The Art of Hosting is predicated on a very simple set of practices which we call the Four Fold Practice. This framework emerged from a conversation in the late 1990s between Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Carsten Ohm and Jan-Hein Nillson about what patterns make for a meaningful conversation. After talking about it for days, the clarity that arose was that people experience meaningful conversations when they are present, when they participate, when they are hosted and when they co-create something. Simple.
The next question then became, what if these four patterns were actually practices that could be cultivated both by individual leaders/facilitators and by groups? What would that be called?
The answer was, “That would be called the art of hosting.” And so a collective inquiry was born that has spread around the world and been taken up by tens of thousands of people working in all forms of leadership, organization, and community.
I sometimes feel that the four fold practice doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Sometimes people can confuse the Art of Hosting with the methods we use or the way we harvest conversations or the tools that help us design things. But that’s not what it is. The Art of Hosting, at its deepest essence, is these four practices.
Today we are beginning an Art of Hosting workshop with some community foundations in British Columbia and tonight we began by introducing the four fold practice in some depth, because when all else fails, coming back to these practices will at least remind you how to invoke patterns that make engagement and dialogue meaningful. We began by telling the story of the practice and where it came from (you can learn a bit about that here) and then we led people in a simple exercise to explore it.
Getting into pairs we asked people to spend 5 minutes on the question “Which of these practices are you strongest on, and what’s a story about that?” We heard a bit in plenary about what was strong with folks, and there are lots of assets and experiences in the room
Then we asked people to talk about which of these practices they were weakest on and what they were eager to learn about. These learning questions were captured on index cards and placed in our centre where we will use them to focus our teaching and inquiry over the next three days.
It’s a simple way to dive into these practices, acknowledge that there are lots of ways to come into an Art of Hosting workshop, and build on the strengths that people have. And it allows us to discover the learning agenda in the room and tie it to the practice. It’s a rich harvest.
Erich Fromm studied love and connection as his life’s work. Along the way he was able to study and learn about the art of some of the core capacities of loving.
From a blog post today on Fromm’s work, comes this simple set of principles for deepening the art of listening (in his own words):
- The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
- Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
- He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
- He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
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The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
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Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.
Over the last few months I have been hosting gatherings among groups of people that have some conflict, which isn’t at all unusual. These aren’t acute disputes but rather long simmering cultural characteristics of exclusion, mistrust and a loss of meaning in work. These are natural rhythms of organizational life and they require intentional interventions. Instead of addressing the conflict head on however, the designs of these gatherings has focused on creating shared work that requires people to be listening to one another with presence and attention, in unusual groupings, focused on things like overarching principles to guide big organizational work.
I can see that when more people are working situations that need intense and engaged listening, they are better able to overcome the low grade malaise and dissatisfaction. It sharpens the awareness of one’s own role, and sharpens the attention on what others have to offer. Sharing perspectives alone is a key route to overcoming those kinds of low grade conflict that seem to eventually sneak into to all aspects of organizational and community life.
Over the past few years, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to develop artistic mastery in facilitation/hosting practice. It’s an important topic to me because I teach this work, and it’s not always easy to design deep learning when people are expecting to become instantly good at facilitation after a single workshop.
The Art of Hosting is a practice founded on tools, rooted in theory. It takes time to understand and integrate this practice and become masterful at it. I often draw parallels between learning the practice and development of mastery in the arts.
Today I was sharing my experience in a kind of cheeky way with some other Art of Hosting stewards, and I wrote the following, which seems helpful:
The 14 steps of the artist’s journey to mastery (based on the last 30 years of my experience)
1. Cultivate the desire to create beauty
2. Discover a medium for doing so
3. Seek the teachers who can teach you how to use the tools of your medium faithfully
4. Use the tools faithfully to make simple things.
5. Ask why things work and why they don’t
6. With that knowledge, modify your tools to do what needs to be done beyond simplicity.
7. Discover the limitations of your tools.
8. Become a tool maker
9. Take on apprentices and teach them to use the tools faithfully to make simple things
10. Take on apprentices and help them reflect on why they are succeeding and failing.
11. I don’t know…I haven’t got there yet
12. Unimaginable to me, but I see it.
13. Wow.
14. The unrealized ideal master that I aspire to become, should I be given more than one lifetime to do so.Along the way, be aware of the following:
- self-doubt
- errors at different scales
- mistakes and regret
- joy and surprise
- the desire of others to learn from you
- the feeling that you have nothing to offer them
- times of steep learning and times of long periods of integration
- waxing and waning of inspiration
- Rule 6a applies at all times (an inside joke: Rule 6a is “Don’t take yourself too f*cking seriously)
Reflecting these days on some two day courses I have coming up, including one on complexity and social change, one on invitation practice and one on Open Space.
Each of these courses is workshop to introduce people to a practice or a set of practices, as opposed to techniques and skills. In each of these workshops people will come away with an ability to go into the practice, literally as artists. These are not technical trainings designed to download procedures and methods. They are courses that will leave you ready to practice, ready to make mistakes and learn as you go, and ready to improve.
It’s always hard to explain to people when they come on these courses that they will not leave as competent practitioners of the stuff they are learning. All artists make mistakes when they are first using a tool. What’s most important is that you have a way of developing your mastery with a tool, which is to say that you have a framework that helps you understand what you are doing and how well your are doing it. In traditional settings, mentorship is an important piece of this, to help one develop mastery from every attempt as you learn. The point is that these kinds of tools are useful in complexity, meaning that they are context and practitioner dependant. How you use these tools and where you use them matters.
Teaching, therefore, requires a disruption to the pedagogy of filling another person’s brain and body with competence. In my courses, my favourite answer to questions about application is “it depends.” But what doesn’t change over time is the body of theory that needs to inform one’s practice.
Theory is the constant, and therefore a heuristic (a basic set of measurable principles) are they way to develop practice that is appropriate in context. By theory I mean a serious understanding from natural sciences that underpin the ways systems work.
Courses that are pure theory are generally not helpful without grounding them in practice, and courses that are just collections of tools and practices are somewhat useful but can lead practitioners astray if they don;t understand why things work (or they aren’t able to see why things aren’t likely to work). So my basic approach to teaching these kinds of things is to use the following heuristic:
- Theory
- Framework
- Practice examples
- Application
Teaching theory – in my case usually complexity theory – is critical for setting the groundwork for the practices that follow. If you don’t understand the nature of the context you are working in, you are likely to make serious errors in applying practices: linear problem solving doesn’t work in non-linear settings. That seem intuitive but you need to know why and be able to explain it.
Frameworks are helpful because they provide touchstones to connect theory to practice. When we were teaching the harvesting course last year, we came up with the mnemonic PLUME to describe five heuristics that help practitioners design methods that are coherent with good theory. (We have a new one for the invitation course by the way: VALUE. You can learn more about it on the course or in the blog posts that come as a result of the teaching). Sometimes that framework is Cynefin, sometimes it’s the chaordic path.
The important thing about a framework is that it helps you to create something and then it can fall away and what you have created can stand on its own. If your practice relies on maintaining the integrity of the framework then your framework isn’t effective. This is an issue I see sometimes with things like sociocracy where in poor application it’s important that people retain accountability to the framework (but not even necessarily the theory). Frameworks should be important enough containers to inspire grounded and coherent action, but not so critical that the action depends on the framework.
Dave Snowden uses the metaphor of the scaffold, which is useful. Build a scaffold to build your house. But if the scaffolding is a part of your house and your house depends on the scaffolding for it’s structural integrity, you haven’t succeeded
Once we are grounded in theory and have a way of carrying it with us, we can share practices that help practitioners to ground this in real life. I always combine this with an opportunity to apply the learning on real projects. This gives people an opportunity to work together to make sense of what they are learning. It means that folks working on projects get a variety of perspectives from people who have just learned something, including naive and oblique perspectives, which is good when you are trying to do new things. For those that are giving their help with projects, they learn a lot by stepping into the coach or critic role, as they are forced to think about what they have been learning in an application context.
So that’s my basic pedagogy these days. I’ve been on a few facilitation workshops over the years and been shocked at two things: the lack of theory (so how do I know how your methods work) and the over reliance on tips and tricks, which is basically a kind of addictive mechanism for people learning facilitation. many people are super-interested in adding a few things to their tool box, and while I love helping people add tools, I would never give an apprentice carver a knife without helping them understand why this thing works and what happens if you use it incorrectly. And I would never say “here’s a knife, now go make your masterpiece.” Their first effort is going to be terrible, and that’s what practice is. We need more folks teaching the art of facilitation as artists teaching artists and less shady selling of recipes and tools for guaranteed success.
My friends over at the Social Labs Revolution website have been fielding questions about the prototyping phase of labwork and today published a nice compilation of prototyping resources. It’s worth a visit. It got me thinking this morning about some of the tools I use for planning these days.