One of my favourite photos of Harrison Owen, courtesy of Peggy Holman
This morning I got to play the role of host/interviewer to my mentor Harrison Owen, the guy that accidentally invented Open Space Technology and unknowingly changed my life. It was when I participated in my first Open Space conference in 1995 that I knew I had found the core of my path in work.
Truth be told, interviewing Harrison is the easiest job you could ever want. You basically do what you do when running an Open Space meeting: ask the question and get out of the way. This morning’s conversation was part of a series my friends at Beehive Productions are running on the origin stories of various participatory processes and methods, and so I wanted to get some stories from Harrison about what was going on for him BEFORE Open Space arrived in the world in 1985. You can go and listen to that story for yourself.
Despite being a student of Harrison’s work and legacy for 25 years, I’m never surprised to learn a new thing from him, and today was no different. It was all about simplicity. Harrison shared some stories about how his work and academic studies help him discover that things like myth, ritual, story, Spirit, self-organization and the dance of chaos and order are near-permanent features of human experience and indeed, are features of the cosmos which a 13.7 billion year history. Harrison told a few anecdotes about how he discovered along the way that no matter what one did or didn’t do, these forces were constantly at play in organizations. Many times they helped people get stuff done, but occasionally these dynamics produced problems.
In the late 1970s, Harrison got involved with the organizational development community and much to his chagrin, discovered that people were trying to solve some of these problems by creating other problems, like relying on control, linear problem solving, or ignoring the deep myths and stories that permeate all organizations. When folks did that they ended up creating more problems, and now you had to solve both the original problem and the one you had created by trying to solve in the original problem poorly.
Harrison’s genius. ad the genesis of Open Space was really his sense that the fundamental dynamics – myth, ritual, story, self-organization, Spirit, and the chaos/order dance – are actually the tools you need to address most problems in organizational life. His practice became finding one less thing to do, or as I said in the interview, “steadily removing all the things that get in the way of those dynamics showing up.”
Facilitating Open Space meetings, and indeed, practicing the leadership art of holding space (or “hosting”) is really about stripping away all the things that stop self-organization from doing its thing. Harrison has a radical commitment to this and its always interesting to see him respond to people who say “yes, but what about…” He just keeps exhorting people to get out of the way and make sure that while you are disappearing from view you take the barriers to high-performance action with you. Many of the objections that some people have to using Open Space Technology for a meeting tend to come from the idea that they think they can add a thing that is most important for the group to experience or do before they get down to self-organizing around important issues. In truth, if people are gathered to work on important issues, the worst thing you can do is dely them from getting to work, and that’s doubly bad if you are delaying a whole group because of one person’s anxiety.
I can’t quite describe how Harrison makes me feel when I read him or hear him speak. Clear, might be the word. Fierce. A bit cheeky perhaps. Whatever it is, that feeling hasn’t changed since the moment I met the man in 1996. I don’t think he’s changed a bit, either. He discovered something profound about organizational life in the 1970s and he has turned that into a 40 plus year global experiment, enlisting thousands of collaborators along the way. He codified some of that experiment into a method called Open Space Technology, but his work and its implications are much broader than a meeting method. You can read what he refers to as his “Final Report” in his 2008 book Waverider. In that book, he basically challenges the management, leadership, and OD fields to ask some serious questions about their practice, because Open Space has shown that almost every problem, no matter how intractable, can be addressed in a much simpler way than we are all led to believe: “Not only do we live in a self-organizing world, but our job – or perhaps better, our opportunity, is to leverage this force for our purposes and so ride the waves of self-organization as an intentional, and conscious act.” Here is an intro to that book.
This isn’t a naive perspective either. Harrison’s folksy demeanour can sometimes cause people to miss how sharp and incisive he is, and how grounded are his insights. Open Space is a gift to the world, and it isn’t even Harrison’s gift to the world. It is the world’s gift to the world. In Harrison’s terms, it is the gift that the 13.7 billion-year-old universe has given us. Once you get that, it will irrevocably change how you do your work and how you live your life. You will have the radical realization that you are participating in a universe that made you a participant in the grandest Open Space of all.
To begin the new year, I’m offering here a series of posts on the core practice of the Art of Hosting, the Four-Fold Practice. Since 2003, the Art of Hosting community has been my primary learning and practice community as I have learned and grown my facilitation and leadership practice. Central to that community is the four-fold practice, a simple framework that describes both what the actual Art of Hosting is and what it does.
Part one today describes a bit of my own journey that brought me into contact with this community. Over the next few days, I’ll share a bit more about the practice as well including its origins and my current thinking on its application in both facilitation and leadership.
Part one: just what I needed
I began my journey as a facilitator back in the early 1990s as I ran meetings for the non-profit I worked for, the National Association of Friendship Centres. Across Canada, more than 100 Friendship Centres provide services, cultural programming, and care for urban indigenous communities. Beginning in 1948, it is one of the oldest indigenous community development movements in Canada and has become a powerful force for change and social development.
Facilitation is a very important skill in the Friendship Centre movement because, as an organization that is devoted to community development and the elevation of urban indigenous voices in policymaking and social change, well-hosted meeting are an active part of the work of Friendship Centres. Friendship Centre staff, especially younger staff members, often find themselves in front of a flip chart, armed with markers, writing down ideas and helping groups make sense of the world. The Friendship Centre movement is an excellent training ground for participatory work. SO tat is where I began, in the national office, as a policy analyst, armed with a culture and community development-heavy degree in Native Studies from Trent University and a deep desire to help.
My first facilitation training came from Bruce Elijah, an Oneida Elder who was our Board Elder and spent many days at our office advising us, guiding us with prayer and good advice and making sure we were doing things “right.” One day in 1993, when I was about to go an host a very important meeting on family violence policy development, I asked him for some advice and he gave me an eagle feather to use as a talking piece and said “The Creator gave us two important gifts: circle and story. Use them.”
That was the full extent of my first facilitation training and I put it into practice right away, convening a meeting of Friendship Centre staff and Health Canada officials and researchers that resulted in the establishment of the national Aboriginal Family Violence Initiative. It was clear to me that these two gifts – circle and story – were the secrets to meetings in which participants themselves were in control and the content was uninfluenced by the facilitator. It reminded me that my only role was to be quiet, hold space and keep careful notes.
I think I had an inkling very early on that quality participatory work required something like meditation for personal preparation. It also always required a prayer or some way of deliberately entering the work, with a good heart and an aspiration towards kindness, listening and contributing one’s best thinking. I could see too that people were more engaged when everyone was given a chance to speak, when there was a good process held in place to enable the work and what, at the end of the day, what was created was created by all. I watched the Elders in our movement open meetings with prayers and hold us in ceremony for the duration. Bruce himself would begin Board meetings with a long Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving prayer, which sometimes lasted 20 minutes or more and acknowledged our dependence on things far greater than those on the agenda. We would sometimes smudge the room, to bring kindness and calm to the space. Sometimes we would sing together or someone would sing for us and after this extended beginning, we would start our meetings. The Elders would sit quietly with us, and intervene only if saw something that threatened the quality of the space in a negative way. They didn’t suppress dissent or disagreement, but they called people to account for their behaviours and invited a pause for everyone to remember the bigger teachings and get back to work.
Those were my first teachers in facilitation work: Bruce Elijah, Sylvia Maracle, Marge White, George Cook, William Commanda, Gisda’wa and many other Elders in communities across Canada who opened our meetings with prayers and guidance and who stayed present during the whole time. These names are well known across indigenous communities in Canada. When you are in a meeting hosted by them, you are in ceremony, plain and simple. They make no distinction between the two. When people are gathered to do work, it is a sacred moment with the potential for healing and significant change. One never knows the long term outcomes of an important meeting, so attention to the quality of the space is critical. In retrospect, I can remember the exact birth moments of significant things like the Aboriginal Head Start Program, the devolution of the Friendship Centre Program, the Aboriginal Family Violence Program, the Tsawassen Accord, and the BC First Nations Leadership Council among others. All were meetings that began in prayer, with that deep level of intention.
Mostly my job in these meetings was to design and run the process by which work got done, but it was always critical to do that in line with the quality of the space that Elders had created. I made many mistakes when my own ego or sense of self-importance trampled on what the elders had given us, and I paid for those moments with some embarrassing public scolding from Elders! These moments were some of the most important parts of my facilitation education – being called on the floor and corrected in front of groups of people, always directly, always with kindness, always with the intention of restoring and remaining in relationship.
In 1995 Caitlin and I decided on a whim to travel to Whistler, BC, for the International Association of Public Participation Practitioners conference (it was known as IAP3 back in those days). One of the sponsors of that gathering was BC Hydro, who had been using a large group facilitation method called “Open Space Technology” in their work. Chris Carter, who was working in change management with BC Hydro at the time, hosted the open space day alongside Anne Stadler and Angeles Arrien. In retrospect, that is quite a team, and it was a brilliant opening, which included some aspects of ceremony such as lighting a candle in the centre of the rings of concentric circles holding 400 of us in the Whistler Convention Centre. We were all offered a chance to call sessions and record the results of the sessions in a newsroom filled with a bank of 20 386 PCs running WordPerfect. After their opening, the conference exploded. Into dozens of topics and sessions – I led one on the role of storytelling in facilitation – and after I had witnessed a whole day of this I knew that there was a way to host large group meetings that ensured that the responsibility for the experience was owned by the participants.
For many years afterwards in my work with the BC Association of Friendship Centres and later, the Federal Treaty Negotiations Office and the BC Assembly of First Nations and Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services, I used Open Space whenever I could. We ran meetings on economic development, firearms legislation, the implementation of Aboriginal title, family rights in the child welfare system, policy research conferences, youth network development, organizational change, governance, stakeholder consultations…you name it. If you were in a meeting with me in the early 2000s, you were probably in an Open Space.
Through my work with Open Space Technology, I met Harrison Owen, initially in 1997 at a one day course on self-organization and then later at a gathering in 2003 on Whidbey Island, where he was the key feature in a four-day conference called “The Practice of Peace” based on his little book of the same name. This gathering brought together folks from around the world working on peace and reconciliation as well as those of us who were working with Open Space and other large group methodologies. It was there that I met Toke Møller as well as Juanita Brown. At the conclusion of that conference, Toke and I found ourselves in a circle with a dozen or so other people, already tightly connected through relationships. We passed a talking piece amongst us discussing the question of what comes next following this conference. When it came to Toke who was sitting next to me, he spoke of the trainings he was starting to do around the Art of Hosting, and he said something like this, which I later asked him to rewrite as a poem:
It is Time
the training time is over
for those of us who can hear the call
of the heart and the times
my real soul work
has begun on the next level
for me at leastcourage is
to do what calls me
but I may be afraid ofwe need to work together
in a very deep sense
to open and hold spaces
fields
spheres of energy
in which our imagination
and other people’s
transformation can occurnone of us can do it alone
the warriors of joy are gathering
to find each other
to train together
to do some good work
from the heart with no attachment
and throw it
in the riverno religion, no cult, no politics
just flow with life itself as it
unfolds in the now…what is my Work?
what is our Work?
And I said yes to that invitation.
My last blog post here was back in March, at the beginning of a colossal few months of travel and work during which I was away from home and working in the Netherlands, Germany, northern Ontario, New York City, Vancouver Island, and several locations in Japan. In the course of my travels I was away from home for 64 days, had two major airline cancellations (one airline went bankrupt, one couldn’t get me home without massively creative re-routing). I probably doubled the number of foods I’ve tasted in my life, just from the 28 day trip to Japan alone, and I’ve come back to find myself taking stock of where I am these days.
Summer is good for that.
In reflecting on my work offerings these days, I find myself doing these kinds of things:
- Helping organizations and communities by facilitating large scale meetings and participatory processes to understand and act in complexity. I do this through meeting design and facilitation. That’s the bread and butter.
- Using technology to support strategic work in complexity. This year I’m working with both Sensemaker and NarraFirma in different projects to help groups collect, analyse, and act from stories. I love this work and it has taken me into the realm of deep developmental evaluation. The software is helping us to be able to generate deeply informed strategic insights with our clients and to create innovative ways to address stuck problems. It’s amazing and powerful participatory research and support for strategy.
- To that end, I have been also been working closely with evaluators in some interesting emerging community projects as well as developing teaching modules to run workshops on participatory methods and evaluation.
That’s the basic strategic work. There is lots of capacity building work I’m doing as well. For me that focuses on teaching, first and foremost:
- Teaching Art of Hosting workshops, including upcoming ones in the next year on Bowen Island, and in the Whitehorse, Montreal, and Calgary.
- Teaching complexity courses. One with Bronagh Gallagher focused on complexity for social activists, and one with Caitlin Frost on complexity basics, using Human Systems Dynamics, Cynefin, The Work and dialogue methods. I’ve taught several one and two day complexity course this past year, and feel like we’ve really got a good introductory course.
- A one day workshop on dialogic containers that I gave to good reviews at Nanzan University in Japan. It is based on two papers I wrote over the past few years on Hosting and Holding Dialogic Containers, and one Dave Snowden’s ABIDE framework (now mooshed with Glenda Eoyang’s CDE framework) as a way of using containers to work with complexity. At Nanzen, Caitlin added a neat little piece on Self as Container as well.
- A course on evaluation, which I first offered online with Beehive Productions this past winter, and then has developed into a two day course offered in New York with Rita Fierro and Dominica McBride. That might morph again and meet the Art of Hosting, so if you’re and evaluator, look out for an offering that joins up those two worlds.
- Leadership 2020, a nine month participatory leadership program for leaders in the Social Services Sector and child and family services ministries in British Columbia. We are coming up on ten years of this work, with a redesigned program so that we can get more leaders through it in a slightly compressed time frame.
- I continue to offer a one-day course at Simon Fraser University on World Cafe and Open Space Technology as part of the certificate in Dialogue and Civic Engagement. You can come to that if you like.
- And I have a few coaching clients as well, folks I spend an hour or so with here and there, thinking through issues in their own practice, working on workshop designs and supporting their confidence to take risk.
As for writing, I have long promised a book on Chaordic Design, and that may still come to pass, but I can see it now being a joint effort with my partner Caitlin Frost. We have been using the Chaordic Stepping Stones tool in every context imaginable and have a ton of stories of application to share. The basic model on my website is due for a revision as well, so perhaps I’l have a chance to do that in the coming few months. When Caitlin and I can find some time to go away and write, we might actually get some stuff on the page.
And here is the blog, my old friend, the place I have recorded thoughts and insights and ideas and events over the past 17 years or so. It needs a bit of attention and it needs to be used, so look for more blog posts more frequently. And they won’t all be well crafted essays – could be just more musings, things that are longer than tweets, and that properly belong free in the world and not locked into the blue prison of facebook. Maybe you’ll even see something of the other passions that are in my life, including my love of soccer, music, and some of the local community projects I’m up to.
Does any of that grab your interest? Is there anything you’d like to hear more about? Can I support your organization or community, or individual practice in any way? Wanna play?
Over the years I’ve noticed a trend in consultative facilitations that goes something like this: a client calls wanting to consult with the community about something. Sometimes this takes the form of a leader wanting to engage employees. The request is usually to design an event where we can hear from people without them being dominated by more powerful voices. At some point the client says something like “we’d like to have our people there as observers or table hosts or mixed in as silent listeners.”
Often this looks like elected officials not wanting to dominate citizen meetings, government or agency staff not wanting to dominate community meetings, or executive teams not wanting to dominate the lower level employees.
My response to this over the years has been to push back hard against that idea, despite how noble it seems. Often it comes from a good place: that those with power want to create space for people without power to speak and have their ideas taken seriously. I get that, and I honour it, but truthfully the best way to do engagement is to, well, engage. It’s entirely possible to design engagement to maximize what you want and minimize what you don;t want all the while not create
Let’s get a few things out of the way
- Groups of people are never free of power and dominating behaviours. It doesn’t matter if you are using a well conducted circle process or a self-organizing process, or placing limits on who can speak and who cannot. It is impossible to build a group process that is free from these behaviours. So the challenge is to mitigate them.
- In truly participatory processes, observers are indeed influential. Have you ever been somewhere and there are people there not participating, just watching from the sides silently and taking notes? Does it feel like this kind of set up lessens power in any way or builds trust?
- If you are consulting because you don’t know the answer to a question, being absent from the conversations does not help you learn. The trickiest challenges we face aren’t solved by listening quietly to someone else in the hopes that they will provide you the answer you are looking for. They are addressed by diving in together and looking for ways to tackle problems in new ways.
If you are facing a truly sticky issue and you have no answers, getting as many people as possible fully engaged in exploring it is critical. So here are a few bits of advice I find myself giving out time after time, in no particular order.
Use a process like Open Space or World Cafe that allows participants to set their own agendas. These processes, and many others, place the onus of discovery, creativity and action on the participants. They operate from the assumptions that the ways forward are there to be discovered together, from the creative spaces between people. Furthermore they are founded on good dialogic principles, which you can point to and practice, such as, speak from your experience, listen to learn and be aware of your impact. Inviting a group into these practices helps them focus on each other as as potential experts.
Use small groups and break them up. I’ve never understood the aversion to small groups, but trust me when I say that you can do very little rapid creative work in groups larger than five. If you want to learn more about my approach to group sizes, here’s a post summing up what I know, and here’s a quick video my friend Nancy White made. Making and breaking up small groups is an important complex facilitation technique that allows for people to create without getting entrained and therefore sinking into domination patterns are or other kinds of bias.
Trust your people. There is an undercurrent to the base worry that clients share with me, and it’s worth addressing with them. I find that when we probe deeper, we discover that often the client has a deeper issue about either trusting their own people to behave well, or trusting a group of “lesser powered” folks to be resilient enough to speak. This is actually easily remedied by designing the session well, but it sometimes helps to have an offline conversation about the way the client feels about participants.
Have truly open questions. If you want your meeting to be truly participatory and engaging, you have to ask a group a questions you are stuck on. The questions need to be open and honest, and the group you assemble needs to be the people best suited to explore the question and create actions around it. Never bring a pre-determined answer to a participatory process, and give people the illusion that they are creating something new together. It’s unethical. Beyond that, truly open questions make it easy to encourage people to listen to one another and they de-centre expertise, meaning that the group itself can truly become the experts. If we can separate those in power from those with answers, we get a truly rich dialogue and learning experience.
Commit to supporting what you start. In my practice of chaordic design, I call this the Architecture of Implementation. You have to know what you are willing to commit to ensure that whatever happens at the meeting will have an effect. This doesn’t always mean money. It could also mean that time, space, power, connections, and many other resources can be put at the behest of the group to move to action. It could also be that you let people know that “nothing will come of this meeting beyond the learning that happens in the meeting itself. It doesn’t matter to me what the architecture is, but it does matter to the group. Being honest helps people to show up in a trusting way, and helps them to know how much time and energy to spend on your initiative.
Invite authentically. If you have designed with all of the above in mind, you can authentically invite the right people to your gathering with very little fear that there will be catastrophic domination. And authentic invitation brings people into the room ready to work on a problem that they are needed for. That is a powerful call.
I’m sure lots of experienced facilitators out there have other wisdom to add about how to address this concern. What have you got to add?
I’ve been deeply influenced over the years by Christina Baldwin’s principle that “no one person can be responsible for the safety of the group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for it’s own safety.” I too think that the principles of Open Space allow for the right balance for individuals to take responsibility for co-creating group safety. What is remarkable is that safety is an emergent phenomenon in Open Space, a true artifact of a self-organizing system. Of course I have seen some real conflicts happen in Open Space, but what seems to mitigate them is the double wall of the container.
What I mean by that is that meetings in Open Space happen within break out groups within the larger container. If a break out group breaks down, participants are still held in the larger space. I have seen very few instances where people in conflict left the bigger container, even if the exercised the law of two feet and left their breakout space. Most often a kind of “neutral ground” emerges in Open Space: near the agenda wall, around the coffee table, sometimes outside on a nice day. These emergent neutral spaces provide participants with a chance to discharge, relax, calm down and get their wits about them. The facilitator never has to do anything, in my experience, but just keep holding the space.
I don’t like the idea of safe space though, I prefer the term “safe enough” space, or even “brave space.” For many marginalized people the idea of safe space is always a myth, and there is no way that we can guarantee it will emerge in Open Space. So instead I encourage people to take a bit of a risk and enter into “safe enough” space, so that they can learn something new and let go of whatever it is they are holding on to.
I remember an event I did once on Hawaii with indigenous Hawaiians and well heeled Americans looking together at the values of reverence and sustainability. At one point, one of the Americans, a person with a net worth in the millions of dollars, asked the group that we commit to safety in the space. This raised the ire of the senior Elder in the room who snapped (and I paraphrase) “You have no right to safe space! Your desire for safety has imperilled the entire world. We do not live safe lives as a result. Our lands are colonized, our food supplies are depleted and our oceans are in danger of no longer providing for us. There is no safe space here. You must learn to live with risk and take responsibility for your role in creating it.”
When we are invited into risk together, everyone giving up safety according to their means, the possibility for real relationship exists in the shared challenge to our well held worldviews.