Somehow that statement is worth keeping nearby in my work. For me and everyone I work with.
I spend a lot of time working with people who need or want to do something new. And no level of new work – innovation, boundary breaking, next levelling or shifting – is possible without failure. A lot of it. Much more often than not.
Today, working with 37 leaders from human social services and government in our Leadership 2020 program, Caitlin asked a question: “How many of you have bosses that say it’s okay to fail? How many of you have said to your staff, it’s okay to fail? How many of you have given permission to yourself to fail?” No surprise. No hands up.
There are many reasons for this, the least of which is that people equate failure in this system with the actual death of a human being. When that is the thought you associate with failing, of course you will never put yourself in a position where failure is an option, let alone likely. And yet, it’s impossible to create new things that work right out of the box. You need to build testing and failing into strategy if you are to build new programs and services that are effective.
This is where understanding the scale at which you are working helps: hence probe, prototype, pilot, program, process…five incrementally more robust and more “fail-safe” (in terms of tolerance) approaches to innovating and creating something new. But just having a process or a tool for innovating – whether it is Cynefin, design labs, social innovation, agile, whatever – is still not going to give you a resilient mindset in which failure is tolerable or possible. And this is as true for leaders as it is for people working on the project teams that are supposed to be delivering new and better ways of caring for children and families.
In our programs and in our teaching, we double down on working with improvisational theatre and music techniques and especially The Work, which Caitlin teaches and leads. That process is the primary tool we use with ourselves and others to work on the limiting beliefs, patterns, thoughts and cognitive entrainment that impedes our ability to embrace failure based approaches. Without addressing patterns of thinking, it is just never safe to fail, and when a change leader is hidden behind that block, there is no way to truly enter into strategic, innovative practice.
How do you sharpen your failure practice?
When you make your living in the world as a facilitator, you can’t help but notice the quality of conversation that surrounds you. People come up to me all the time asking advice about how to have this or that chat with colleagues or loved ones. Folks download on me their grief that our civic conversations have been polluted by rudeness and the inability to listen. We feel an overall malaise that somehow our organizations or communities could be doing better.
Thanks to a rich conversation with artistic researcher Julien Thomas this morning I found this video of Olafur Eliasson at TED in 2009. In this presentation he talks about the responsibility of a person in a physical space, and discusses how his art elicits a reaction beyond simply gazing at a scene. It address one of the fundamental problems in our society for me: that of the distinction between participation and consumption. So much that happens in physical spaces and in our day to day lives has been geared towards gazing and consuming and away from participation and responsibility.
The four of us on the Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics team are all global stewards of the international Art of Hosting community of practice. We have all attended or hosted at least two of the global stewards gatherings and we have been deeply involved in the creation and growth of the Art of Hosting community over the past decade.
As such, the Art of Hosting is our lineage. It’s where we met. It’s the most important community of practice in our lives and it continues to shape our work. And Beyond the Basics is very much rooted in the Art of Hosting.
A couple of weeks ago in Minnesota while we were preparing our teachings I saw clearly how we were extending what we know about the Art of Hosting. It’s not just that Beyond the Basics focuses more on how the practice of participatory leadership extends past meeting facilitation into longer term and broader strategic initiatives. It’s that our work builds upon the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting the simple pattern that lies at the heart of this approach to facilitation, leadership and community work.
The four fold practice was the first pattern that gave rise to the Art of Hosting. It is simply an observation that great conversations happen when people are present, when they participate, when they are hosted well and when they co-create something. Some of the originators of the Art of Hosting, people like Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen and Jan Hein Nielsen began asking the question, what if these patterns became practices? And in that moment the decades long inquiry that is the Art of Hosting was born.
Our Beyond the Basics offering refers to these practices, but only now have I seen what we are doing. Toke has always called the four fold practice “The Basics” and I have no need to creat new basics. But I can see now how deeply rooted we are in extending and deepening them.
Be present. For all hosts, personal practice is essential. Whatever you can do to bring yourself to be present with a group serves the group. In the Beyond the Basics offering, Caitlin is a deep practitioner of The Work of Byron Katie which is a powerful personal practice that we all use to get at what keeps us stuck, to address what we are afraid of, and to help us become resilient and quality hosts of uncertainty, complexity and confusion. The first clarity we need to address is our own, and we do that with the Work.
Participate. It is impossible to be a part of a participatory process without participating. And it is impossible to affect a complex system from the outside. Understanding how systems works helps us to be more effective participants in the strategic work we are called on to lead and host. Using theory from the science and sociology of complex adaptive systems creates a more powerful way to see and understand and leverage people’s participation in their own work. through teaching Cynefin and working with harvesting methods that are sense-making based, we extend the practice of participation to move beyond the acts of listening, speaking and learning and into the realms of sensing, interpreting and decision making.
Be a host, so everyone can make a contribution. Tim’s work with his Collaborative Advantage model extends this practice of hosting beyond the methods that for the core of the Art of Hosting practice. While we are deep practitioners of World Cafe, Circle, Pro-Action Cafe and Open Space, we know these methods alone are not enough to host large scale strategic change work. We need a framework to understand the levels of transformation that need to be hosted and the key design pieces (such as power, results and capacity) that need to be addressed so long term change can continue to be hosted from within systems and organizations.
Co-create. It is one thing to say “just work together” and quite another thing to do it when our communities and organizations are soaked in differences. Where power, privilege, race, economic opportunity and all kinds of other differences are at play we need a set of practices that can bring us to deeply transformative shared work. Tuesday has been developing this framework for many years now and it is taking form in a way that has fundamentally changed my own approach to co-creation. Moving to a place of shared work is taking co-creation beyond the basic level of just doing things together.
In our AoH Beyond the Basics offering we are addressing this extension of our lineage with teachings and reflective practice that help participants to dive more deeply into the four fold practice. You don’t have to have come nto an Art of Hosting to understand or work with what we are sharing, but if this framework makes sense to you, the three days we spend togther will help challenge and deepen your practice in these areas.
We would love to have you join us this July in Leicester, UK or in October in Kingston Ontario.
This afternoon Caitlin and I were in a delightful conversation with new colleagues that ranged across the landscape of the work we are all trying to do in the world, supporting leadership, supporting quality and addressing the ineffable aspects of human experience that pervade our work on leadership.
And in the conversation we found our way to the idea of friendship.
In our Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics offering we are exploring friendship as a key strategic pillar to transforming the nature of engagement, organizational life and community development. And today as we were discussing friendship as the highest form of accountability, I was reminded of my work 15 years ago in the BC Treaty Process.
Back then I was employed as a public consultation advisor for the federal government. It was my job to talk to non-indigenous people about the treaties that governments were negotiating with First Nations. Most of the non-indigenous stakeholders I had to meet with were hostile to the treaty process, to put it mildly. Some of them were just downright furious, driven by the white hot heat of completely irrational racism, uncertainty and disruption to their lives. At their worst, hey shouted at us, threatened us with violence and tried to have us removed from our jobs. these were not folks that I would ordinarily try to meet with, let alone befriend. But I found I had no choice. No amount of rational discourse about rights, law, policy and economics could persuade these people that treaty making was a good idea.
And the truth is that I didn’t have to have them think it was a good idea. But I did need them to understand what was happening and I did need to offer them many many ways to engage with what we were doing, even if they were 100% opposed to it. It was my professional obligation as a person responsible for the mundane daily workings of a democratic government, and it was my moral obligation as a human being who saw a group of people in danger of being dismissed by their government for their opinions, no matter how odious those opinions were to the government of the day, or how opposed those opinions were to government policy.
I realized that the only way we were going to create lasting agreements that gave First Nations the best possible future was to treat the noin-indigenous stakeholders as human beings. And that meant that I quickly abandoned my professional guise of talking to them as experts in their field and instead I adopted a stance of friendship. Instead of asking them questions I was interested in answering, I asked questions about what they were interested in: logging, ranching, fishing, making a living, what they did in their spare time, what was important to their families.
In due course I found myself hanging out with these folks. Having dinner, going on long drives through the British Columbia wilderness to visit clear cuts and mining sites. Joining them on board their fish boats and in their pastures, hanging out in local hockey arenas watching junior teams from Quesnel and Prince George and Powell River ply their trades. I ended up playing music with people, drinking a lot of beer and whisky and meeting up with folks when they were in Vancouver. It became social. We developed friendships.
And in the end I believe it helped to transform the atmosphere in BC from an angry and bitterly divisive climate to one where folks were at least tacitly okay with treaty making, if not outright supportive. My seven colleagues and I and our counterparts in the provincial government worked hard at developing these relationships.
Friendship is not something that we set out to create. It is an emergent property of good relationships and good collaboration. When you do a few things together that end up being – well – fun, then you begin to experience friendship. And in the end when times turn a bit hard, that friendship will see you through, helping to sustain the work you have done.
It is not perfect by any means, but those three years spent in the late 1990s befriending folks all over BC proved to me that no one is above friendship, and that the results of dedeicated and personal relationship building are essential to a humane society.
What passes for “engagement” these days is so professionalized and sterile that I think it threatens the very fabric of the kind of society that we live in. Society by definition is an enterprise that connects everyone together. “Public engagement” that does not also include the capacity for personal connection is a psychotic and sociopathic response to the need to care and be cared for. And when we get into hard places – think Ferguson, Burnaby Mountain and even Ukraine – it is friendships, tenuous and strained, but nevertheless intact, that offer us the way out.