As Marc’s conversation has unfolded at teh OSLIST, he dropped this lovely analogy about holding space into the mix today. Here’s what he does when people ask him why they pay him:
Usually I then refer to my memories living in West Africa. We mostly had a night watchman in our garden (in many ways the reason was also to give another person a job). They were always there, sitting under a tree, brewing tea and they were great to have a chat with – they knew everything that happened in the neighbourhood! But they never actually did something. And that was the point: you have a night watchmen BECAUSE YOU WANT THEM NOT HAVING ANYTHING TO DO and you have the great desire that they never ever will need to do anything – that was precisely the reason why you have (and paid!) them! They are “holding the night” – and your space to sleep free from worries. And you assume that their mere presence creates this safe space.That’s always how I understood – and explained – my role and the space that I hold as a facilitator. People (who have experienced African night watchmen) always understood…
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Back in April, I got to be a part of one of the best hosting experiences of my life when I joined Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Phil Cass and Tim Merry and a bunch of others in designing and hosting the 2008 Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference. The other day Erin Caricoffe, one of the staff members of the core team we worked with sent out this summary of where we are now:
By all shared accounts, the 2008 Food and Society Gathering for Good Food was a success, meeting planning Team goals of providing a relevant, inclusive, and highly participative event, and in the larger, movement-wide goals of defining where our work currently stands, and where it must go to collaboratively progress towards a healthy, green, fair, and affordable food system for all people.
To help weave our work into the national consciousness, we posed hard questions of self-definition, movement-wide strategic thinking, and personal responsibility within the conference framework. Our speakers supported these questions, challenging participants to be inspired towards change and confident in furthering it. Thoughtfully crafted Learning Journeys enabled many to step beyond their desk-bound days to re-examine and experience the shared core of our work. The technologies of Open Space, Good Food Village Square, and Good Food Cafes shifted us from prescribed idea sharing to permit a more personal stake in not mere talk, but work in the moment, of the moment, with long-term vision. We all took our turn asking attendees to participate more than they had before at such an event; thank you for your creative assistance in making this happen to such great effect.
The gathering intended to provide and ignite a crucible for systemic shift towards deeper, more meaningful connections that will sustain the good of our communities; towards co-creating the bigger picture of the Good Food Movement; and finally, towards experiential co-learning through conversations, visual harvesting, performance poetry, dedicated blogging, and sharing nourishing meals at the table. With defined intentions and shared commitments, our efforts to make it so were strengthened, and many goals met. We sincerely thank you for these efforts, your sharing of time and wisdom. And so shall our steps continue, following this collective lead. Together we will continue”
This gathering’s success is quite obviously an achievement earned through the hard work of many, of you: Planning Team members and our talented core of Art of Hosting facilitators, speakers who came from different locales and different backgrounds, authors who overturn the rocks that drive our knowledge, the maverick leaders who embraced ad hoc strategic planning in leading Good Food Village Square Sessions, the many persevering Learning Journey hosts who gave extra effort in order to connect with dozens of visitors, the hard-working Wild Horse Pass Sheraton crew, and last, but not at all least, the welcoming community of Native American generations who graciously hosted us at a most appropriate and inspired location, allowing authentic, challenging work to take place.
We, the Good Food Movement, are a living, breathing model of diversity, heart, and cooperative engagement for common good. Thank you for your efforts in helping us all realize this, and challenging us to maintain our necessary work!
This work was truly the next level of conference design for us, a completely participatory and challenging gathering and I’m so take with Erin’s description of what happened there.
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On the OSLIST, Marc Steinlin posed a few questions that I took a stab at answering:
What means “holding space”? What is the function, if demonstrably one can do without?
The $100,000 question! Several of us over the years have written things on it (I wrote a whole book trying to understand it) but it is an elusive process. And I think it changes with the scale and size of the group AND most importantly with the pre-existing depth of their own relationship.
If I was to generalize I would say that holding space means helping the group find its highest potential realized. For some groups, in some contexts this might be a very controlling kind of thing and for other groups not so much. In my expereince where there is a deep underlying and pre-existing architecture of relationships and collaboration, there is very little an individual can do to control the outcome, so getting out of the way seems the best option. Lately I’m learning a lot about working with fields of learners or people engaged in large scale and longer term change. What I’m learning is that it takes a field to hold a field, as my late friend Finn Voldtofte once said. In other words, at large levels of scale within organizations or communities, the act of holding space is actually all about attending to the relationships of the group of people that are holding the deepest intention for the work. In an organizational development context this means that the core team spends a great deal of time working on its own relationships and in so doing, they are able to hold space for the bigger field of learning.
And then having said all of that, I think there is an art to intuitively knowing how much or how little to “hold.”
Or is it really that the group as a whole can hold space (which seemed to be the case)? Any group?
Yes a group can hold its own space, but not any group. My hunch is that we can let go into groups like this when there is at least a minimal form of relationship in place. How much or how little is immeasureable, but you can sense whether a group has that capacity or potential if you let go of your expectations for the role of facilitator.
Why do we really need any facilitator throughout the event?
I am working a lot these days with the chaordic path, the idea that there is a way forward if we dance between chaos and order. In that respect I think the facilitator can play a valuable role in brining minimal elegant structure to chaos so that the conditions for self-organization might be met. At it’s most basic level, this structure looks like or is an invitation, a calling question that taps passions and responsibility Once passion and responsibility are tapped, the group can look after itself.
And consequently under which conditions can we dispense with it?
Most of our lives are spent without facilitators helping us be around other people. We can learn a lot from those situations. If you engage in a little appreciative inquiry project on your own life, you might remember stories about times in your life when you experienced great strides without a facilitator.and then harvest the key conditions from those stories.
What is the risk? Can this go totally wrong?
The risk is always that it won’t work, that a group won’t discover its highest potential. And although whatever happens is the only thing that could have (and that means you need to pay attention to the space to hold at the outset), if there is much at stake and the group finds itself unable to work without some form and leadership, the stake will be lost, as will the opportunity. But in complex living systems, there is no such thing as totally wrong anyway – everything that happens is food for everything else. If however you have an expectation that there is a right and a wrong result, there is always the risk that a group might acheive the wrong result.
In my experience, it pays to create the conditions in which the host team and the group itself understands this approach to complex systems and self organization. so that you are operating with a learning environment rather than a right/wrong dichotomy.
That’s the extent of my thinking this morning.
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Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission launches today (hooray that my friend Jane Morley was named as one of the commissioners last week!) and I’m here at Queen’s University in Kingston to run an Open Space as part of a conference of academics, policy makers and public servants from First Nations and non-Aboriginal governments and institutions on the topic.
In Canada, the process that is being embarked upon today is spurred by the residential school experience. The main brief of the TRC will be to write the history of that 150 year period in Canadian history when residential school did huge amounts of personal and collective damage to Aboriginal children, families and communities.
But as I’ve been thinking about this topic in preparation for tomorrow’s Open Space, I’ve been thinking about reconciliation from a broader perspective, and I’ve been thinking about it specifically in relation to the way reconciliation helps us to create generative relationships that can be the basis for paradigm shifts. Today I was in a conversation with the Mohawk artist and teacher Rick Hill who filled me in on his experience of the Haudenosaunee worldview about relationships. Rick said that for Mohawks, the primary form of relationship is the family. So in the thanksgiving address used by Haudenosaunee Elders for opening gatherings, the natural world is referred to by family relations: mother earth, grandmother moon, our brothers and sisters in the plant and animal kingdom. Likewise, for important relationships, the Haudenosaunee government gives names to politicians and senior public servants because by doing so the confederacy “extends the rafters” of the longhouse to include strangers. Once you are named, you are family and once you are family, you are able to be in relationship.
When I asked Rick the question “What are the purpose of relationships?” he answered me by saying that relationships are the places in which we find peace. It is most important in all indigenous cultures I know of that this search for peace be a communal experience. In contrast to the Buddhist path of individual enlightenment, the Haudenosaunee worldview holds that collective peace cannot be served by an individual seeking their own path. In fact, such an act is dangerous and hubristic and leads to a reprimand from the clan mothers. The purpose of relationships, Rick said, is to find ourselves in a peaceful place together.
So this had me thinking about my opening tomorrow and so I called my partner Caitlin to get her thoughts and she said similar things. Her take on reconciliation is that it is actually a means to an end. Only when we are reconciled to what is real, can we find new things to do and new ways to be. As long as we live with the energy of unresolved historical stories, we cannot be in a place of generative shift. So Caitlin suggested an appreciative exercise, which I intend to begin with tomorrow. She suggested that each person take a moment to notice for themselves what reconciliation feels like, and what it allows us to do. From there we can ask the question of what might then be possible in the public sector in Canadian society if we achieved the kind of peace and resourcefulness that comes with having reconciled with each other. If what is needed is a fundamentally different way of being with one another, reconciliation represents not an end state in itself, but rather a pre-condition to moving to the generative space of co-creating new paradigms.
I’m curious to see how this all plays out.
Update: Opened space this morning and had a lively agenda setting session. My favourite ones so far included a Kingston City police officer who convened a session called “Why do we support and adversarial justice system?” and a new federal public servant who asked how non-Aboriginal people cna become allies of Aboriginal peoples.
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I just opened space here for 550 people at the Food and Society Conference. This was the biggest OST gathering I have ever facilitated, and it’s huge in importance as well. There must have been close to 100 sessions proposed for today and I’m just gathering my energy for a long day and night ahead of compiling the proceedings document.
I’m a stranger to the good food movement in the United States, and so it’s hard for me to know what the agenda looks like, but like all Open Space events I trust that it is what is needed right now. Our organizing question was: “If you take the margins and social justice seriously, what are the bold conversations you need to have to amplify and accelerate the impact of good food.” I stepped into the circle following a powerful talk on structural racism in the food system given by today’s provocateur, Maya Wiley from the Center for Social Inclusion. She dropped a great challenge into the centre of the circle, speaking about the radical nature of this room full of people. People were ready to get to work. I have rarely seen a flood to the centre of the room as I just experienced. It’s kind of overwhelming.
So the participants are in a break now, and soon enough the remainder of the day will be self-organized. Learning a lot about working with great friends, all of whom had my back this morning and had the logistics nailed down pretty well. We had to prepare 140 breakout spaces, in a conference facility that is over the top luxurious and is pretty concerned about the aesthetics of randomly places pods of chairs. Within these constraints, the conference staff have been great and the hosting team rocks. It’s impossible to do one’s best work alone.
You can follow along with the gathering at the Food and Society website.
[tags]fas2008[/tags]