacks. The agility and adaptive characteristics of movements are fueled not only by personal stakes, individualism, driven leadership, passion and local control, but also by unpredictable solidarity and a distributed organizing approach that resists centralization. The difference between an organization, coalition, centralized campaign and a genuine movement is the way each fuels smart local initiatives and the ways leaders align power.
Building a movement is actually more aptly perceived as unleashing a movement, creating new spaces that help the movement surge in wider, expansive and still supportive directions. As a movement gains organizing momentum, strategies shift to broadly unfold and push a wide set of actions that draw opposition thin rather than clustering and making defense easy. This distributed layout requires a shift in thinking and strategy.
The key thing to notice here is that culture is changed by evolving movements, not linear programs. Movements are not led TOWARDS a goal, but rather emanate from a set of connected and coherent stories, actions and intentions, and self-correct, fail and adapt as they go. This is true whether the venue of action is organizational or societal. Cultures are complex and require complexity to change them. Diving more into the examples given in the quote will give you more insight into how these movements have become a part of, and transformative agents within, the cultures they are aiming to change.