For the past two years, I have been active in the Art of Hosting fellowship. This is a global community of practitioners dedicated to uncovering the new and emerging forms of meaningful conversation and organizational shape. Together we have been conducting trainings, working together on projects and deeply learning our patterns.
Several of our mates in this fellowship have been working hard to bring about an online presence for our work, and today it went live. So I introduce to you the brand new Art of Hosting site, a place that describes what we are doing, how we are doing it and invites you to join us. Please take some time to poke around there and draw some inspiration from the amazing resources and content that has been assembled.
And if you are interested in exploring this pattern more deeply, there are several opportunities to do so in upcoming trainings, including one here on Bowen Island BC in a couple of weeks.
[tags]art of hosting[/tags]
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Last week I was working with a team of business school professors meeting in their annual retreat to plan their teaching for an integrated introduction to their MBA program. The professors themselves come from all facets of the business world: logistics, accounting, organizational behaviour, ethics, marketing. The often use the terms “hard” and “soft” skills, but only in reference to the stereotypes they are trying to confront in their students.
It’s always interesting to me to see where “hard” and “soft” skills blur, because in practice they truly do blur. In general “hard” skills refer to those practices in business that are about the external world: financials, accounting, finance, market surveys, logistics. “Soft” skills are associated with human resources, relationships, learning, personal development and ethics.
There is a false dichotomy in the business world between these two skill sets, and one of the professors obseved that one can be a good manager knowing hard or soft skills, but one can only be a good leader with both.
I have been thinking about this when today Rob Paterson posts an interview he did with the staff of silverorange, a tech firm in PEI. In the interview there was a great short summary of what it looks like in the real world when hard and soft skills blend:
Do you have a financial plan at all?
“Yes and no – most business plans are also based on a fantasy that you can predict the future in detail. Most also set tight goals when the environment is shifting that is also very risky. You can get trapped doing the wrong thing very hard when the environment has changed.
Instead, we set broad goals. (here is a link to Dan’s view of how best to plan for the future) In the context of never being able to know the future in detail we…(quote from Dan’s post) have no master plan at silverorange. The cat is out of the bag! We do however have broad goals and ideals that factor into our daily, monthly, and yearly decisions. We always have these goals and ideals in mind. We also make decisions the good old fashioned way. The necessary people sit as equals and hammer it out. Often the conversation becomes heated, in the good way. When we are done the best decision has been made for us.
When I look back over the past seven years of silverorange I see a route that has veered its way around tremendous obstacles, some we saw coming, and others we had no idea that we were dodging. Our process of quick, frequent, and small decision making has led us down a safe and secure path.
If I was an investor I would know that you pulled your cash flow projections out of your ass. I wouldn’t care. I would look for the following:
- What are the overall goals & ideals that you are striving for?
- Has you surrounded yourself with a team that can hammer out good small decisions?
- Are you willing to have your idea bend, warp, & mutate based on frequent, small, decisions?
I propose that we all change to process and people based business plans. One, maybe two pages at most.”
The religion of scientific materialism has privileged data over intuition, but the silverorange team is calling for a change, for a balance. It’s great to see this happening in business, and in business schools.
[tags]Rob Paterson, silverorange, business skills[/tags]
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From whiskey river
Only to a magician is the world forever fluid,
infinitely mutable and eternally new.
Only he knows the secret of change.
Only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness
to become something else
and it is from this universal tension
that he draws his power.
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Been quiet here the last couple of weeks but not in my life. Two weeks ago I visited The Shire near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia to teach with Toke Moeller, Sera Thompson and Tim Merry in the Art of Hosting. It was a beautiful time, working on the land, working with people from Yarmouth, Montreal and the eastern US who are doing deeply important work with youth, food and community. And it was great working with my mates.
A couple of pieces have showed up around the web about this training. Here is a post from Brian Hurlburt, a truly generous soul in Yarmouth who hosts web sites for community groups:
The Art of Hosting training is open to leaders, managers, teachers and pioneers from all walks of life who want to see and act from a new perspective on leadership that sets free one another’s creativity and intelligence. Helping those who want to learn to lead without being possessive, to help without taking credit, to let go in order to achieve more for the common good.
This practice may well require a shift in our thinking and ways of doing things, however since having left the Shire I’ve had more meaningful conversations with my family, friends, and associates! The exclamation point is purposely used because I’ve been to these types of things before; you know those leadership getaways where you get all fired up and then when you leave and return to reality your left with an empty useless feeling! This was totally different!
What I learned there, and what I experienced there was real, meaningful, and lasting! Easily applied in the real world and very affective and effective! In fact I find myself having more meaningful conversations without even trying!
No that’s powerful, when a way of doing things becomes a practice that becomes a natural way of doing things and can be applied in meaningful ways in daily life the course / conference becomes one that will benefit anyone who is open to it and makes themselves available to attend.
It was also great to see Rob Paterson there, who has been recently investigating the nature of “trusted space” on his blog and who found something in what we were talking about to animate those spaces. In the Art of Hosting, we use the term “fellowship” to describe our way of working together and we often refer to each other as “mates.” In talking with others, like Peggy Holman, the word “communitas” is another way of describing it, in perhaps a less gendered way. Regardless, this is a deep form of organizational structure and Toke, Tim, Sera, Rob and I along with others explored this deeply at The Shire.
Essentially, as Rob put it:
I am still amazed that I can know someone I have never met so well. I am not alone in going to work, as I did with Johnnie Moore, on a very dangerous piece of work with a person that I had never met before. There is some weird property of the web that enables Mates to notice the connection. Cyn has helped me overcome my fear of using my body and has put me on a path to keep healthy and fit. She lived only a mile away but we met for years online. Chris arrived at the Shire never having met Tim before. I came to the Shire because of Chris’ request knowing that it would be great. I have only met Chris once before. Many of you have similar stories about finding ‘Mates” in the ‘sphere. I find no separation in these relationships. Reputation is critical in this world…Fellowship is when Mates decide to do the world’s great work together. There is great work to be done that requires exceptional courage and often more than a lifetime to accomplish.
I think that is a lovely description, and it certainly validates my experience of working deeply with others, connected over long distances, engaged in the work of making good in the world. You probably have your own example of this type of organizing and working together. You work on a simple but mammoth task together, not tied to timelines or outcomes but simply knowing that one another are behind you. It is the shape of a circle moving outward from it’s centre, the essential shape of the expansion of the universe. We remain connected in our origins and our committment, and even over vast distances, we seem able to sense what the others are doing, and know when help is needed.
So, I’m curious, what is your mammoth task? And who are your mates? How is your fellowship working?
If you would like to explore more of this way of working, and the role that meaningful conversation plays in it, there are two Art of Hosting trainings coming up this fall. Here on Bowen Island, British Columbia, Tenneson Wolf, Brenda Chaddock, Teresa Posakony and me are hosting a gathering September 24-27, and there is still space. Sera Thompson will be hosting a gathering with Toke and Tim in Boulder Colorado.
[tags]Art of Hosting, Toke Moeller, Tim Merry, Sera Thompson, Rob Paterson[/tags}
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Pema Chodron, a well known Buddhist teacher, is one of my favourite teachers on facilitation practice. She has enhanced my understanding of dealing with tricky situations and scary places with practices, advice and stories which are beautifully rendered.
In this article, “The Answer to Anger and Agression is Patience” she writes about her own struggle to cultivate a practice of patience as the antidote to anger and aggression:
Patience has a quality of enormous honesty in it, but it also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of space for the other person to speak, for the other person to express themselves, while you don’t react, even though inside you are reacting. You let the words go and just be there.
This suggests the fearlessness that goes with patience. If you practice the kind of patience that leads to the de-escalation of aggression and the cessation of suffering, you will be cultivating enormous courage. You will really get to know anger and how it breeds violent words and actions. You will see the whole thing without acting it out. When you practice patience, you’re not repressing anger, you’re just sitting there with it–going cold turkey with the aggression. As a result, you really get to know the energy of anger and you also get to know where it leads, even without going there. You’ve expressed your anger so many times, you know where it will lead. The desire to say something mean, to gossip or slander, to complain–to just somehow get rid of that aggression–is like a tidal wave. But you realize that such actions don’t get rid of the aggression; they escalate it. So instead you’re patient, patient with yourself.
In situations where groups are in conflict, it is pointless to pretend that there isn’t anger and aggression in the room. The presence of this anger and aggression calls for this radical honesty and trust in what is real, and it means being very grounded as you approach what is there and give it your attention. There are few things scarier for a facilitator than leading a group towards the honest appreciation of the true anger and emotions in the room. If you are unable to stand in the fire, exhibiting patience to be there fully yourself, you will not be able to invite others to join you there. The shakier you are, the more afraid everyone else will be.
The challenge is to remain of service to a group of people for whom an honest relationship with what is real is important. Remaining of service means being able to address the anger and aggression honestly, without judging it, which only adds to it. If you think anger is wrong, you won’t be able to be a peacemaker. If you think anger is true, you can go there.
This is a fundamental skill needed in the world right now, on all levels. Think about how you deal with confrontations in your work environment, in your family or in your community. Do you shy away from the anger, or do you let it overwhelm you and do you take a position?
Imagine you were called to facilitate a ceasefire in the Israel – Lebanon conflict. Could you do that? Who do you know in the world that has the capacity to do this? If the answer is no one, what do you think it would take for you to become that person? Trust me, if you are that person, the world needs you right now.
Cultivating patience cultivates peacemaking.
Thanks to my blogless life partner Caitlin Frost for the link.
[tags]pema chodron, patience, peacemaking, peace[/tags]