This morning the wind and rain continue here in the islands of the south coast of British Columbia. It has been a wet fall and winter – perhaps the wettest since the time of the Flood stories – and this is the coldest May we’ve had for a long time, which brings its own hazards. It’s all down to an extended La Nina event that pipes cool water into the north Pacific and keeps the air masses cold and turbulent, resulting in reliable patterns of convection, instability and therefore precipitation and windy weather weather.
I live in a very rainy part of the world, and so to really love living here, one has to love the rain. This morning as I took my coffee to sit by the sea, I was struck by just how immersed I was in water. The sea of course, which bathes the shoreline and brings all kind of nutrients into our inlet. The creek beside me, channelling the rain from the mountain into the bay, delivering different nutrients back to the shore line. The rain that was falling into my coffee cup, spattering against my hood. And my breath, precipitating in small clouds that echoed their larger cousins across the channel, covering the mountains on the mainland. An entire symphony of sound all played on the same instrument.
For me, actually, water is my favourite image of God. If you are a spiritual or religious person, your engagement with the Divine is of course fraught with reductionist peril. As Lao Tzu wrote in the very first line of a book about the Tao, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” It’s a disclaimer. He says, “look, everything I am about to write here isn’t the things I am actually writing about, so take that under advisement.” One must be very cautious talking about images of God, the Creator, the Divine. Every name severly limits your experience of that which you are trying to talk about. Whatever name or image you have is like trying to watch Barcelona FC play through a tiny keyhole, in the outside door of the Camp Nou.
And yet, the image that works best for me is “water.” It brings life, and it can sweep it away. It can induce terror and soothe the soul. One can go for a hair raising boat trip from which you barely escape alive and then heal yourself with a soothing cup of tea and a bath. Water also has a characteristic of non-duality which gives it an important characteristic as it relates to my spiritual practice. As our atmosphere is made of water vapour, and so are we, it is true to say that “I am in the water and the water is in me.”
To end, here is a poem by William Stafford that I used in our fifth Complexity from the Inside Out course this morning, borrowed from a blog post by my buddy Tenneson. It points towards this non-dual whole I am talking about.
Being a Person
William Stafford
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.
My favourite places to walk are along coastal paths, preferably along cliff tops or wild shorelines. On my home island we have very few places where one can take an extended stroll along such a place as most of the shoreline is privatized and even though in Casnada all shore up to the high water mark is public right of way, much of the Nex?wlélex?wm/Bowen Island coast line is steep and rocky and access to the intertidal zone is restricted.
But there is a glorious walk along the shoreline at Cape Roger Curtis and it is my favourite place on the island. For about a kilometer and a half, the trail winds along the shoreline, part of it even crossing a cantilevered boardwalk, pinned into a sliff side maybe 20 meters about the rocky shore below. From that trail, it is common to see marine mammals such as seals and sea lions, and I have spotted harbour porpoises, killer whales and even a humpback whale from the trail.
in living systems the most important and interesting zones are the ecotones, the place where two ecosystems meet. This tends to be where the most life is. Where the forest meets the sea is a rich area of nutrition and growth. And Cape Roger Curtis is doubly special and edgy becasue it is the point where Atl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound meets the Strait of Georgia which makes up the half of the main body of water that is the Salish Sea. It is here that currents swirl and meet, with the salty ocean water meeting the fresher water that flows from the glacier and streams that rise above our inlet. The coastla trail winds down the west side of the island, around the Cape and along the south shore, which in the Squamish language is called Ni7cháy?ch Nex?wlélex?wm, a name which captures the edges of the forest and the sea, which is also the edge of Squamish territory. From here on out is the big wide world.
Today that churning seas with its 4 meter tides is nurturing schools of anchovy and herring which have draw sea lions back for their annual feed. They have been hauling out in large number on one of the unused docks at the Cape over the past several years. At times there are as many as thirty around – especially when the Biggs Killer Whales are out hunting them – but today there where only four or five. Offshore there was a large raft of surf scoters, number 5-600, and gulls and cormorants were similarly hunting and diving into schools of these rich feed fish. In the nearby forest townsend warblers and song sparrows were calling, while in the skies above a battle was raging between a pair of ravens and an eagle. It appeared as if the eagle’s appetite had disrupted the ravens’ family plans and they were angry.
Much of my spiritual practice comes through a tradition of monastic and contemplative practice that was formed in places like this, on the edges of continents, on the edges of territories, on the ecotones between the known world and the mysterious beyond. It is a place where the heart is awakened and the senses sharpened, and the power of the natural world is so strong that it overwhelms the temporary intrusion of a human.
I have a little more than a passing interest in the politics and history of Ireland and Northern Ireland in particular, from whence my father’s family of 17th century Scottish transplants emerged.
One of the blogs I follow on this subject is the Unionist blog Slugger O’Toole which offers very thoughtful commentary on Irish and British politics from a Unionist – but not sectarian – perspective. It is very hard not to conflate the two when discussing Northern Ireland, Glasgow or Liverpool-based football, or Canadian history (yes they all have a Protestant v Catholic underlying animosity). This is especially true if you only know a little bit about what you’re talking about. The more you know, the more nuance you will find.
And so here this morning, buried in this review of a new personal history of Ireland by Fintan O’Toole is a really nice succinct quote about sectarianism:
…here we have the essence of sectarianism, the inevitable by-product not of misunderstanding, but of understanding to the point of caricature without compassion and human respect. Such an environment could only fail to foster a political culture able to sustain the give and take of a mature democracy. It made the recourse to violence more immediate and appealing.
That is really a good and useful description of a dynamic that usually unnecessarily complicates the already complex politics of colonization and conflict. It strikes me that overcoming dynamics like sectarianism is work that can be done by each of us personally in order to engage with the bigger issues of policy and politics that affect all us collectively.
This morning this quote came through the email via Richard Rohr’s daily meditation. it’s Thich Nhat Than writing on the Christian practice of communion.
The bread that Jesus handed to you, to us, is real bread, and if you can eat real bread you have real life. But we are not able to eat real bread. We only try to eat the word bread or the notion of bread. Even when we are celebrating the Eucharist, we are still eating notions and ideas. “Take, my friends, this is my flesh, this is my blood.” Can there be any more drastic language in order to wake you up? What could Jesus have said that is better than that? You have been eating ideas and notions, and I want you to eat real bread so that you become alive. If you come back to the present moment, fully alive, you will realize this is real bread, this piece of bread is the body of the whole cosmos.
If Christ is the body of God, which he is, then the bread he offers is also the body of the cosmos. Look deeply and you notice the sunshine in the bread, the blue sky in the bread, the cloud and the great earth in the bread. Can you tell me what is not in a piece of bread? The whole cosmos has come together in order to bring to you this piece of bread. You eat it in such a way that you become alive, truly alive. . . . Eat in such a way that the Holy Spirit becomes an energy within you and then the piece of bread that Jesus gives to you will stop being an idea, a notion.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 106–107.
I love that. It reminds me of the power of acknowledging the simple and everyday sacred with a simple and everyday ritual. It uses a mindful practice to raise the ordinary to the sacred.
About seven years ago I was working at a conference called Awakening Soul as a facilitator and as a poet who captured the keynote presentations and the harvests from the world cafes I was leading. One of the speakers was John Phillip Newell, a prolific writer on Celtic Christianity informed by his time as warden of the monastery on Iona in the Hebrides.
His keynote contained a similar idea to Thay’s about the Eucharist. He spoke about the cosmology of matter and meaningfulness. He said that the bread in the Eucharist stood in for “the matter that matters.” Somehow in the dance of speaker and poet we also added that the wine is about the spirit that flows. The matter that matters and the spirit that flows. A simple ritual used to acknowledge the profound meaning of Jesus being together with his dearest friends on the last night of his life. If you have been with a dying person or in a situation like that you know the feeling of that moment. Only at birth and death does one experience it.
Later that night Newell and me and five other people all found ourselves talking around a dining table in our shared accommodation. We got on to telling the birth stories of our children and as the night deepened, the stories became more and more profound. Not all the stories were good news One was about a still birth. Others were funny like the way Caitlin gripped my knees so hard that the two of us were screaming in different kinds of pain when our son was born, much to the midwife’s amusement.
It was late in the night when our circle of stories drew to a close but before we all went to bed I suggested that we mark the end of this very sacred experience with a small communion. All we had was a bottle of Laphroaig whisky and a bar of Bowen Island chocolate. And so we passed these two elements to each other offering the simple blessing: this is the matter that matters and this is the spirit that flows. And it truly transformed our little gathering into something quite sacred.
Today I stood on the beach you see in the photo above, in a very isolated and sacred place on the south flank of Haleakala on Mau’i. It is a place where the first Hawaiians arrived on this island, a black cobble beach with incredible waves and the stunning 8000 foot high flank of the volcano behind. And as I stood there I felt my father very strongly. He sailed in these waters as a naval officer in the 1950s and he knew the power of the simple and transcendent. He knew deep in his bones about the communion that I am talking about. he knew to take time to stop and acknowledge it. That knowledge served him well in his death back in December and it has served me well in my grief journey since then.
And it served me well today, remembering in a simple act that “this is the matter that matters, and this is the spirit that flows.” That little prayer is your gateway to remembering that you belong to the cosmos.
Part three in a series:
Part three: a collection of patterns for design and facilitation.
As I heard the story, the four fold practice was something of a flash of insight tied in with the original Art of Hosting offering made by Toke, Jan, and Monica. Somewhere in the forests of Northern California as the team was preparing to offer its first Art of Hosting training, somebody woke up one morning, after a few days of discussion and design with the strong sense that meaningful conversations had four things in common: people were present to the work, everyone was participating, the conversation was hosted in some way, and people co-created together. That’s it. It was, as the legend goes, drawn on the back of a napkin, which is the test of all useful frameworks, and it became the subject of an inquiry: so if these are the patterns that make up a meaningful conversation, what would the Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations look like? Could we anchor our hosting practice on that? Could we teach that?
This simple observation and the subsequent inquiry has become a generative framework that holds together a global community of practitioners and theorists. We have seen that what constitutes a “meaningful conversation” in a huge variety of cultural and linguistic settings on every continent is a process that more or less exhibits these four characteristics. When brought together in the service of meaningful work these four patterns bring life and effectiveness to collective sense-making, problem-solving, and action. When attended to with good design and facilitation, these patterns become basic elements of the best kind of dialogue.
The ART of using these practices is being able to use them fluidly and fluently in many different contexts. Each of these four patterns looks different depending on the group you are working with and the work you are doing with them. It is very important that each group experience these patterns in ways that make sense to them. As skillful hosts we are trying to build containers for important and meaningful work. These containers are not the product of our role, rather they are themselves instruments that help good work to be done. The Art of Hosting is purely instrumentalist, in the sense that if the hosting is not practical and pragmatic and not in the service of something else, then it is not appropriate. Our goal as practitioners is not to simply create good dialogues for their own sake but to do so to have an effect, so we can be of service to a group.
Over the past 15 or so years of teaching and working with this art I have thought a lot about the connection between these patterns of experience and the practice of hosting. For me now, these four patterns have become the enabling constraints of my work with groups, in that I try to ensure that my designs meet the group’s purpose using this practice. The practices are broad enough that they allow for a vast array of approaches to be used so that designs can be tailored to context, but at the end of the day, it’s important to ask myself these questions:
- Are participants present?
- Is everyone participating?
- Is the space being held and hosted?
- Is the group itself co-creating its work?
In my experience, the extent to which these four conditions are true is directly related to the extent to which the group is doing good dialogic work. When I see goops faltering in their work, it is usually because one of these four patterns is crumbling. A group may lose its focus, some participants might be dominating in a way that causes others to become redundant to the process, the facilitation may be too tight or too loose, or the group may be having its work done by someone else. All of these conditions have the effect of undermining ownership, capacity, engagement, and participation. In general, when we are working with uncertainty or unknown futures, the four-fold practice is a useful checklist to enable groups to work together in complexity to understand what’s happening, make sense of their situation and make some decisions about what to do next, all the while staying connected and in relationship.
That’s a pretty big return on investment for such a small and portable practice.
Being Present
When I think back to the original learning I did around hosting and facilitation with the Elders of the National Association of Friendship Centres, and indeed before that in the governance processes of the United Church of Canada in which I was involved as a young man, I notice that important conversations were always preceded with a prayer or an invocation, or even a moment of silence before we got to work. For a conversation to be meaningful, every participant must be present to the task at hand. That means each one needs to have the time and resources to be able to participate. The work of the moment must be the only thing that holds people’s attention and so focus is important.
In later years, through the playing of Irish traditional music, which itself is a kind of social ritual and through spiritual practice influenced by both my indigenous teachers and the stream of practice that comes from Celtic monasticism, I observed and thought deeply about the nature of thresholds, which are those edges we cross that help us understand that we are in a different space, set aside for particular collective work that requires a little more depth of attention than our day to day activities. Practices to cross the threshold are very important in these kinds of spaces because they help us understand that we are in a different place and we are asked to bring a different awareness to what we are doing.
This is true of dialogue.
So whatever helps people come present to the work is a useful way to build the container for dialogue. It becomes almost ceremonial, and indeed the importance of ritual of some kind cannot be overstated. Even something as simple as taking a moment of silence before beginning, or having people silently read the relevant document together is a useful way to begin. Of course, more elaborate processes can involve more elaborate ways of bringing people to presence, but I have never been let down by a moment of silence. Even in the middle of meetings, when things are going sideways and conflict has become unproductive, a moment of silence can have a powerful effect in bringing people back to the problem or the purpose.
Whatever helps the group cross the threshold – be it physical or immaterial – will help participants come to the presence necessary to do deeper work.
Participating
In my own journey to develop the art of hosting in myself, one of the biggest mountains to climb was the idea that the facilitator is the one in charge of the room. For years I stood at the front of rooms full of people struggling with problems, asking questions, guiding discussions, commenting on ideas and writing them on flip charts. I was an influential part of the discussion, mostly unconsciously influencing decisions and discussions towards ideas and actions that grabbed my attention and excited me. It was all about me. Even though I was schooled on participatory research and Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I was also raised and mentored by people who were training me to be a preacher in the United Church of Canada and the promise to the ego of commanding an audience was the hardest thing that I had to overcome. Indeed it is still the hardest place of my own facilitation practice.
Discovering Open Space Technology was an absolute revelation to me. It allowed me to see what was possible when the facilitator radically trusted the group and let them take full responsibility for the conversations and the outcomes of their work. Radical participation is at the heart of the Art of Hosting, and the practice itself is intended to constrain leaders and hosts in such a way that the groups do theor work within constraints but with a minimum of influence from the facilitator. This is often the hardest practice for facilitators to learn when they shift their style to hosting: we are generally imprinted its the idea that facilitation means the facilitator is taking control of the space, ensuring safety, managing the agenda, keeping things moving along and dealing with conflict. Many times clients have asked me to solve interpersonal problems for them, because we have an idea that we can outsource these kinds of things to a facilitator.
But we know that when a group takes responsibility for its own work when everyone is actively participating and making sense of their own situation, we get a much more sustainable and resilient outcome from dialogic processes. The job of the host is to enable participation through careful attention to the constraints and methods that make it possible. This means first of all that hosts themselves must have a practice of participation, meaning that they must be good at engaging in dialogue themselves: sharing Ideas, listening to others, being aware of their impact in systems. It means that hosts must understand that they are never neutral in a system, that the privilege, power, and influence they bring is significant and important. Learning more about complexity, power, and privilege has made me a better host and has deepened my practice of participation in the world.
There is a reason that methods like Circle, Open Space Technology, World Cafe, and Appreciative Inquiry have been fundamental to the practice of the Art of Hosting in strategic settings. These methods have full participation built into them, and participants actively share the responsibility for the quality of the conversation and the harvest of the outcomes. Furthermore, when practitioners in the Art of Hosting global community have created methods, they also ensure full participation from all, including methods like Pro-Action Cafe, Collective Story Harvesting, and Design for Wiser Action.
Participation is at the heart of the four fold practice.
Being Hosted
In the practice of Dialogic Organization Development, of which the Art of Hosting is one expression, there is a great deal of attention given to the “container.” Participatory conversations take place within a described time and place and a set degree of freedom. The container is formed from attractors like a core purpose, a calling question, or a felt need. It is constrained by boundaries like time, space, resources, and degrees of influence. The role of the host is to pay attention to the container so that participants can operate within this space. Sometimes this involves tightening constraints or destroying them altogether. It might mean inviting attention on a shared purpose again or moving with the energy of the group and changing course. It is a dynamic and ever evolving practice.
And yes, it is different from what most people understand as “facilitation,” which is that person standing at the front of the room managing the conversation ad scrawling away on flip charts. Years ago I wrote a blog post that sought to make a clear distinction between the two terms but it was really too stark a distinction. These days I’m not so precious about this and I use the terms interchangeably. The essence of the art of hosting for me though is attending to the properties of the container so that the group itself can do the work. I see the host as a part o the system but a part with a very specific role of managing constraints. Most often in my work, this is done as a consultant, with the power and responsibility to do this, but there are times when I am a part of a group that needs hosting and I turn my attention from the work at hand and focus on the quality of the container instead. It is, as my friend Tenneson Woolf often says, a gift to host and a gift to be hosted.
Being hosted well is indeed a gift, and is not that common. Think of how many meetings you have been to where your irritation with the facilitator has gotten in the way of the work you came to do. Some of those times may even have been with me as your host! Alos, think of the times when you were acutely aware that the LACK of hosting was a real problem, impeding the ability of the work to get done. Reflect on these experiences and contrast them with the experiences you had of the most meaningful work in your life. It is an almost certainty that these experiences were hosted – that is they happened inside a container that was built around mutual purpose,a common challenge, a relationship, or an opportunity to do something relevant. The hosting may have been extremely light, or it may have involved a tightly scripted flow. It may have been held by another person, or the group itself may have played the role of the host. Regardless, I am willing to be that the most meaningful conversations humans are involved in – and the most meaningful work – comes inside just the right enabling constraints. It is hosted.
Sometimes when I am talking about the four-fold practice I will say that this pattern is about enabling contribution, and I truly think that a well-hosted meeting sets up a kind of gift economy, where participants are offering and receiving in the best way. This doesn’t mean that folks are always getting along well, but it does mean that difference, dissent and conflict can be offered and received in the service of something bigger and not as a back and forth tennis match of accusation and closing down. Hosting is not something that happens without intention and a commitment to the role and so in spaces where hosting will benefit, to step up and do the work is to contribute to the emergence of this pattern.
Co-creating
The fourth pattern of meaningful conversation acknowledges that the best dialogues leave the participants with the knowledge and evidence that they have been creating something together. When things are truly participatory, participants can point concretely to the way that they contributed to the outcome. This is a rare feeling these days where both organization and community life is dominated by accountabilities that are more often than not pointed towards people in power or responsibility and not towards oneself or to the group of folks to which one belongs. There is of course some truth to this, but complex challenges require the participation and ongoing ownership of all in order to be sustainable. The feeling of having co-created something brings tremendous meaningfulness to a task and ongoing commitment to the relationship that will extend and sustain the effort.
Co-creation for me is a key piece of design in every way. I recently hosted a meeting with drug users, community members, service providers and non-profit leaders where we were looking at the stories collected about opioid use in a sensemaker project. It was obvious to me that the meeting needed to be co-created with people from all of these groups in order for it to be something that had some real efficacy. In the end, a network of peers offered the four main tasks for the day (review the stories to find patterns, discuss them with others, come up with bigger solutions, and leave with something concrete) and they also took responsibility for setting up safe space where people could use drugs or be supported if the stories triggered trauma. This was something I couldn’t do at all, and so I stuck to hosting the process and the peer network hosted the space. That is co-creation.
Likewise, when I am hosting, the group itself will be largely responsible for its own harvest of the gathering. That means data written or recorded in their own hands and voices, and it means that they make sense of the conversations they have had and even create the substance of the report of the proceedings. My basic principle is “never touch the data” and if there is ever a time I have to move post-it notes or write words about the event, I think very carefully about whether or not it is my place to do so. It is tempting for facilitators to show their prowess by synthesizing data, writing reflections and telling the group what happened in their reports. All of that, useful as it may appear to be, has a cost. It is your job to find that cost and determine whether it is a price you are willing you to pay!
So these patterns translate into a useful set of design and planning guidelines. They help us practice the art of hosting and keep meetings as participatory as possible. They also often guideposts for the development of practice of both facilitation and, at bigger scales, leadership.