Sometimes we describe what we do with practing the Art of Hosting as bringin participatory leadership to life. THis can be a major shift in some people’s way of thinking. To describe it, Toke Moeller sent this around a few days ago – an explanation of participatory leadership in one sentence.
| How do you explain participatory leadership in one sentence? |
o Imagine” a meeting of 60 people, where in an hour you would have heard everyone and at the end you would have precisely identified the 5 most important points that people are willing to act on together.
o When appropriate, deeper engagement of all in service of our purpose.
o Hierarchy is good for maintenance, participatory leadership is good for innovation and adapting to change.
o Complements the organigramme units with task force work groups on projects.
o Look at how well they did it in DG XYZ – We could be the ones everybody looks at.
o Using all knowledge, expertise, conflicts, etc. available to achieve the common good on any issue.
o It allows to deal with complex issues by using the collective intelligence of all people concerned & getting their buy-in.
o Participatory Leadership is methods, techniques, tips, tricks, tools to evolve, to lead, to create synergy, to share experience, to lead a team, to create a transversal network, to manage a project, an away day, brainstorming, change processes, strategic visions.
o Consult first, write the legislation after.
|
Traditional ways of working |
Participatory leadership complementing |
| Individuals responsible for decisions | Using collective intelligence to inform decision-making |
| No single person has the right answer but somebody has to decide | Together we can reach greater clarity – intelligence through diversity |
| Hierarchical lines of management | Community of practice |
| Wants to create a FAIL-SAFE environment | Creates a SAFE-FAIL environment that promotes learning |
| Top-down agenda setting | Set agenda together |
| I must speak to be noticed in meetings | Harvesting what matters, from all sources |
| Communication in writing only | Asking questions |
| Organisation chart determines work | Task forces/purpose-oriented work in projects |
| People represent their services | People are invited as human beings, attracted by the quality of the invitation |
| One-to-many information meetings | A participatory process can inform the information! |
| Great for maintenance, implementation (doing what we know) | When innovation is needed – learning what we don’t know, to move on – engaging with constantly moving targets |
| Information sharing | When engagement is needed from all, including those who usually don’t contribute much. |
| Dealing with complaints by forwarding them to the hierarchy for action | Dealing with complaints directly, with hierarchy trusting that solution can come from the staff |
| Consultation through surveys, questionnaires, etc. | Co-creating solutions together in real time, in presence of the whole system |
| Top-down | Bottom-up |
| Management by control | Management by trust |
| Questionnaires (contribution wanted from DG X) | Engagement processes – collective inquiry with stakeholders |
| Mechanistic | Organic – if you treat the system like a machine, it responds like a living system |
| Top down orders – often without full information | Top-down orders informed by consultation |
| Resistance to decisions from on high | Better acceptance of decisions because of involvement |
| Silos/hierarchical structures | More networks |
| Tasks dropped on people | Follow your passion |
| Rigid organisation | Flexible self-organisation |
| Policy design officer disconnected from stakeholders | Direct consultation instead of via lobby organisations |
| People feel unheard/not listened to | People feel heard |
| Working without a clear purpose and jumping to solutions | Collective clarity of purpose is the invisible leader |
| Motivation via carrot & stick | Motivation through engagement and ownership |
| Managing projects, not pre-jects | Better preparation – going through chaos, open mind, taking account of other ideas |
| Focused on deliverables | Focused on purpose – the rest falls into place |
| Result-oriented | Purpose-oriented |
| Seeking answers | Seeking questions |
| Pretending/acting | Showing up as who you are |
| Broadcasting, boring, painful meetings | Meetings where every voice is heard, participants leave energised |
| Chairing, reporting | Hosting, harvesting, follow-up |
| Event & time-focused | Good timing, ongoing conversation & adjustment |
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Reading David Holmgren’s book on Permaculture right now, sitting on my front porch overlooking the garden that we have created using some of his principles. I love the permaculture principles, because they lend themselves so well to all kinds of other endeavours. They are generative principles, rather than proscriptive principles, meaning that they generate creative implementation rather than restricting creativity.
At any rate, reading today about the principle of Design from Patterns to Details and in the opening to that chapter he writes:
Complex systems that work tend to evolve from simple ones that work, so finding the appropriate pattern for that design is more important than understanding all the details of the elements in the system.
That is a good summary of why I work so hard at teaching and hosting important conversations in organizations and communities. Very often the problems that people experience in organizations and communities are complex ones and the correction of these complex problems is best done at the level of simple systemic actions. Conversations are a very powerful simple systemic action, and serve to be a very important foundation for all manner of activities and capacities needed to tackle the increasing scale of issues in a system. Collaboration, dialogue, visioning, possibility and choice creating, innovation, letting go of limiting beliefs, learning, and creative implementation are all dependant on good conversational practice. If we use debate as the primary mode of communicating, we do not come to any of these key capacities; in fact debate may be the reason for these capacities breaking down.
Conversation between people is a simple system that is relatively easy to implement and has massive implications for scaling up to more and more complicated and complex challenges. The ability to sense, converse, harvest and act together depends on good hosting and good conversation.
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This summer I have been gifting myself a weekly learning session with my friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk who are leading a TaKeTiNa workshop here on Bowen Island. TaKeTiNa is a moving rhythm meditation that provides a learning medium for dealing with questions, inquiries and awareness. In many ways it is like a musical version of the aikido based Warrior of the Heart training that we sometimes offer around Art of Hosting workshops. It is a physical process that seeks to short circuit the thinking mind and bring questions and insights to life.
We do this by creating difficult situations, polyrhythmic patterns using voice, stepping and hand clapping. This exploration of the edges of chaos and order is powerful, even in the short 90 minutes sessions we are doing.
Each session is offered as a learning journey, and so I have been coming the past two weeks with questions and ideas that I wanted to pursue. Yesterday I was think a lot about community and how people get left behind. In our group there were six of us, stepping, singing and clapping in ever increasing complexity. There were times when I lost the pattern and laid back into the basic drum beat, the basic vocal sounds and found my way back into the complicated rhthyms. It brought to mind a question: what violence do we do to groups of people when we have no heartbeat to come back to?
For any community or group, this heartbeat could be their deepest passion, their shared purpose or the thing they care most about. When those things aren’t visible, people get left behind, and chaotic circumstances lead to alienation and despair. So working a little with sensing the heartbeat, and arriving at a solid home place to return to.
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My business year usually follows the wet seasons, running for September to June. I’m finally back home on Bowen Island, relaxing and recovering, feeling rather burned out from a very heavy year of travel and work. Here are a few links that crossed my path recently:
- Euan Semple on why flashmobs are beautiful.
- Johnnie Moore on change myths and “best” practice.
- Holger Nauheimer has a series of posts on skills and change worldviews.
- Dave Pollard‘s unschooling manifesto.
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Back in Halifax after a few days on PEI staying at Rob Paterson’s place. Right next to the house we were in was a striking contrast in field ecology, comparing a monocultured wheat field with a former horse paddock which has become a meadow. Rob and I spent the better part of an hour talking about these two fields and drawing analogies between them and the kinds of organizations we work with: some are monocultures and some are communities. The above video is a five minute summary of some of the things we discovered on our own.