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.
The last couple of weeks my deepening of perspective on the four fold practice of the art of hosting has continued. In the Art of Hosting Water Dialogues we are teaching the practice and inviting participants to reflect on what they already know about the practice. Here is a snippet of the harvest from our work this week:
Presensing and hosting yourself
- Be place based
- Sense what could be better
- Develop confidence
- Prepare for surprising outcomes
- Centering before entering
- Personal wellness: sleep, eat and hydrate
- Give yourself enough time
- Know your participants
- Remember that you are always a learner
Participating
- Connect people to purpose
- Learn and speak with a common language
- listen and ask questions and be curious
- Take notes and connect to learning from elsewhere
- Realize that you don’t need to know everything
- Celebrate and reinforce commonalities
- Ask good questions
- Empathize and synthesize
- Notice your projections on to other people
- Response-ability
- Act on your beliefs and values in a positive way
- Trust yourself
Contributing and hosting conversations
- Create space for dialogue and for a community that cares.
- Bring together diversity for better innovation
- Make people comfortable and invite them to push their boundaries
- Invite respect
- Pay attention to logistics and the quality of space
- Create a space for invitation and learning, where disagreement is legitimate
- Work from common purpose
- Recognize and name the elephants in the room
- be clear about the purpose of and the intended harvest of a conversation
- provide the minimum structure to focus work while allowing for emergence
- Host people to enable them to engage in uncertain cisrcumstances
- Level the playing field for wisdom
- Use methods that bring in diverse voices
Co-creating the community
- Create collaborative buy in
- Change must come from the margins of the system, sustained by a core that is willing to co-create
- Do activities that connect rather than prescribe answers
- Always plan with an eye to sustaining momentum
- Develop a close network of mates and work together
- Work with people and have fun with them too.
- Collect and share stories
- Collaborate with complimentary allies
- Seek inspiration across disciplines.
At our art of hosting water dialogues this morning, several insights on the four fold practice of hosting:
- on hosting ourselves, one of the participants who used to work in emergency medicine shared his team’s mantra: in an emergency the first pulse you take is your own,
- participating means coming to any situation with curiosity and an ability and desire to learn something
- the practice of hosting doesn’t mean you need to be an expert. To convene you simply need the desire and courage to call and hold.
- the practice of co-creation is born from generosity and sharing resources, skills, opportunities and knowledge.
- as we move through the four fold practice we evolve from a learner to a community of learners to a community that learns. This last shift is often the hardest.
- at the core of this practice is intention. To come to the practice with intention is to activate it.
- it is surprising how quickly we can move to co-creation when we have practiced together once, we did a signing exercise that took the group through two rounds of co-creation and we quickly moved to creating music together that was unimaginable 10 minutes before.
I love how groups just spark insights. You can teach this stuff dozens of dozens of times and there is always something new to learn.
This video on The Four-Fold Practice was made by Kevin McKeever for InCommons, the initaitve we were working with last month in Minnesota.
This video really captures why we feel that this simple four folded practice lies at the heart of what the Art of Hosting is. Everything we teach and practice under the name “Art of Hosting” springs from an integrated practice of these four things. Enjoy.