Been quiet here the last couple of weeks but not in my life. Two weeks ago I visited The Shire near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia to teach with Toke Moeller, Sera Thompson and Tim Merry in the Art of Hosting. It was a beautiful time, working on the land, working with people from Yarmouth, Montreal and the eastern US who are doing deeply important work with youth, food and community. And it was great working with my mates.
A couple of pieces have showed up around the web about this training. Here is a post from Brian Hurlburt, a truly generous soul in Yarmouth who hosts web sites for community groups:
The Art of Hosting training is open to leaders, managers, teachers and pioneers from all walks of life who want to see and act from a new perspective on leadership that sets free one another’s creativity and intelligence. Helping those who want to learn to lead without being possessive, to help without taking credit, to let go in order to achieve more for the common good.
This practice may well require a shift in our thinking and ways of doing things, however since having left the Shire I’ve had more meaningful conversations with my family, friends, and associates! The exclamation point is purposely used because I’ve been to these types of things before; you know those leadership getaways where you get all fired up and then when you leave and return to reality your left with an empty useless feeling! This was totally different!
What I learned there, and what I experienced there was real, meaningful, and lasting! Easily applied in the real world and very affective and effective! In fact I find myself having more meaningful conversations without even trying!
No that’s powerful, when a way of doing things becomes a practice that becomes a natural way of doing things and can be applied in meaningful ways in daily life the course / conference becomes one that will benefit anyone who is open to it and makes themselves available to attend.
It was also great to see Rob Paterson there, who has been recently investigating the nature of “trusted space” on his blog and who found something in what we were talking about to animate those spaces. In the Art of Hosting, we use the term “fellowship” to describe our way of working together and we often refer to each other as “mates.” In talking with others, like Peggy Holman, the word “communitas” is another way of describing it, in perhaps a less gendered way. Regardless, this is a deep form of organizational structure and Toke, Tim, Sera, Rob and I along with others explored this deeply at The Shire.
Essentially, as Rob put it:
I am still amazed that I can know someone I have never met so well. I am not alone in going to work, as I did with Johnnie Moore, on a very dangerous piece of work with a person that I had never met before. There is some weird property of the web that enables Mates to notice the connection. Cyn has helped me overcome my fear of using my body and has put me on a path to keep healthy and fit. She lived only a mile away but we met for years online. Chris arrived at the Shire never having met Tim before. I came to the Shire because of Chris’ request knowing that it would be great. I have only met Chris once before. Many of you have similar stories about finding ‘Mates” in the ‘sphere. I find no separation in these relationships. Reputation is critical in this world…Fellowship is when Mates decide to do the world’s great work together. There is great work to be done that requires exceptional courage and often more than a lifetime to accomplish.
I think that is a lovely description, and it certainly validates my experience of working deeply with others, connected over long distances, engaged in the work of making good in the world. You probably have your own example of this type of organizing and working together. You work on a simple but mammoth task together, not tied to timelines or outcomes but simply knowing that one another are behind you. It is the shape of a circle moving outward from it’s centre, the essential shape of the expansion of the universe. We remain connected in our origins and our committment, and even over vast distances, we seem able to sense what the others are doing, and know when help is needed.
So, I’m curious, what is your mammoth task? And who are your mates? How is your fellowship working?
If you would like to explore more of this way of working, and the role that meaningful conversation plays in it, there are two Art of Hosting trainings coming up this fall. Here on Bowen Island, British Columbia, Tenneson Wolf, Brenda Chaddock, Teresa Posakony and me are hosting a gathering September 24-27, and there is still space. Sera Thompson will be hosting a gathering with Toke and Tim in Boulder Colorado.
[tags]Art of Hosting, Toke Moeller, Tim Merry, Sera Thompson, Rob Paterson[/tags}
I am a very mindful driver. For me driving is an exercise in flow and self-organization and I even see it as a bit of a giving practice.
So I was intensely interested when my friend Kathryn Thompson told me of an article entitled “Why don’t we do it in the road? recently published in Salon, which talks about how to make streets safer by removing controls.
“One of the characteristics of a shared environment is that it appears chaotic, it appears very complex, and it demands a strong level of having your wits about you,” says U.K. traffic and urban design consultant Ben Hamilton-Baillie, speaking from his home in Bristol. “The history of traffic engineering is the effort to rationalize what appeared to be chaos,” he says. “Today, we have a better understanding that chaos can be productive.”
In the past, in this space, I posted a video of traffic in India which demonstrates this point.
Chaos does make us more mindful. We make better choices in more chaotic environments because we pay much closer attention to the subtleties of what is happening around us. You cannot be on your cellphone, or talking to others or letting your mind wander when you are driving in unregulated traffic. You have to use all of the capacities that every driving instructor tries to teach you when you are sixteen. Pay attention, anticipate, leave space and be careful. Good advice for a chaotic world.
The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further that seems possible. It keeps surprising us. In this regard, the Wikipedia truly is exhibit A, impure as it is, because it is something that is impossible in theory, and only possible in practice. It proves the dumb thing is smarter than we think. At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.
That is such a lovely and concise description of the benefits of bottom up organization combined with the benefits of top down. In some ways you could see this polarity as inside versus outside as well. For example, in chaordic organizational design, you see this manifest with the principles that are developed for action which are the collective expression that comes “top down” in a sense to guide the bottom up action of the individuals. There may be a group of people that cares for these principles and, by agreement of the rest of the group, maintains them in order to creatively constrain action. In that sense the organization is top down that allows for and opens space for bottom up agency.
To see this as inner and outer, it seems clear that from the outside, the rules for action come, but they exist to support and encourage the expression of individual volition, so that individuals, acting on their own drives and passions can connect with others to take responsibility for bringing things to life.
We have a real life example of this in the community that has collected around our learning centre here on Bowen Island. Just finishing its third year, the learning centre is a place for homeschooling families to connect with others, use the expertise of hired teachers and for the kids to supplement their homelearning with up to 2.5 days a week of work with others in a class room and resource rich setting. Each family is responsible for the learning of their own children and so we have a number of approaches being used in the community. Our family unschools, and other families use curriculum to various degrees. We are involved in a variety of activities outside of the learning centre but we also come together to work with and support each other.
The learning centre program is supported by a group of parents called the planning council who make top-down decisions about how things run at the centre. They hire the teachers, and look after the finances and also set and maintain the principles of the program. One of the principles is family participation, and so the organization runs as a bit of an Open Space. If you want something to happen, make it happen. If you need help, ask for help. Connect passion and responsibility within the principled parameters of the program and we can do stuff. If what you want doesn’t fit the program, find some other parents and offer it on your own. In this way we support 20 homelearning families, all with different styles, in a common set of activities. It works really well, and is actually surprisingly little work for the planning council. I think their biggest stress is not time per se but wrestling with the edges of the principles to maintain the integrity of the intention of the program. And that, it seems to me, is what top-down should do, while bottom up is taking care of the quality of the offerings and the details. It is, in the words of our Open Space practices, holding and supporting connection, to keep the space open for creative learning and offerings to occur.
[tags]Kevin Kelly, chaordic[/tags]
Here are a number of bits and pieces that have been waiting around for ages to get posted:
- Donella Meadows on being a global citizen and dancing with systems. From Bill Harris at Making Sense with Facilitated Systems.
- Getting Started with Action Learning, also from Bill.
- Dave Pollard on indigenous capacities for learning and discovery:
The word indigenous* means ‘born into and part of’, and by inference ‘inseparably connected to’. We are all, I think, indigenous at birth, born into the Earth-organism and connected in a profound and primal way to all life on the planet, even if we are born in the sterile confines of an ‘antiseptic’ hospital. But we are quickly indoctrinated into the civilized conceit of human separateness, and that conceptual separateness is reinforced by a physical separateness until, soon enough, we forget that we are a part of a constituency greater and deeper than family or state. Conception thus becomes our reality.
My most important moments of learning and discovery have occurred in those rare moments when I’ve been able to briefly shake that illusion of separateness, and re-become indigenous, liberated, part of the real world.
- More Dave, on what we can learn from aphids:
If I’m correct, then the aphid I’m looking at right now does think and feel. She wonders. She is curious. She experiences the profound joy of living, and the commensurate desire to go on living. She enjoys the company of and communication with others. She is driven to learn and gets satisfaction from doing so. She experiences emotional grief and/or physical pain at being lost, separated, witnessing the death of a fellow creature, or being stepped on. She cares about all the life she can fathom, and as long as she lives she fathoms more, and passes along more knowledge, and more reason to care, in her DNA. That is why she is here.
- Na’Cha’uaht on Indians and oil:
One of the most basic and fundamental Nuu-chah-nulth principles is embodied in the phrase, “Hish’ukish Tsa’walk” (Everything is one/connected). A full comprehension of this principle teaches us that we cannot support unsustainable development. We cannot support an industry that would threaten our watersheds with complete devastation. We cannont gladly shake the hands of corporations who use proxy governments (US, UK etc.) to wage wars all over the world, killing other Indigenous people. We cannot make the best of an inevitable corporate imposition by selling ourselves for a few jobs and money. We cannot accept this inevitability.
- Squashed Philosophers, a redux of the major thinkers that underpin Western thought.
- Getting out of confusion through conversation by Nadine Tanner:
Conversation can help move us out of the discomfort of confusion. Inquiry opens a space for meaningful conversation. It makes your intangible confusion visible to others so you can begin to build a more complete understanding.
So, next time you’re confused try staying with it for a while. Share it with others. Start conversations. Connect the otherwise unconnected dots
- Patti on following desire lines:
When faced with a bird’s eye view of my own desire lines, measuring in quick paces the decisions I’ve made or not made, do I allow them to become the real path, or do I put up a concrete barrier to redirect myself back to the “official” road? And what is that process of creating our own path? What feelings does it entail, engender, cause?
As Finch said,
“Sometimes, following unknown paths, we find ourselves in a maze of growth, in failing light, unsure where we are, flailing through jungles of stiff, impenetrable shrubs and sharp briars in deceptively benign-looking woods. All at once we realize we are lost, unable to retrace our steps. Then, suddenly, we come out onto a paved highway, far from where we thought we were, feeling a gratefulness and a relief we are ashamed to acknowledge.
But sometimes, just sometimes, we come upon a new and unexpected clearing, a magical place unanticipated in our daily thoughts or even our dreams; and when we do, we are so amazed that we cease even to wonder whether we will be able to find our way back home, or, perchance, whether this might in fact be our new home.”
- Lisa Heft’s collection of papers on Open Space Technology
- Kevin Harris’s musings on community leadership, with links to an interesting paper.
Sun and clouds above the Strait of Georgia
I was listening to this podcast this morning, a conversation between Krista Tippet and John Polkinghorne regarding the marriage of quantum physics and religion (which incidently is a subject Ken Wilber has also taken on recently in a podcast). It is an excellent conversation and I found myself grooving along with the theme of the universe as both predictable to some extent and unpredictable at the same time. Polkinhorne makes the analogy with clocks and clouds, saying that the sun rises and sets and we can predict when that will happen using Newtonian physics (and clocks), and also there is much uncertainly in the world, which he calls “clouds:” unpredictable possibility, structure on the edge of chaos and order.
My mind got busy and I started thinking about how peering into the sky, one can see this all the time. The sun, stars, moon and planets that we see in the sky can be predicted and clocked. The clouds that move across them are full of potential and beauty and complexity and there is no way we can account for or predict the specific form of any of them.
And then I began to notcie the sky itself – clear, transparent, irrelevent to both the objects and the clouds and yet the medium in which both exist, and I began to think that this is a good model for thinking about facilitation. As facilitators we hold space for both order and chaos to play at the same time. We are barely noticable when we are working well, and when people gaze into our container they see only the play of clouds or the precise edges of stars and moon, and forget that they are also looking at the sky itself.
Facilitating as sky means opening THAT big and inviting both clouds and sun to play with one another and to admit the possibility for amazing and astonishing beauty to arise from their coexistence. It is the essence of holding space in chaordic process.