We are deep in the rainy season here on the west coast of North America. I’ve been reflecting on my year of work and noticing a few patterns that are coming to mind as I think about the kinds of questions that our clients have been confronting this year. I don’t know that these observations are especially novel, but they do represent patterns that I have seen this year. they also represent places where I think our work can be helpful.
Something of the bigger context.
As it always has been. But that bigger context is currently full of austerity, fear and polarization. Much of our work is within the non-profit and public sector, and our clients have all been facing declines in funding, uncertainty about the future, skyrocketing need from their own clients and a deep questions about using their leadership to confront polarity and division in their organizations and communities.
It used to be that we were confronting a “scarcity mindset” where we feel to recognize the wealth of ideas and leadership that we actually have. This leaves leaders and organizations retreating into their own shells as they try hard to shoulder the responsibility of the work. Often in our organizational development work, we could do things that lift our eyes up a bit and help activate the leadership throughout the organization.
These days, on top of that dynamic, I think we’re facing an “austerity mindset” whereby that wealth of talent, attention and money is still present but it is actually locked away and not available to us. It has been concentrated elsewhere and everyone seems to be preparing to simply do without it.
I’m certainly not 100% sure of this shift, but it feels like the issues leaders are confronting are shifting in ways that we continue to explore with them and their teams, and my colleagues as well. What helps at this time is continued connection and sophisticated situational awareness to see and name what is happening and to be honest about what is available to work with. Maybe, dear readers, you are seeing it too. All work happens in a context and being able to name this context is important, without getting lost in it. I wrote about this back in September.
Five year strategic planning is dead.
The Covid-19 experience seemed to finally put to rest the typical five year strategic planning process. Everyone now has practical and tangible experience of how the best laid plans can be knocked sideways. And in the last year or two, as organizations have been recovering from Covid, they have no been hit with massive uncertainty in the world, including cuts to their funding. And it very much seems irrational, arbitrary and determined by bigger dynamics that are outside of the control of the organizations we get to work with.
In response, the kind of planning I have been asked to do more and more this year is about scenario planning and arriving at a set of practice principles that can help organizations lead towards a variety of futures. I do love this kind of work. It has relational benefits of visioning and dreaming together, but is rooted in deep and practical need for on the ground responses. I’m not an expert at operational planning – and there is always a need for that kind of work – but bringing people together to think about futures and develop some shared resourcefulness about responding to what might happen is useful.
Connection is needed but trust is shaky at the centre.
I have had a blog posts sitting in my drafts for a little while that talks about how we can move from centralized planning and control towards a more networked form of leadership. Ever since I ran across Open Space Technology in 1995 I have seen the need for this, because as Harrison Owen (who we lost in 2025) observed, Open Space activates an organizational structure of shared leadership and responsibility that is latent in any group of people. He called it “The High Performance Organization” and it checks a lot of boxes for what leaders want: engaged staff, ideas and responsibility sprouting up all over, connected and self-organizing teams that are working in a common direction, but meeting challenges where they are at.
The problem is that such networks really depend on the ability and willingness of organizational leaders to open up space for that to happen. We spend a lot of time in our longer engagements working with senior leaders to help them sustain their ability to truly trust the folks in their groups to do the work. It is sometimes a hard thing to bootstrap, but once it gets going, these types of networks can be quite powerful. Central leaders and organizations become conveners rather than resource sinks, and work becomes meaningful. It requires leaders to do the work they are uniquely positioned to do but to release to the community work that can be better done at the edges.
In the little supporter-owned soccer club I am a part of we do this but having our core leadership care for the fiduciary and technical responsibilities or the club and the rest of us live by the principles of “Assume your talents are needed, and proceed until apprehended.” In this way we activate community and true ownership over what we are doing.
And speaking of polarities…
This kind of things means that polarities abound: centralized control and distributed responsibility; continuity of tradition and new responses to emerging conditions; maintaining fiduciary obligations while stretching beyond; focus on the core external offering and building interior connections and development. Every planning process I have been involved in this year seems to hang on one or more of these polarities. Often the conversations about need and purpose start with an acknowledgement that both sides of the polarity are needed and the challenge is to lean into the skills and talent we have to do both. As contextual uncertainty has increased, our clients seem more willing to wrestle with these polarities rather than simply seeing their current conditions as a problem to be solved.
As always, we need to be thoughtful about how we think about change.
We are living in a world which seems to be revelling in ignorance about complexity. Every problem now seems to have a simple answer, with predictable and brutal results. We are fed this line in our civic conversations too, organizational realities and personal lives too. Social media algorithms have shaped our ideas about what is happening in the world and what we should do about it. I think complexity literacy is more important than ever. Just being able to think about the different kinds of change out there TOGETHER helps us to make sense of things in a more useful way and in a way that builds more relationships and therefore more resilience. Some of my go to frameworks for helping folks understand how change happens, the Cynefin framework and the Two Loops framework, continue to be extremely useful for helping people describe the spaces they are in, and chaordic planning has stood the test of time for collaboratively designing responses to these kinds of conditions.
AI is helping us delude ourselves into believing that we don’t need craft, or the ability to confront uncertainty with relationality.
It used to be fairly common that a client would discover that I was a facilitator and hand me an agenda and ask me to facilitate it. Its the reason I wrote the chaordic stepping stones guide in the first places, so that we could explore the possibility space together and design something that was fit to needs instead of simply rolling out a best practice. This year was the first time I received agendas generated by ChatGPT and asked to facilitate those. It took me a moment to figure this out, but I think that many people are probably asking their favourite large language model to give them an agenda for a two day strategic planning process. We are witnessing a massive cultural crises stemming from the destruction of craft across all the arts including music, writing, visual arts and process arts. Designing and facilitating participatory work is a craft. the two go hand in hand. One would never give an accomplished artist a paint-by-numbers set and ask them to use their technique to fill it out the way one wanted. Or hand a musician a piece of music to play that has notes in it, but no sense of development, harmony or rhythm.
Artificial intelligence is excellent at giving one the impression that the uncertainty they are confronting is easily solved. The tools that we currently have access to are extremely powerful aids to help with facilitation work, but they simply cannot replace the craft of relationship building and the time it takes to do work that generates meaningful contribution and ownership and sustainability. Facilitators and participatory leaders need to continue to develop the skills to work with groups of people in increasing complexity, within decreased time frames and a climate of austerity, polarization and uncertainty. Our chatbots are incapable of understanding what we know when we enter a space like that, but those of us that fear the ambiguity of these spaces can find ourselves retreating into the comforting certainty of a set of answers that come from what appears to be a divine and omniscient source. We just have to be careful not to lose the ability to sit together and figure something out. Keep watching sports like soccer and hockey. Keep making music with each other. Exercise the feeling and abilities that we have to make and undo things together without knowing where we are going or what might happen next. Move together, slightly slower than you think you should be, and seeking surprise along the way.
Stories and shared work are helpful.
I had a lovely call the other day with Cynthia Kurtz and Ashley Cooper are some folks Ashley is working with around using Participatory Narrative Inquiry to work with stories in communities and organizations. I continue to use that collection of methods for dealing with difficult and complex situations, including future scenario planning, because my experience has been that making sense of grounded stories together is the best way to engage with the uncertainty and opinionated conversation that passes for civic dialogue. I’m interested in methods and processes of civic deliberation and address conflict with process design. How can we bring difference into governance without confusing it with conflict? How can we work with conflict without confusing it with violence? This is not an area I have ever been comfortable in, but I have found that stories and circle are the best way to have a group of people dive in together on shared work that helps differences become resources and helps conflict become co-discovery. In watching the current kinds of conversations we are having in Canada around things like Aboriginal title, it’s clear that folks with opinions not rooted in actual experience have a hard time even beginning to understand issues, let alone seeing ways in which reconciling differences can be the work of a mature politics, and a potentially defining characteristic of the Canadian project.
So these are some of the things I have seen this year and I expect that these are threads that will continue to grow and bloom in the coming year too. I’m really interested what YOU have noticed?
Cedric Jamet and I together at the Art of Hosting Reimagining Education gathering a couple of weeks ago.
The other week we were sitting in the Queen’s University Biological Station in Elgin Ontario, opening our third annual Art of Hosting on Reimagining Education. Cedric Jamet was teaching about the chaordic path, the term we use for the leadership path that works with a dance of chaos and order. The chaordic space is the space of self-organization, where structure and form creates the conditions for otherwise chaotic spaces to produce direction, coherence, energy and engagement without top down control. It is a way of conceptualizing self-organization in groups, which is the kind of facilitation practice I specialize in.
The idea of self-organization, what it is, how it arises, what practices support it is been the single most important organizing question of my professional career. As Cedric put it in Elgin, this is what the world needs, to be hosted so that people can self-organize to improve their conditions, make beautiful and sustainable things and sustain good work with strong relationships. When we create the conditions that enable self-organization, we are creating places of “safe uncertainty” and relational connectivity. We create what I call “dialogic containers” which become places of meaning and sustainable connection. Strong dialogic containers can hold difference and conflict without rendering the relational field. They can provide spaces for meaning and depth and purpose. Sustained over time they can become “life-giving contexts.” As a facilitator and in my work leading and supporting leaders, everything we do points in this direction.
Over the past 20 years this inquiry has led me into two major areas of practice. I have studied and worked deeply with the Art of Hosting and the field of participatory process design and facilitation. Based around the “Four Fold Practice” – presence, participation, hosting contribution, and co-creation – the Art of Hosting is a simple framework for a practice that, as Cedric said, helps us enable self-organization. This is a well-established field of facilitation practice and I work with facilitation methods that are found in the fields of dialogic organizational development, collaborative change management, and anthro-complexity including those contained in the seminal collection of large groups methods, and small scale Liberating Structures, as well as the suite of methods from Participatory Narrative Inquiry.
The other area of practice I have explored is complexity, in an effort to understand the conditions by which self-organization arises. This has led me through the various threads of complexity in human and living systems initially through the work of Senge, Wheatley, Scharmer who came out of the system thinking world with new metaphors, models and understandings about how things worked. From there I dove deep into anthro-complexity, championed primarily by Dave Snowden who work on ontologies is a significant contribution to this field as it helps leaders, facilitators and process designers make good choices about the way they participate and intervene in different situations. I also read deeply and learned with other complexity-focused theorists and process designers like Cynthia Kurtz, whose work on story is especially important, and Glenda Eoyang, whose work on complexity and whose suite of methods and approaches called Human Systems Dynamics is accessible, simple, and extremely effective for the most part in seeing and working with complexity.
The two most significant academic works I’ve published reflected these two streams as I have written about and explored the ideas of dialogic containers as the key structures which enable self-organization and meaning-making. In Hosting and Holding Containers, I talk about the concept of a dialogic container and use the four-fold practice to describe how to work with these phenomena. In “Hosting Dialogic Containers: a key to working in complexity” I talk about containers from a more complexity-informed perspective and discuss the role of constraints in designing and hosting containers. A subsequent paper, published only in Japanese is actually closer to my current thinking on the constraints framework that I use.
This morning I am sitting in an Open Space meeting while all around this place a small team of folks are busy engaging in conversations that are necessary for creating their future. These people are interested in pedagogy and learning design, and I was struck by the fact that Open Space was a new experience for almost every single one of them. But I can hear the snippets of conversation and see the energy and attention in the work that is happening, and I continue to be astonished at how powerful self-organization is, given the right kind of container for it. We have an urgent question that is a deep attractor. We have connections and exchanges that are already strong in the team and made stronger by the visioning conversations we had yesterday. And we have important boundaries, including a threshold that was crossed with a new Director, a beautiful space that is full or opportunity and a timeline for the work that is both bounded and generous. There is urgency but not emergency, still room for excitement creativity and energy.
I have done many hundreds of Open Space events, large and small, and each one has delighted me as I watch groups of people self-organize and take responsibility for the issues that matter to them. I remained astonished by the powerful and generative nature of a life-giving dialogic container that emerges from a few enabling constraints thoughtfully applied and held. And I remain grateful for the immense body of work that underlies this approach to human organizations and communities and all those friends and teachers who guided and taught me along the way.
I had a lovely call with my old friend Johnnie Moore the other day. We catch up a couple of times a year and our mutual friendship with Rob Paterson, caused us to connect up on Zoom and raise a virtual glass to Rob’s life and in particular the ways we knew each other, through work, ideas and good friendship. Johnnie’s got a great post up on his blog today about “Facilitation Antlers” in which, as usual, he manages to speak the thing that occupies my mind too: the pitfall of facilitators feeling the need to explain what they are doing, instead of just getting on with it. It’s one we all have to dance around. Johnnie is offering a facilitation training in November in Cambridge, UK. I highly recommend you sign up for it. I would if I was there.
Another friend, Sally Swarthout Wolf, is also birthing an offering into the world. I’ve just had a chance to review and provide a blurb for her new book “Restorative Justice Up Close” which is a broad collection of stories of restorative justice practice, primarily from across the USA. These are the kinds of stories that experienced practitioners crave, becasue it helps to inspire us in our own work. It’s not a how-to manual, but a how-did-I collection. Even if you are aren’t a facilitator of restorative justice, if you work with people in groups, there is a lot in this book to learn from, especially when conflict is afoot. I worked closely with Sally over a number of years when we were running Art of Hosting trainings in Illinois in part with the Illinois Balanced and Restorative Justice Project. I adore her and her colleagues. The book is available for pre-order now.
And while I’m at it, here is a list of the facilitation training offerings I’m involved in the fall. We have spots for both of our Art of Hosting trainings in Vancouver and in Elgin, Ontario, and you can still register for the Stories and System Change workshop I’m doing alongside Donna Brown and my SFU one-day course in the new year.
Yesterday I came across a paper that was published in a well-respected journal discussing how a group of computer scientists had discovered that participatory methods are much better way of organizing a conference that traditional methods of presentations, panels, and concurrent sessions (which are often just smaller presentations). They took the time to document their work and share it with their community of scientists, which is excellent. The conference itself seems to have included a great deal of dialogue and conversation around topics that were chose in advance by the participants and scheduled by the organizers. But, I won’t share the paper because it has significant issues with the name it uses for the method involved.
The paper refers to “World Cafe” and then proceeds to describe a process where over the course of the conference, two 45 minute sessions were held during which participants talked about topics that had been submitted weeks in advance and selected by organizers who then also appointed people to lead these discussions There were also panel discussions and social events.
On its own this is a fine conference design. Not especially ground breaking in the world of conferences, but novel to the organizers, and the feedback was positive from the participants which is what really matters. The issue I have is what appears to be the misattribution of the term “World Cafe” to the dialogue method that the organizers used. In defining the term, the paper references a website (now a dead link, but archived here) which does indeed provide a reference to the World Cafe method, but I don’t think they used the method per se in the conference itself.
Here’s why this matters.
I do believe that methods like World Cafe and Open Space Technology are powerful and extremely useful ways of organizing and working wth large groups of people in dialogue. It is the core of my work – convening large groups for strategic learning and engagement. There are many ways of working with large groups, but these methods are well established and they share a common feature: leadership or facilitation of these methods is a very particular act, one that has a very different relationship to control and power than working with small groups. Being able to “hold space” in these processes involves using enabling constraints to create the conditions for emergence. Technically speaking: enabling constraints are boundaries that contain an activity such that certain kinds of things can happen within the dialogic container. That is, in the context of a World Cafe for example, organizers and process hosts make decisions about what the conversation is to be about and design questions that enable every person in the process to participate. We also provide the conditions so that conversations can be self-hosted by small groups by making it as easy as possible for people to engage. What happens in these contexts is therefore emergent.
Sometimes I use a metaphor like this: classical facilitation is like sailing a boat – you respond to the wind and the waves to help guide the vessel on its journey towards its destination. Large group facilitation is more like pushing a boat out onto a lake in such a way that it also ends up travelling towards its destination. Once you’ve pushed the boat out, you have no more contact with it, practically speaking. Whatever will happen will happen (or as Harrison Owen wrote, “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.”) Therefore, the art of facilitating large group methods is very much in how the container and the participants are prepared, how the first few moments of hosting are framed, how the room and space is set up to enable the work, and then it is very much about NOT doing anything after you have let people get down to it. This is extremely difficult, but the results can be extraordinary in terms of ideas, engagement, and the overall revelation of capacity of the group itself. This is the heart of participatory work. The Art of Hosting, if you will.
The methods that have arisen around this common garden of practice and experience are well documented. When a person uses a term like “World Cafe” or “Open Space Technology” I would expect them to reference the primary material that exists in published form and use that method with some fidelity. I don’t mind if people change or create new methods from the world that has gone before, and in fact, as long as one has a good understanding of the basic principles and practice of participatory work, this kind of thing is to be encouraged, so that the needs of the group can be best met. But I have significant issues with what happens when this is done poorly.
Many people over the years have asked me to run an Open Space meeting and what they then describe is something that is far from Open Space. Commonly they describe a process whereby some or all of these kinds of features are present: people submit topics in advance, or organizers choose from a list of topics, or there is some voting on which topics will be discussed on the day, or perhaps organizers look at the agenda and then cluster conversations. All of these “modified Open Space events” are not just modified Open Space events. They actually are different kinds of events. They reveal an unstated limiting belief held by the organizers. They take the form of Open Space and introduce some level of facilitator control that is deliberately NOT a part of Open Space Technology facilitation. Why this happens, I think, largely depends on organizers’ feeling that they cannot fulfill Harrison Owen’s oft stated but rarely recorded admonition to “trust the people, not the process.” Open Space Technology in particular is a method that enables facilitators and leaders to fully trust the participants. Ironically, if you follow the method very closely (trusting the process), it initiates radical trust in the people. If you find yourself afraid of some outcome or another happening that you won’t have control over, then you are more likely to take Harrison’s original method and introduce a point of control there. That MIGHT be fine, but I always coach people to do this very mindfully and consciously and not to call what they have done “Open Space”
In its worst case, I have seen so much of the unexamined limiting belief creep into a process that the process is no longer “Open Space” or “World Cafe” but something else entirely. And once again, that is fine, but if you insist on still using the term “Open Space” or “World Cafe” to describe what you are doing (or even using the world “modified” before those terms) then you are doing the field a great disservice, and you are risking having knowledgeable participants view your motives with suspicion. These methods are not new, even though most people in the world don’t know the jargon or technical language associated with our field (and they don’t need to at all to be able to participate.) But if someone thinks they are coming to an Open Space Technology gathering and they are then met with a process whereby they have to pitch their idea to a large group of people who may vote to reject it from the agenda, they are going to be confused at best, and probably angry at worst.
So I want to leave this with a couple of encouraging ideas. First, use the methods. They are amazing. They have been honed in grounded practice, they are grounded in good theory and they work. They are widely and freely shared by the founders or designers and they are useful because they don’t need any modification beyond choosing the theme or questions for your own context. When you use them with fidelity to the original work, let people know that is what you are doing and share your sources.
Second, make up new methods. Go for it! There is nothing to stop you from really thinking through what a groups needs and creating a new method that will help people meet the urgent necessity of the moment. Use a good design tool like the chaordic stepping stones to help you think through your design. If you alight on something really good that no one else has ever done, make it replicable and share it in the myriad of communities of practice, like the Art of Hosting community, that are interested in such things.
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PS. If you are going to publish a paper on your work and your findings, using participatory methods for large scale self-organized dialogue, here is a good example, with proper references and a discussion of the methods and how the final design relates to those methods. Please do publish! I have contacted the lead author of the paper I referenced at the beginning of this post to help make peer-reviewed changes to the paper to have it better reflect the knowledge in the field of participatory dialogue methods, so that it can be more widely shared without skewing academic references to World Cafe. If we get to make those changes, I’ll happily share their work.
Here are four key insights from a conversation on designing good invitations for Open Space meetings. This is the real work of hosting self-organization. It’s not JUST about facilitation.