I was watching the Cop15 conference at a distance and I have been thinking that big conferences are maybe not what it will take to shift things. Bigger and more may not be what is needed, or what works. One of the problems is the pressure and expectation that comes from big gatherings – it tends to result in a level of planning and pre-ordained outcomes that actually suppresses emergent behaviour, and emergent behaviour is the mechanism I believe we need to evolve our next level of being, if we are to have a next level as a species.
An exception to my mind has always been the Open Space conference which is built on self-oganization as a mechanism for fostering emergent understanding and work. In fact, recently I have been returning more and more to Open Space in its most pure and extended forms to generate emergent results embedded in sustainable relationships. I find that as a designer I am maybe sometimes a little guilty of frankly pandering to the fears of clients who want me to design results rather than process. The inclination to control is a strong one, to feel like there is much at stake and so therefore everything must be tightly scripted. And yet the reality is that in the world outside of conference, innovation and emergence is happening all the time in fact most conferences, even conferences of amazing and talented people, are a let down because a small group of people – the organizers – seek to control what happens, making sure everyone has a good experience, as if people aren’t perfectly capable of a good experience on their own. It’s a bummer, and real life, where people get to make their own decisions and take responsibility for what they care for, is a whole lot more exciting and productive.
Of course a sole four day Open Space, powerful as it is for fostering surprising levels of emergence and action, still requires much skillful design. I place a great deal of emphasis on the quality and mode of the invitation. How we invite people – how we ACT when we invite people – often says more about the invitation than the text of the invitation itself. Assembling the right people around the right call is a deep art, and in fact might be the deepest art of all the arts of hosting. But once they are in the room, I think most folks, and especially thoroughbreds, like to have the space to run. To be scripted and moved around, have conversations prematurely cut off or started around false or half guessed-at topics, is a travesty. To see a group of highly talented and motivated people create their own emergent agenda and go to work offering everything they can is a truly inspiring sight and to see them doing so over two, three and four days is to watch a community get born. I have experienced three and four day Open Space gatherings a handful of times, both as a facilitator and as a participant and without exception powerful, enduring and totally unexpected results have emerged. And these results have lasted, evolved and morphed into amazing things. I have never seen those kinds of results from other kinds of tightly scripted conferences.
I have been thinking about this for a while, and the missed opportunity in Copenhagen combined with some other observations about over the top conference planning has led me to really question whether the ONE ALL PURPOSE GATHERING has not seen better days. We are so muich more able to work in local and disbursed ways that we don’t need to wait for the big conference to do good work. We can just get on Skype and start going at it. In fact I’m surprised how few people actually do do this. Instead they wait for the big gathering to start something. Having said that, Open Space offers the nearest conference based analogue to this marketplace of life. As designers and conveners, we simply need a powerful invitation, the influence to connect to the right people, and then stand aside as skillful and motivated people connect with one another and find the work they are meant to do together.
Almost 20 years ago I was a part of pioneering something and I had no idea I was doing that. Gathered under the creative eye of Rob Winslow at The Union Theatre in Peterborough Ontario, a small cast of us put on a weekly improvised soap opera called “The Cactus Hotel: A Western Philosophy” (My God! Here is the brochure for it!) Every Sunday night all summer we improvised a one hour show that advanced the story of a number of characters who found themselves in an imaginary world that owed its existence to the marriage of the Hotel California, Baghdad Cafe, and Trent University’s Cultural Studies department. I now know that what we were doing was a improvised longform that was funny, tender and explored vast emotional and philosophical terrain and character development.
This past week I was in Portland, Oregon at the annual conference of the Applied Improvisation Network, and when I told that story, long time improvisers were surprised and delighted that such a thing was going on in small town Onatrio in 1991. I felt grateful, looking back 18 years to have been a part of that, and I realized this week, just how much of what I know about invitation owes its origins to that summer.
Unless engaging in deep play with a group of 125 giggling, creative and talented extroverts is your idea of a good time, the Applied Improvisational Network is not for you! But show up there ready to learn, eager to test yourself and curious about what is on offer (and willing to offer as much as you get back) and show up to it with Viv McWaters, Geoff Brown and Ann Patillo in your gang, and you have the makings of the most delightful professional development I have ever done for myself.
The gathering was spread over three days at an incredible venue – Edgefield – which itself is an improvisation in action. Once a former poor house, where homeless were rounded up and housed so they could have the dignity of working for no pay, the plae is now an artful quirky and eccentric resort complex with 15 pubs on site and some good restaurants to boot. The owner’s vision was to have people live a pub crawl and then crash in a bed and do it all over again the next day. ‘Twas the perfect venue.
Over the two days we heard from a couple of keynotes including the incomparable Armando Diaz, and the very amazing Nick Owen. Nick should be the standard for keynote presenters. Given that my tolerance for sitting in rows of chairs listening to someone speak at me is zero, the fact that Nick kept me there for there for two hours is unbelievable.
Keynotes aside, there were two days of workshops and breakouts which varied in quality and usefulness to me. My bias was to be there for high play, and so I gravitated towards those sessions that seemed to let me do that. I spent my time the first two days working with Polarity Management and improv, learning about biomimicry and improv with Belina Raffy, exploring Turkish traditional storytelling and its application for improv with Koray Tharhan and Zaynep Tarhan from Istanbul, doing an incredible micro-fiction writing session with denzil meyers, and getting a great grounding in basic improv design with Kat Koppet and again with Gary Hirsch and Julie Huffaker from On Your Feet.
I got to play a little, joining Koray, Zaynep, and Geoff onstage at the Portland Centre for the Performing Arts where we played music for an improv show featuring Special Project Lab and other local improvisers.
On the last day we opened space and a whole slew of other sessions appeared. I dove into music improvisation with Patrick, convened a session with Viv, Ann and Geoff on designing a conference that we are doing in Melbourne and had the most incredible session of contact improvisation with Munir Rashid.
Contact improv is new to me and involves very powerful experiences of working with partners to explore where our bodies want to take us. It is part dance, part martial arts (sticky hands, Tai chi, and aikido are all familiar here) and part real-time non-verbal coaching. It can be as minimal as touching one hand to another and seeing where the movement takes us all the way to rolling around on the floor, lifting one another up and down and discovering how bodies move together. Done with a skillful partner it is an incredible experience of being mentored, led, encouraged and trusted and it can take you well beyond your edge.
Being taught and hosted by Munir was one of the highlights of the entire gathering for me. He is a master teacher and practitioner of this discipline, having devoted 12 years of his life to this. He is able to stand on the edges of safety, intimacy and trust and name the container that will hold the emotional and physical energy of the practice and he is as good a teacher of physical movement as any martial arts master I have ever learned from. I am certain that in lesser hands my experience of contact improv could have been confusing and emotionally challenging. As it was I came out of the session with a strong sense of blissful fearlessness.
Improv of course is all about living the life of invitation in every second. It is about making offers and accepting offers. It is about building on the best of others and contributing something to help them look good. It is a world that works when generosity and attention are activated. And it is instantly accessible. Stories, metaphors, teaching are all at hand. Simply start somewhere and follow it anywhere and see if you don’t surprise yourself. It is in short a new form of old practices I have been doing for a while, but today I am renewed and aligned and excited to see how else we can explore and practice.
Any of you thinking of attending an Art of Hosting with me in the future will be subject to all of this learning I am doing! Expect more games, exercises and improvisational play to explore hosting, harvesting, facilitation, design and collaboration.
It gets fun from here!
Today John Inman had a great post on using the world cafe for a five hour strategic planning session with a non-profit. His process works as follows:
First I asked that the whole system be in the retreat. We had board members, a customer, grant writer, community member, and contractors.
1. Introduction in group setting
2. Introduce the process
3. Pose the question
4. Three cafe tables with three people each, start the cafe
5. Three rounds of conversation each 20 minutes
6. Returned people to original table and asked them to capture the main themes at each table. 20 minutes
7. Harvested main themes in group
8. Group process for prioritization and assessing performance on each focus
9. Opportunity map outcomes
10. Group process to explore opportunities to work on and time frames
11. Assign teams to develop tactical plans to address opportunities
12. Used affinity process to capture everyone’s values, and group into value titles
13. Developed the values for the non-profit from this harvest
14. From conversation developed mission for the non-profit
15. Created list of what the non-profit is and is not for them to develop a story about their organization and it role in the community
16. Provided a foundation for a vision statement to be drafted.
17. Reflection session and adjournAnd all of this in 5 hours. It was the most productive planning session I have ever had and I believe that is in no small part due to driving them into conversation early and the power of conversation transformed the session.
Years ago I developed a process for doing something similar in Open Space. the challenge was how to hold an open planning conversation on the future of the organization, but address key areas without being controlling. We designed a day and a half strategic planning retreat with a non-profit by first identifying the key areas which the plan needed to cover. In this case the organization needed to plan in five basic areas: services, funding, human resources, government relations and labour relations. We then issued an invitation to everyone who needed to come. Our process ran like this:
- Prepare a harvest wall with five blank spots for reporting, each with one of the five topic headings.
- Open Space and invite any conversations to take place but point out that only those conversations that touch on the five planning topics will go forward into the plan.
- Open Space as usual with convenors hosting sessions and taking notes. Convenors type notes up on laptops and print them out, placing the printed copy in one of the five topic areas (or outside the five topic areas, if the conversation was not relevant to planning).
- Overnight, compile the reports from each of the five groups and print a copy for each participant.
- In the morning, there are five breakout spaces in the meeting room each one focusing on one of the five topics.
- People self-organize their participation in a 1.5 to 2 hour conversation on each of these five areas. I think we asked them to undertake specific tasks such as identifying key priorities, and planning action (including preliminary resource estimates and communications implications). Also we asked them to identify initial implementation steps. Rules of Open Space applied, especially the law of two feet.
- Groups met and then reported back. Their initial plans were then sent to the executive of the organization for refining and more detailed resource costing (everyone knew that going in).
Like John, my experience of the process was incredibly productive and the plans were excellent, and sustainable over the long term because there was a huge amount of buy-in from the co-creation process.
These participatory processes are far more than “just talk” and with wise planning and focussed harvests, they are a very fast way to make headway on what can otherwise be tedious planning processes.
This week I had the tremendous privilage to facilitate two days of Open Space for Xyolhemeylh, the Aboriginal child and family services agency in the Fraser Valley, east of Vancouver. The agency has been going through a lot of turmoil over the past few years, and has come to a point of reinvention. The theme of the gathering was “Reclaiming our Journey” and it marked a significant transition for the organization as it headed into community control from being managed by the provincial government for the past 2.5 years. The point of the Open Space meetings were to invite the Elder’s staff and Board of the organization to reflect on the values that the organization wanted to name for itself as it moved forward. Over two days 140 people participated in the two back to back open space gatherings. Forty discussion groups were held on values that staff in particular felt were important to take forward. There was lots of laughter (especially from the the group on “laughter!”) and some very important healing took place.
Our gathering was held in the community at Tzeachten, a small First Nation in Sardis near Chillliwack. The event was held in a ceremonial container over the whole two days, with traditional protocols being in place, “floor managers” operating to keep things happening in a good way and Elders actively involved in witnessing what was happening. All of these activities are deeply traditional Coast Salish ways of working, taken directly from the longhouse protocols and they are deeply important to the organization.
Heln and Herb Joe, two Elders I have tremendous respect for, held the space over the two days while I simply ran the process. In the middle of the second day, a full blown ceremony broke out, as the outgoing director was honoured for her work and the incoming director was given his proper welcome. Witnesses were appointed, songs were sung and many many gifts were given as the two individuals were honoured. Many teachings were shared during this two hour ceremony that just appeared in the middle of the day, but the most important one I think has to do with the fact that this agency, responsible for hundreds of children, and employing 150 staff, is considered a family.
“Xyolhemeylh” the word talks about the relationship between a parent and a child, and is a word that describes the quality of this relationship, full of care. The name is also carried by an individual, although it seems not be at present. This creates a very different form of organizational design. In Sto:lo culture, there is no word for adoption as there is no way for a child to be outside of family. Family is all encompassing and surrounds you even in periods where you feel alienated. Xyolhmeyelh has been in many ways outside of the family of Sto:lo communities for the past few years as the organization has weathered political storms and concerns over practice.
But this past week there seemed to be a reaffirmation of the fact that the agency has never left the bigger family. Our Open Space was a family gathering, intended to remind us of the values that are important and the children that need help, care and nurtiring if the future of First Nations is to be secured.
It was a truly wonderful gathering, the best of who we are. More photos, especially of Colleen Stevenson’s lovely evolving mural are here.
At the end of a beautiful day one of two days of Open Space with the Fraser Valley Aboriginal Child and Family Services Society. One lovely teaching from the Elders today: in Halkomelem there is no word for adoption, because there is no concept of a child being outside of family.
Cool.
It is a curious set up, this particular Open Space. We have 70 people in a circle and a dozen Elders sitting at tables outside of the proceedings, but that is as it should be. In Sto:lo culture, the role of the Elders is not to participate but to notice. In this respect they are not considered to be outside of the circle at all, but really deeply engaged with it. At the end of the day, three Elders shared their reflections of the day, and all three talked about how important it was that the staff of the organization met this way.