There is no way you can learn the art of facilitation, the art of hosting, by simply coming to a workshop. It happens from time to time that people show up for a three day workshop and expect that at the end they will be competent hosts of groups process in any situation. To get good at arts you have to practice.
Last week in Montreal, I saw 120 people come to an Art of Hosting with an overwhelming desire to practice. The invitation to them was to attend if they were wanting to develop and improve their practice. It made for an incredible experience. When people are invited to come to learn because they are ready to host, they are open wide to what is offered, not only by us as teachers, but more importantly by the group itself. This is an excellent ground from which to develop a practice of hosting, and the relationships that are formed are the critical supports for competency in that practice to unfold.
Somehow, the view of learning in the world has been confused with the kinds of quality control that is attached to manufacturing. We imagine that a learning experience will have specific achievable outcomes and that upon completing a course, we can be certified in the competency in which we have been trained. While this can be true for technical training, such as how to operate equipment, with things like art and strategy and leadership and communications and other practice based arts, the opposite is actually true. When I leave practice based learning events I recognize that I am a baby, just starting out, and with a lifetime of practice ahead of me. I can’t be certified to be competent, because there is no way to guarantee that I will be perfect. When we first begin to practice, we always make mistakes. Over a lifetime we develop our own styles and we get better at it.
Hosting is practice. The willingness to embrace it this way is the biggest indicator to me as to whether someone will eventually develop a competency in this art. Expertise is developed, not given or bought.
Very few of us have our hands on the real levers of power. We lack the money and influence to write policy, create tax codes, move resources around or start and stop wars. Most of us spend almost all of our time going along with the macro trends of the world. We might hate the implications of a fossil fuel economy, but everything we do is firmly embedded within it. We might despise colonization, but we know that we are alos guilty of it in many small ways,
The reason challenges like that are difficult to resolve is that we are embedded within them. We are a part of them and the problem is not like something outside of ourselves that we apply force to. Instead it is like a virus or a mycellium, extending it’s tendrils deep into our lives. We are far more the product of the problems we wish to solve than we are the solutions we long to develop.
Social change is littered with ideas like “taking things to scale” which implies that if you just work hard enough, the things you will do will become popular and viral and will take over the world. We can have a sustainable future if “we just practice simple things and then take them to scale.” The problem with this reasoning is that the field in which we are embedded, that which enables us to practice small changes is heavily immune to change. Our economy, our energy systems, our governments are designed to be incredibly stable. They can withstand all kinds of threats and massive changes, This is a GOOD THING. I would hate to have the energy system that powers my life to be fickle enough to be transformed by every good idea that comes along about sustainable power generation. So that is the irony. In the western world, the stability that we rely on to be able to “make change” is exactly that which we desire to change.
We are embedded in the system. We ARE the system. That which we desire to change is US. You want a peaceful world, because you are not a fully peaceful person – violence has seeped into your life, and you understand the implications of it. This is also a GOOD THING. Because, as my friend Adam Kahane keeps quoting from time to time “if you are not a part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution.” Real change in stable societies like Canada comes only from catastrophic failure. That may be on our horizon, but I call you a liar if it’s something you desire. It will not be pretty. Living on the west coast of Canada, I sometimes think about it because a massive earthquake will strike here – possibly in my lifetime – and it will change everything instantly and massively and forever. So, while climate change and economic collapse are probabilities, earthquakes are certainties.
So let’s forget about prototyping new things and “taking them to scale.” But let’s not forget about prototyping new things. Because one of the big lessons from the living systems world view is that change happens in an evolutionary way. It happens deep within the system and it requires two resources we all have – creativity and time. It does not require hope. Living systems do not hope. They just change.
Years ago I was inspired by Michael Dowd’s ideas captured in “Thank God for Evolution” in which he talks about mutations as the vehicle of change in evolving systems. Of course this is a widespread thought, but it was quite liberating to me when I first discovered it because it compels us to use our own creativity to make change. Practicing something different, as some small level, is not a useless endeavour. There is no way to know what will happen when you mutate the system. And so that is a reason for practicing. That is why I love Occupy and #IdleNoMore and other social gathering practices. They are creative mutations of the status quo. And they are undertaken without any expectation of massive change. Instead they seed little openings, the vast majority of which don’t go anywhere. In an evolutionary system, mutations may introduce new levels of adaptability, but they might alos kill off the organism. But to survive and evolve, an organism needs to mutate. Remaining the same is also suicidal, because everything else is mutating and changing, and you will lose your fitness if you don’t also change.
So the second resource we all have is time. if you are beholden to making change along a strategic critical pathway, especially in a complex living system, you will suffer terrible delusions. Very few of us have that kind of time. The kind of time we do have is the time to let whatever we do work or fail. To orient yourself to this kind of time, you need to practice something with no expectation of it’s success. The moment you cling to a desired result is the moment suffering creeps into your work, and the moment you begin to lose resilience. Adaptability is reliant on creative imaginations working resourcefully.
So changing from within has something to do with all of this. Watching #IdleNoMore is to witness a celebratory mutation in the system of colonization. It is impossible to say if it will have the desired results that people project upon it. But of course it will “work.” We need to sit and watch it work as a mutation in a living system. And the bonus is that we get to round dance while we do it!
Ten years ago on September 6, 2002 I launched this blog with an innocuous little link to an on lie art project ground through Euan Semple. I called the blog Parking Lot, which is the term facilitators use for a flip chart where we record things that are off topic to the subject at hand, but important enough to come back to. Since then I have used this space as my open source learning pad, to explore and grow in the field of facilitation, organizational and community development and random other bits and pieces of living. I’ve had long extended sidelines into poetry and art, music and taekwondo, bits and pieces and threads and buttons that have led somewhere or nowhere, notes that have been quoted, posts that went viral. I’ve met amazing friends, had fleeting fame and even got into a few fights over the years in this little space.
I have often said that this space is the book I will never write – I learn so fast and change my mind so much that a book is almost too static a format for me. If you want to see the book that I will never write, head over to “A Collection of Life’s Lessons” which is a occasionally updated meta blog of this site’s greatest hits. Print all those posts out, make a nice cover and there you have a book. For free.
So this blog has been a saving grace – a place where I can jot down notes, record great links and sources and leave a legacy for my own reference. Over the years, twitter and Facebook have become more and more prevalent in my writing life, and this blog has gone through periods of being neglected and avoided. There are a million links in my twitter feed that are more instantly useful, and I’m trying to get into a rhythm of writing about them a little longer here.
So as the summer falls away and the fall simmers around the corner, join me in raising a glass of whisky and toasting ten years of Parking Lot. Thanks for being along for some of the journey.
In this article, stringing together some obersvations about Louis CK and Mary Halvorson, Seth Colter Walls touches on the wellspring of collaboration.
He writes a little of the play that replaces rehearsal for true improvisers, of finding outlets of artistic practice where
“no one person is responsible for all the tunes–if tunes are even the order of the day. Such groups aren’t the ones that players use as reputational tent-poles; they’re the ones that successful artists keep going in order to keep the channel for new sounds open. It’s the jazz-world equivalent of Zach Galifianakis’s avant-chat Web-show “Between Two Ferns,” the sort of thing that happens in the background of an otherwise thriving career.”
Facilitation or Hosting practice is improvisation too. Every time I work with a group I go in as a jazz musician, with a set list of “tunes” to play, which in group work as in music is simply a way to divide time into portions that carry and enable a narrative to unfold. Sometimes the unfolding narrative necessitates that we completely change the tunes we were planning on playing. Just last week for example, the group we were working with had come through some hard work rather earlier than we imagined, causing us to jettison our entire design for something that could take them onward from this new place.
So where do you learn how to do this? When I wrote recently on disruption, I talked about how learning how to deal with that is a capacity that serves marvelously in the world. In some ways for those of us who work with groups for a living, we are lucky to have a world that goes according to its own plan. You don’t need to work hard to seek out places where things change faster than you can account for them. It may be driving in traffic, walking in a busy street, participating in sports or music or dancing, socializing and playing in groups. All of these are training grounds where you can practice sensing and changing the plan, where you can try new ways of unleashing groups intelligence as a leaders, as a follower, as a bystander, as a participant. You can try and fail without any dire consequences affecting your bottom line.
In short, see your social life as practice, and your capacity to work with groups will be richer.
UPDATED: To include Patricia Kambitsch’s beautiful doodle.
We talk about the Art of Hosting as a practice. It is a way of being with self and other.
This is sometimes a difficult concept to understand, because the world is full of lots of instructions about what to do. Telling me what to do is very useful in situations where I am doing things that can be repeated. For example, if I am building a cabinet, fixing a car, creating a budget or processing a claim, then you can give me a set of instructions that will be very helpful in most situations. Of course there is an art to all of these, which is to say there is almost always some part of the context of these activities that require me to be smart and creative and solve a little problem here and there. But in general, these kinds of tasks can be taught.
But what happens when we are confronted with a huge question, for which the answers are unknown? What happens when things shift in ways that we have never trained for? What do we do then?
If you have trained as a martial artist or as an athlete, you will know that only with practice can you be ready to face the unexpected and create a good outcome. In martial arts, the point of training is not to rehearse every single situation so that you can create a logic tree of what to next. Rather the point of training is to actually get to a place where you don’t need to think about what to do next. It helps you to react wisely, rather than blithely. When confronted with the fight of your life, you act from clarity and calm and resourcefulness, none of which you can learn in the moment.
It is the same with the Art of Hosting. Art of Hosting workshops are not “trainings” in the typical sense of the word. Rather they are practice grounds – dojos if you will – where we can come together to spend a few days in a heightened sense of conscious awareness about what it takes to create and hold space for good conversations. In other words, the best way to come to an Art of Hosting is to prepare to pay attention in every moment to how you are practicing the basics of being in conversations with other people: being present, being an active participant, taking responsibility for hosting and co-creating a space together.
Luckily, we can also practice the Art of Hosting outside of workshops and facilitation sessions, because at its core, the Art of Hosting is about being together with another person consciously. This means that this art is extremely easy to practice because there are 7 billion humans on earth and each day we interact with dozens of them. So every moment can be a little learning journey; every conversation, no matter how brief, can be practice.
And what are we practicing for? We are practicing for the sake of practice. The practice is the practice.
For a world that is addicted to measurable outcomes and a linear progression of competency that leads from beginner to expert, this seems absurd. Why would I want to practice for the sake of practicing?
There are several reasons for this. First this kind of conscious practice – of being present as often as possible with everyone you meet – actually changes things. It actually shifts the social spaces of our world. If you want a kind society, you cannot ask for others to provide it for you. It arises to the extent that you practice it, in every moment. Starting right now.
And if you want to become good at working with other people to make creative decisions and chooses about the problems we face together, practicing on a daily basis and in small ways gets you ready for big and surprising challenges. It prepares you to meet the challenges that come on so fast that you have no time to learn how to deal with them. Practicing kindness, possibility seeking and deep listening on a daily basis ingrains those skills and capacities. It makes you a better facilitator. It makes you a better parent and a better citizen. It even makes you a better cabinet maker, a better financial analyst and a better claims processor.
But there is no goal. You cannot practice with the idea of achieving an 80% efficacy rate in generating creative listening in the moment of deepest crises. Practice does not lend itself to these kinds of metrics and targets. So let go of those expectations. Practice for the sake of it and revel in the small shifts that happen around you. Become present simply because it is a better way to experience the world. Participate fully in your interactions with others, ask good questions and experience what it is to be hosted. Step up and practice kindness in daily interactions to discover the core practice of hosting challenging spaces. And find a place, moment by moment, to co-create the world you want to live in.
Those of us that work with people have a terrific opportunity to practice and improve in every moment. Approaching our own training as a life long practice opens the possibility that we might get very good at it very quickly. Consider this an invitation to do so. The world is your dojo. Go practice.