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.
I want to invite you to bite down hard and read this article by Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review: Baltimore, a Great Society Failure:
A beautiful quote from Douglas Adams via whiskey river:
“The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, its just wonderful. And the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.” – Douglas Adams
I think there is an implicit assumption in leadership work that complexity is hard, that it’s confusing and stressful. But that is not a guaranteed starting position. Adams invites us to rather embrace it, because it is our daily reality anyway, and, when you think about, it is really quite extraordinary that we get to live as a result of it.
Recently in BC, we have a had a child die in the care of the state. This does happen from time to time, and when it does a process is triggered whereby the Representative for Children and Youth lanuches an investigation and makes recommendations which usually result in more rules and procedures to govern the child welfare system with the express purpose of never having it happen again.
I work closely with child protection social workers in BC and there is not a single one I know of whose heart does not break when something like this happens. Everyone wears the failure. Social work is difficult not because of the kinds of predictable situations that can be mitigated but because of the ones no one saw coming. The Ministry of Children and Family Development operates under a massive set of procedures and standards about social work practice. But no amount of rules will prevent every case of child death. Just like no amount of rules will eliminate every case of discrimination, every war, every instance of every bad thing that happens to humans.
Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and I are snuggled into the attic rooms at the Capitol Hill Mansion B&B in downtown Denver, listening to some jazz, eating some pasta and salad and finishing up a productive design day together. We are preparing to teach the Art of Hosting to 60 leaders from the community at St. John’s in the Wilderness Cathedral in Denver. St. John’s is a high Anglican Gothic Episcopalian cathedral in the heart of Denver. We have been working with the cathedral community over the past couple of years to build the capacity among the 1700 members to be able to host and engage in conversations that matter.
As we’ve done this work, I’m struck at once by how simple it really is and how little space we make for it in our lives. People are busy, rushed and worried about deadlines and results and as a collective society we tend to defer the slow and clear attention to the quality of how we are together. Quality gets sacrificed at the alter of timely outcomes.
And of course this is no more ironic than in the myriad church communities we have been working with over the years, which, at their best, host a place to slow down and consider the nature of the relationship between peoples and to attend to the sacred quality of the spaces in between.
For me there is something in the richness of returning to the simplest way we know of to slow down and host good conversations. This evening as I write by the fire, Caitlin and Tenneson are preparing a simple teaching of Circle practice. Earlier we were thinking about the simplest way we know of to discuss the relationship of our traditional notions of chaos and order.
While I have been diving deep into the nuanced explorations of the Cynefin framework, it is becoming necessary to find ways to invite people easily into the mind shift that complexity requires. In the Art of Hosting community we have, for a long time, been inspired by Dee Hock’s work on chaordic organization. At the simplest level noticing the polarity of chaos and order, and noticing how our reactions to chaos and uncertainty often take us to high levels of control becomes an entry way into a different way to think about strategies for achieving goals in the complex domain.
So tomorrow, I’m looking forward to Tenneson’s leading on the chaordic path, a simple teaching worth returning to.