“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
— TS Eliot
Our Beyond the Basics team is about to host our last gathering of the current cycle of offers, back in North America. Over the past five Beyond the Basics offerings I have learned more than I feel like I’ve shared. I can feel that my practice has changed as a result of doing this work, and I’ve become interested in the way our team’s ideas and lessons from working at scale have begun to outline a form and practice of leadership that is needed in much of our work now.
Dave is working on a theory of change, which I think is a good thing. In this latest post he has a nice summation of the way to move to action in complex situations (like cultures):
So where we are looking at culture change (to take an example), we first map the narrative landscape to see what the current dispositional state is. That allows us to look at where we have the potential to change, and where change would be near impossible to achieve. In those problematic cases we look more to stimulating alternative attractors rather that attempting to deal with the problem directly. Our method is the look at the narrative landscape and then ask the questions What can I (we) do tomorrow to create more stories like these and fewer like those? The question engages people in action without analysis and it allows us to take an approach that measures vectors (speed and direction) rather than outcome. The question also allows widespread engagement in small actions in the present, which reduces the unexpected (and potentially negative) consequences of large scale interventions.
In sum, complexity work is about understanding the context to understand where the potential for evolution might lie. From there you try experiements to see what you can learn, and support what works while removing support for what doesn’t
It’s an old saw, but it’s actually a simple thing. And I keep writing about it because it seems TOO simple for most folks. Shouldn’t strategy be more ordered, laid out and thought through than this.
As always the answer depends, but with complex situations the answer is no. Save your discipline and rigour for understanding things as they evolve rather than trying to get it all right from the start.
via Change through small actions in the present – Cognitive Edge.
I’m prepping for a small gig with a non-profit moving to a shared leadership model, and also reading a bit more on Cynefin strategy, and so there are a lot of tabs open in my browser this afternoon. instead of saving them all to an Evernote folder, I thought I’d share the best ones with you.
This week I have been a part of a series of meetings, gatherings and workshops around the release of a new book on Dialogic Organizational Development. I contributed a chapter to the book on hosting containers.
Yesterday, the lead authors hosted a day long conference on the themes contained in the book and we delivered some workshops and hosted some dialogue on the emergence of this term and the implications for the field. Today we are at the Academy of Management conference being held in Vancouver where the lead authors, and some of the rest of us, are delivering a professional development workshop.
Over the past few days I’ve been reflecting on relationships between practitioners and academics, especially as it pertains to the development of learning and innovation in this field. Traditionally, academics are suspicious of practitioners who fly by the seat of their pants, who don’t ground their experience in theory and who tell stories that validate their biases. Practitioners are traditionally suspicious of academics being stuffy, jargony and inaccessible, too much in the mind and engaged in indulgent personal research projects. Secretly I think, each has been jealous of the other a bit: academics coveting the freedom of practice and practitioners wanting the legitimacy of academics.
One of the things I like about this new book is that Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak brought together people from both fields to write the book. Gervase is really clear that the role of researchers in this work is to help practitioners understand why things work. This is a really welcome invitation as I have been working for a year or more led by Dave Snowden’s exhortation to us in the practitioner field to “understand why things work before you repeat them.” For practitioners it is important to engage with theory. If you don’t, you miss out on a tremendous amount of generative material that will make you a better designer and a better practitioner.
I am now interested in bleeding these distinctions between academics and practitioners and I think we both need to do this. I think we are discovering that these days, practice is the fastest way to advance the field. In fact we find researchers now trailing along behind practitioners sifting through the mess we leave when we do projects willy nilly, whether well planned or delivered based on a gut instinct. Our practice evolves quickly because we only need work to be “good enough” in order to use it as a platform for further development. We publish stories and learning instantaneously on our blogs and face book pages and listervs and twitter feeds. Once academics get their hands on the data and take the time to analyze it and publish it, the practice field has moved quickly and may have evolved in ways that the academic conversation has been unable to anticipate.
For practitioners though it’s worth pausing from time to to time and working with the people that are trying to tell you what you are doing. There is a tremendoous body of theory in philosophy, neurology, cognitive science, anthropology, and the natural sciences that is directly applicable to our field. I find that many practitioners have one or two blind spots or reactions to theory: they dismiss it as too dense to get, they borrow it badly (usually as a metaphor, such as quantum physics being misused to talk about intention and influence) or they dive it. I have been guilty of these in the past, and these days I’m trying to embrace theory much more deeply and work with researchers who are studying our field including folks like Jerry Nagel, Ginny Belden-Charles, Elizabeth Hunt and Trevor Maber, just to name a few recent ones. I invite you to do the same.
The four of us on the Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics team are all global stewards of the international Art of Hosting community of practice. We have all attended or hosted at least two of the global stewards gatherings and we have been deeply involved in the creation and growth of the Art of Hosting community over the past decade.
As such, the Art of Hosting is our lineage. It’s where we met. It’s the most important community of practice in our lives and it continues to shape our work. And Beyond the Basics is very much rooted in the Art of Hosting.
A couple of weeks ago in Minnesota while we were preparing our teachings I saw clearly how we were extending what we know about the Art of Hosting. It’s not just that Beyond the Basics focuses more on how the practice of participatory leadership extends past meeting facilitation into longer term and broader strategic initiatives. It’s that our work builds upon the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting the simple pattern that lies at the heart of this approach to facilitation, leadership and community work.
The four fold practice was the first pattern that gave rise to the Art of Hosting. It is simply an observation that great conversations happen when people are present, when they participate, when they are hosted well and when they co-create something. Some of the originators of the Art of Hosting, people like Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen and Jan Hein Nielsen began asking the question, what if these patterns became practices? And in that moment the decades long inquiry that is the Art of Hosting was born.
Our Beyond the Basics offering refers to these practices, but only now have I seen what we are doing. Toke has always called the four fold practice “The Basics” and I have no need to creat new basics. But I can see now how deeply rooted we are in extending and deepening them.
Be present. For all hosts, personal practice is essential. Whatever you can do to bring yourself to be present with a group serves the group. In the Beyond the Basics offering, Caitlin is a deep practitioner of The Work of Byron Katie which is a powerful personal practice that we all use to get at what keeps us stuck, to address what we are afraid of, and to help us become resilient and quality hosts of uncertainty, complexity and confusion. The first clarity we need to address is our own, and we do that with the Work.
Participate. It is impossible to be a part of a participatory process without participating. And it is impossible to affect a complex system from the outside. Understanding how systems works helps us to be more effective participants in the strategic work we are called on to lead and host. Using theory from the science and sociology of complex adaptive systems creates a more powerful way to see and understand and leverage people’s participation in their own work. through teaching Cynefin and working with harvesting methods that are sense-making based, we extend the practice of participation to move beyond the acts of listening, speaking and learning and into the realms of sensing, interpreting and decision making.
Be a host, so everyone can make a contribution. Tim’s work with his Collaborative Advantage model extends this practice of hosting beyond the methods that for the core of the Art of Hosting practice. While we are deep practitioners of World Cafe, Circle, Pro-Action Cafe and Open Space, we know these methods alone are not enough to host large scale strategic change work. We need a framework to understand the levels of transformation that need to be hosted and the key design pieces (such as power, results and capacity) that need to be addressed so long term change can continue to be hosted from within systems and organizations.
Co-create. It is one thing to say “just work together” and quite another thing to do it when our communities and organizations are soaked in differences. Where power, privilege, race, economic opportunity and all kinds of other differences are at play we need a set of practices that can bring us to deeply transformative shared work. Tuesday has been developing this framework for many years now and it is taking form in a way that has fundamentally changed my own approach to co-creation. Moving to a place of shared work is taking co-creation beyond the basic level of just doing things together.
In our AoH Beyond the Basics offering we are addressing this extension of our lineage with teachings and reflective practice that help participants to dive more deeply into the four fold practice. You don’t have to have come nto an Art of Hosting to understand or work with what we are sharing, but if this framework makes sense to you, the three days we spend togther will help challenge and deepen your practice in these areas.
We would love to have you join us this July in Leicester, UK or in October in Kingston Ontario.