Over the past 15 years I have worked with churches, faith communities and faith-based social justice movements using the Art of Hosting and participatory leadership. In many ways these organizations have been at the forefront of social and demographic changes, getting older while holding a fierce commitment to addressing issues of injustice in the world. Working with faith leaders and faith-based movements allows us to have a different conversation about participatory leadership, community work and spirit. The Art of Hosting seems to wake up the kind of collaboration that faith communities long for, even as they confront existential questions within their own organizations or in the larger world.
In November in Toronto, a very special team of us is hosting an Art of Participatory Leadership training aimed at leaders in faith based contexts and those whoa re engaged in social justice work, specifically anti-poverty and inclusion. This training, while it is directed at folks who are working in these contexts, is open and applicable to others as well, whose work needs active involvement and co-creation with the communities they serve. Non-profits and social change movement workers are welcome and will both learn and add much to the conversations we are involved in.
My co-hosts on this team are Ben Wolf and Violetta Ilkiw. Ben is an old friend who has been a community organizer, communicator, journalist and Unitarian congregational leader for years. He is currently working with Thomas Hübl and bringing trauma informed practices into his work.
Likewise I’ve known and admired Violetta’s work for years. She specializes in conflict transformation, decision-making and deep community-led change work, including working with youth-led initiatives in the philanthropic sector.
In this work we have been invited by Sam Cooper, a minister in the Toronto area who has been devoted to setting up an Anti-Poverty Commission in Mississauga, based very much on the citizen-led initiatives in Scotland (like this one). We are also invited into this work by Pablo Kim Sun who specializes in Intercultural work and inclusion and who works for the Presbyterian Church in Canada.
There are creative tuition options for this training and we want to make it as open and accessible to anyone who resonates with this call, whether you are working in churches or other faith-based organizations, or involved in deep community led change work. Consider joining us. There are spaces open and we’d love to see you there.
Some notes from three days of teaching a small cohort of leaders in the art of participatory leadership.
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When we teach the four fold practice of the art of hosting (also the art of participatory leadership) I’ve taken to doing it in a World Cafe. We use Cafe to essentially recreate the conditions that created the insights of the four fold practice 25 or so years ago. We invite people to tell stories of engaging and meaningful conversations they have experienced, look at these stories together for insights about what made them engaging and meaningful and provide and three pieces of advice to aspiring hosts and leaders about how to create engaging and meaningful conversations.
This not only helps a group discover the practice – which we teach only AFTER the World Cafe – but it also shows that the World Cafe is itself a powerful process for sharing stories, collective sensemaking and knowledge creation. In the context of our work this week, with academic researchers , leaders and administrators at a university, this can be a powerful experience as they experience first hand what it feels like to be hosted in what is essentially participatory research.
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Tennesson’s check in questions this morning featured a question that I love. “Who is a person for whom you are here this week?” I love a question like that. It focuses a learner for a moment on the fact that leadership development is not just personal development. It is learning you do to make the world a better place for others.
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Chaos and order and the Chaordic path is an important and basic introduction to complexity. It is the basic teaching that helps folks to see the polarity between ordered and unordered systems and how our work as hosts is essentially determining what move is required to bring a process into more or less order so that good work can be done. Complex facilitation, a term from the Cynefin world, is all about working with constraints, to loosen or tighten, to expand or contract, in order to create the conditions to catalyse actions or behaviours that take us in a preferred direction of travel. Its is about working with constraints to fashion a container that can become a place for emergence and then managing that emergence by harvesting, shaping, grounding or eliminating it.
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Personal work is critical for people working in complexity, or walking the Chaordic path. When confronting uncertainty and emergence, we run into reactions and emotions. Understanding the reactivity cycle and having a tool to create a subject-object shift that can first recognize the connection between the emotion and the situation and then examine that reaction helps to interrupt the cycle of rumination or fixation that can reinforce unhelpful patterns of behaviour which can make a person less resourceful in a space of uncertainty, leading to reactions like controlling, fleeing or tearing it all down.
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Adrenaline does not just create a flight/fight response. It can also induce freeze, appease, control, and comply response. None of these are helpful in leadership situations especially where there are triggering events like conflict, chaos, tough decisions, accountability and other issues on the line. Understanding the reactivity loop is the first step in shifting our responses. Working consciously with our patterns of reaction is how to disrupt those patterns and discover better ones. And it helps us stay more present and aware when we are in situations in which we are more likely to become reactive.
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My father in law Peter Frost, in his book Toxic Emotions at Work, worked from the premise that leadership creates pain. Decisions create lines and boundaries and good leaders make good decisions with an awareness of some of what will NOT happen while being committed to what will happen. This commitment to a core, once a decision is made, can free a leader up to handle the turbulence at the edge of the chosen path. There will always be those who disagree or dissent from a decision. There will sometimes be winners and losers, at subtle political levels as well as more obvious material levels. Taking the time to hear voices and build as much collaboration as possible before hand, and then working at managing the pain afterwards while committing to the decision is a really key skill. It’s never either or. It’s a dance. And the moment of a decision is a kind of madness, but some of the best leaders I have seen in action are able to do it this way.
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A half day spent on Chaordic design. There is nothing more indicative of the intention to create truly participatory meetings than the willingness to make design them collaboratively. As one young person once said to me about Open Space “I love this process because I know that whoever controls the agenda controls the meeting.” Collaborative design is fractal and can happen at all levels of an initiative. It can also be initiated at all levels of an initiative. My hypothesis is that the extent to which people will participate in a meeting is directly related to the extent to which they are connected to the necessity for and purpose of a meeting. Taking time to name these helps ensure high degrees of engagement. Literally, nothing about us without us.
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A good question that came after I taught the Chaordic stepping stones: “This seems like it would work in an egalitarian environment but what about when there are real issues of power?” Mapping the urgent necessity of the moment should surface that reality. Naming the people who need to be involved is an important moment to name who has the power to say “no” and shut this down. In my experience every new initiative has a window of opportunity and a sponsor who will keep it open for a while. Until they don’t. Knowing you have limited time is helpful to focus on what’s really important and WHO is really important to include and HOW.
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How is Open Space a leadership practice? The moment of posting and the hosting a conversation that matters is what does it. A person responds to a call and takes responsibility for something important. For calling a conversation that needs to be called. They write it up and stick it on the wall and then show up to host. In these simple acts are the hallmarks of participatory practice. Post and host. Take responsibility for what’s important.
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One of the features of things like Pro Action Cafe is the way the constraints some times force naive expertise to be present. Having four at every table means sometimes people don’t get their first choice of projects to work on. They might end up a table where they have no idea what’s happening. We always encourage them to participate anyway because these are where the oddball questions, the “dumb questions” and the new ideas come from. Never underestimate naive expertise. If you want some try to explain what you are doing at work to our 16 year old niece. You will instantly learn some new things.
I was in a call with a colleague yesterday and we were discussing Founder’s Syndrome. Over the years, it’s one of the more persistent patterns I have seen in non-profits and social enterprises. There are a lot of similar aspects to this pattern, and it generally unfolds like this:
A person or small group of people start something. Usually, they come from the front line and have experience working directly with people, delivering services, restoring landscapes, organizing campaigns, etc. With a little bit of success, these folks start thinking about growing their operations and stabilizing them over time. This means bringing in staff, board members, and funders who believe in them and want to support the vision. Some staff may be the same kind of front-line folks that the founder was. Still, many will be experts in another aspect of growing and operating an organization: managers, board members, marketers, finance people and so on. While these folks are all crucial to running an organization well, they don’t always share the founder’s experience with grassroots or front-line work.
Often, as the organization grows, the founder realizes that their role can no longer be directly involved in the front-line operations of the organization. They retreat to a more visionary role, and, as the holder of the core story and vision of the organization, they become an ambassador for the work, obtaining funding and support and good board members who can oversee the organization. This sounds good, but it can often generate many issues, especially as the founder begins to sense the end of their involvement with their organization.
At this stage a number of inevitable patterns begin to emerge. They don’t always work like this, but these are common enough that I see them over and over in organizations that have been around for a couple of decades, sometimes less.
The founder begins to feel irrelevant and starts getting nosy. If your whole life has been spent creating programs for vulnerable youth, you might not find yourself relishing leading an organization set up to do this. Founders often have a hard time removing themselves from the day-to-day operations because their heart lies with the activism and the work of change-making, not organizational sustaining. Sometimes founders will involve themselves too much in the front-line work, micro-managing and being unaware of their power and influence. This can lead to trust issues, where newer hires don’t feel like they can learn and grow in their jobs. The antidote to this is to establish good governance structures and good roles and for the founder to transition into a new role through learning and cultivating leadership.
Hardly anyone thinks of succession until it’s too late. This controlling dynamic affects the ability of a founder to plan well for succession. Very few founders give much thought to their own disappearance from their life’s work, especially when building and growing an organization which relies so heavily on them. If an organization successfully survives over the long term, there will always come a time when the founder will step back. I have talked with founders who occupy all points of the spectrum that range from “I can’t leave because the organization will collapse without me” to “if the organization dies when I’m gone, I’m okay with that.” Once you’ve created a structure and moved into a leadership role, it is time to think ahead about how you will get out of it. Even if that is 20 years ahead, it shapes your approach to mentorship and shared leadership. Building shared leadership early will help folks move into roles and create mutual support relationships that allow people in the organization to grow into these roles, increasing organizational resiliency over time.
Resisting change. Organizations that grow their stability also become less able to change. Board members appointed to support the founder’s vision often govern to a rigid version of what that looks like, and Boards like this are always more risk-averse than a swashbuckling social entrepreneur. Funders can enforce a kind of rigidity of approach too as funding grants can bend an organization’s operations to the funder’s theory of change rather than create the ongoing ability of social enterprises to grow and adapt. Stability is a polarity, and from the beginning, organizations need to develop resiliency rather than robustness. They must survive by being changed rather than stand as a bulwark against change. This is hard when you deliver services because clients require a continuity of care, and there are no easy answers to these questions. Managing this polarity is crucial for overcoming a founder’s syndrome, where the governance and funding are tied to an original vision and are not allowed to grow beyond the founder.
Splits between board and staff. In the early days of an organization, everyone is moving in the same direction, doing the same things and pitching in wherever they need to. However, as organizations become larger and more stable, roles become highly differentiated. Board members are often chosen more because of their connections to funding and power than to the front-line work. Staff are learning and adapting at the coal face of the work. The two groups often develop a distance between them, making it hard for them to be mutually supportive. When organizations ask me to help them with strategic planning, I always ask them to do it jointly with the board and staff and even clients and other stakeholders. Organizations that set their mandates and future plans through closed board sessions tend to suffer from a deep lack of situational awareness about the organization’s context. This can exacerbate founder’s syndrome even after the founder has left, as they will often invoke the founder’s intentions in their role as stewards and guardians of that vision. Ignoring the needs, concerns, creativity and awareness of staff and partners is a good way to dig a hole of irrelevancy for an organization.
This is just a bit of the ground I covered with my colleague yesterday. What patterns and responses do you notice?
A little piece I’ve just written about Harrison Owen’s work on High Performance Systems for an Art of Participatory Leadership workbook on the connections between Open Space Technology facilitation and leadership for self-organization.
From the moment Open Space was formalized as a meeting method in 1985, its creator, Harrison Owen, saw massive potential for the process to inform organizational design and leadership. Watching groups of 100 or more people self-organize a conference over multiple days was simply a microcosm of what could go on in organizational life. It offered a radical view that perhaps there was a different way to organize and a different way to lead when we are confronted with complexity and chaos.
In many ways, Open Space Technology was the doorway to the participatory leadership approaches championed by the Art of Hosting community. In his book Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World, Owen shares his observation that what he saw happening in Open Space meetings was a practical expression of what organizational scholars were observing in high-performance teams. He formulated this working hypothesis:
High Performance is the productive interplay of diverse, complex forces, including chaos, confusion, and conflict, characterized by holiness, health, and harmony. it is harmonious, including all elements of harmony, both consonance and dissonance, in that multiple forces work together to create a unitary flow. It is whole in the sense that there is a clear focus, direction, and purpose. It is healthy in that the toxins of its process (metabolic byproducts in organisms) are eliminated effectively and without prejudice to itself or its environment. High Performance can never be sustained at the cost of a fouled nest. A High Performance System is one that does all of the above with excellence over time, and certainly better than the competition.
Harrison Owen. Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance, p. 35
To create the conditions for high performance, Owen turned to what he had learned from facilitating Open Space Technology meetings. Creativity springs from urgency, passion (including conflict) and responsibility. It is facilitated by providing leaders with the time and space to organize their work and choose the places where they make a maximum contribution of learning or doing, and essentially getting out of the way of work. When these conditions are in place, and the leader simply holds the space for self-organization, a high-performing System will emerge.
In Wave Rider, Owen provides three simple principles for leaders to create these spaces:
- “Never work harder than you have to.” Let the managers manage, and as a leader, focus only on what is yours to do. Take action that feeds the system with resources of time, money, and connection and holds space for outcomes to emerge.
- “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.” This requires a leader to be patient and wait for the system’s wisdom to emerge. Too often, leaders respond to their own anxiety and discomfort with uncertainty by rushing to a solution or constraining their people to deliver something—ANYTHING—on time and under budget. For complex problems, staying open longer and allowing people to self-organize and explore many options for moving forward will increase the chances of novelty and innovation.
- “Never, ever, think you are in charge.” The myth of control lies at the heart of much management and organizational leadership literature. The assumption is that if you simply maintain control of the situation, including focusing on accountability for deliverables and directing efforts in a single direction, you will hit your KPIs and achieve a return on investment. The reality is that things are much more messy than that, Understanding that the leader is never solely in charge of the whole system liberates the leader to address situations with curiosity and invitation and builds the conditions for co-creation.
Owen explored these principles and approaches alongside the emergence of the World Wide Web and the idea that organizations could become more flexible and agile if they self-organized in networks around core purposes. New organizational forms and emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, enabled by the web’s ability for people to find each other and resources quickly. Manufacturing was revolutionized by agile approaches to product development, and organizational development became informed by complexity and dialogic practices often based on experiences formed using large-scale self-organizing meeting methods like Open Space Technology. The dynamics of self-organization were harnessed to create currency systems and governance models, which required leaders to be more like facilitators or hosts than dictators or controllers.
Participatory leadership is a set of practices rooted in the need to create spaces of creative self-organization and collective responsibility for new responses to complex and emergent problems. Facilitating Open Space Technology meetings is a tangible way to explore and practice these transferable skills from a single gathering to years-long project management to creating entire organizational structures.
When we are teaching dialogue practice and participatory meeting design, I often draw on the example of organizational and team staff meetings. Every organization I’ve worked with has these meetings and they ae almost nearly the same: an endless re-iteration of what people are doing, and rarely nothing more compelling that an email wouldn’t take care of. There is rarely even time for discussion becasue you have to get through everyone’s update in the 30 minutes assigned for the meeting.
So I often advise folks who want to bring more participatory culture to their organizations to focus on staff meetings. Rotate leadership, get serious about pruning out stuff that can be done by email and replace it with dialogue. After all, 30 minutes with an open agenda is a great place to brainstorm and discuss the thorny questions that are are dogging your team.
Today I cam across a great post from Tom Kerwin addressed to team leaders to help change their staff updates. I like this becasue it builds a container for team members to think about their work and share it in a way that makes it clear and helpful to others. (I’ve often said that if you’re having trouble explaining what you do, try to tell you great-aunt or your teenager about it.)
At any rate, here’s how Tom has re-designed his team’s update meetings:
I asked everyone to give a mini-pitch. In one minute, tell us:
- What’s the main challenge your team is tackling right now?
- What approach are you using to help your team tackle it?
- What are you looking for to tell you if your approach is working?
- And what are you looking for to tell you if your approach isn’t working?
I designed this to follow a key complexity principle: don’t try to change people, instead change their interactions. I designed this particular interaction to be a kind of ‘intuition-pump’ that could indirectly generate beneficial effects. And it did.
Here are five cool things it ended up doing:
- Everyone on my team got to practise pitching their work so that it would make sense to others and not only to themselves. This is a valuable skill in business. It took some repetitions to get this working, but we started live in low pressure small groups to lower the barrier and enable people to learn from each other. We could choose to switch to asynchronous written pitches when the ritual was stable.
- In order to figure out a pitch, each person had to understand why they were doing what they were doing for themselves. People started to develop a sense for different shapes and contexts of work, rather than sticking to one tool or process.
- I could instantly tell when someone was confused about what they were doing because their pitch either didn’t add up internally or didn’t cohere with the team’s strategy. We could grab time right then and there to figure it out together – before they’d spent days on pointless stuff. And this happened less over time.
- We started to enjoy the progress updates. I’ll use a food analogy. Before the change to the meeting format, it felt like we had to sit through people droning on about their food shopping lists. Afterwards, we got to hear chefs inspiring us with the delicious meals they were preparing.
- And folks on different teams started to actually understand what their colleagues were working on. This meant fewer complaints about not having enough visibility, and much more spontaneous collaboration.