Bekkevoort, Belgium
Arrived here last night in preparation for the first gathering of Art of Hosting practioners in Europe, the first Art of Hosting on the Art of Hosting. I’m staying with my friend Ria Baeck, in a small converted stable on an old farm in the countryside outside of Brussels. Tom Hurley joined us this morning from San Francisco (he’s sleeping right now) and Toke, Monica, George Por, Maria Scordialos and Sarah Whitely and others are all arriving this afternoon. Tomorrow we start in a learning centre about 15 minutes away from here called Heerlijckyt.
The flight from Vancouver, through Heathrow was a strange experience for me, It was in many ways a journey back through some personal time and landscapes that have formed me. In 1978, when I was almost exactly the same age as my daughter, I moved with my family to England, where we lived for the next three years. Since 1981, when we left I haven’t been back to Europe at all, so it was interesting landing at Heathrow again, almost 29 years to the day since I first landed there. There is nothing recognizable about the place to me, and I used to know it pretty well. I was an avid planespotter in my youth and I used to spend whole Saturdays with my friend Dominic Adams at Heathrow, watching the world come and go. Today I’m hard pressed to even guess where we used to watch planes from, if indeed that structure is even there anymore.
But this journey was also significant for other quick visits to personal landscapes. In flying from Vancouver to London, we travelled over almost all of the major homelands of my ancestry. First the fields of Saskatchewan, where my great grandmother’s family farmed, and then the Ojibway lands of Ontario, and much later, the homeland of my father’s family, the north of Ireland. We were within view of Moy, the town where my father’s family left from in the 1860s to come to Canada. A few minutes later our low earth orbit took me over the Isle of Man, where my some of my mom’s mother’s family came from. We sort of missed Scotland although it lay not far off our port wing, and that was it; the sum total of the landscapes in which my genes had travelled most recently. I covered in nine hours what it took my genetic material hundreds of years to do.
Ria met me at the Brussels airport and we drove east through southern Flanders to this little rural farmhouse, nestled in a beautifully tended garden. All I know about Flanders has been shaped by the Canadian narrative of the First World War, and so a lot of what I was seeing in this incredibly peaceful and pastoral land was some ancient grief of the wars that have raged over time in this place. I even pulled out a CA$10 bill when I got here and noticed for the first time that it has the first stanza of “In Flanders Fields” printed on it. (I’ve been travelling so much these days I currently have four currencies in my wallet, Canadian and American dollars, Euros and British pounds)
So here I am, happily ensconced in a Flanders fields and awaiting the arrival of some mates for what will prove to be a tasty gathering. More to come as we cook together.
I’m back from Bella Coola, and reflecting on the remarkable three days of learning and Open Space we did there.
Saturday, we held a small community Open Space gathering around the issue of what the community needs to do to prepare for assuming full responsibility over child and family services. This is a provocative question in the Nuxalk Nation. The Nation is a strong and independent community and putting children and families in the centre of any conversation brings heart, passion and commitment.
We had a small group of people present for our Open Space. 20 people began the day with us and more came and went. There was a flurry of activity to post sessions in the morning, much of it spurred by pressing community needs. The conversations had a kind of solid adhesion to them that I haven’t witnessed in every community gathering like this. People sat in very well formed circles, and very little bumblebeeing was seen.
There were two incredible pieces of action that flowed from this gathering – one immediate and one long term. The short term project that arose came out of a conversation on the safety of children and youth. At the outset of that conversation a young man, Stephen, told a story about what happened to him the previous night. He was waiting to be picked up by his mother at 2am after being out with friends. While he was waiting a young girl, who he estimated to be between 10 and 12 years old, came out of the bushes, pulled out a crack pipe and started smoking it. Crack and crystal meth are just beginning to make an appearance in the community, but it was the age of this girl that was shocking to Stephen. He told his mom that no matter how he felt the next morning, he was going to that community Open Space to talk about what to do. Stephen’s story inspired the group on the spot to create a network of parent and Elder patrols. Parents signed up to take turns driving around the reserve all night, looking out for kids and helping them get home or stay safe. If it wasn’t possible for them to go home, Elder’s offered to open up their houses so the young people could stay with them until it was safe. The first patrol happened Saturday night.
The long term project involved further development of the idea of a community house that came out of our World Cafe on Friday. A group met to discuss what came next and they committed to open a bank account, begin fundraising and to meet in a week to flesh out a more detailed todo list. As a result of the concreteness of their invitation and willingness to work together, the group raised $260 just by passing a hat in the closing circle, a tangible investment of money that arose very much as a koha, which is the Maori word for what happens when people commit money to an idea at the end of a meeting.
One of the reasons why this Open Space seemed so “adhesive” was that it came at the end of two days of training, and the folks who came through that experience together ended up co-hosting the invitation for the Open Space – by directly inviting two or three other community members to show up on Saturday – and they took responsibility for co-hosting the conversations and the action in the Open Space. We came up with these two concrete projects without even doing any action planning.
As usual I learned much about community and Open Space in this process. The most important thing for me was noticing what happens when a community enters Open Space with some preparation. In the past I have facilitated these kinds of events in a way that was completely self-contained within the Open Space. It has long occurred to me that simply doing that is not leveraging all the potential for leadership and change that is present in a community. I have been thinking for a while about how to combine training and capacity building with Open Space events to maximize this high potential.
On this score, Michael Herman, Julie Smith, Judi Richardson and I developed an approach in 2002 in Alaska that addressed this by holding an Open Space event and then following up immediately with two days of Open Space training to further explore applications of the process and to develop ideas that were started in the Open Space. In Alaska in 2002 we had great success with this approach and Open Space became used fairly widely within the school system, and in some quite surprising places. The advantage of this approach is that the community gets to experience Open Space first, develop ideas and then refine them further.
This alternate approach is based on the work that I am doing with The Art of Hosting community. The Art of Hosting is a training event that covers many aspects of leadership, process design and methodologies and is built around the core of Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe, Circle practice and Open Space. In wanting to give participants a more realistic experience of Open Space, we have been adding more and more time in the Art of Hosting to the Open Space events, and typically putting them at the end of the three or four days of training. The advantage of this approach is that it begins by building a broader sense of leadership, design and process and then uses Open Space to create the kinds of projects that flow from the learning work. In the context of community-based leadership development, this approach works beautifully, to give people a variety of tools, host conversations that are at times theoretical and at times deeply experiential and to sew it all together with a concrete experience of Open Space which actually gets so-hosted by the community members themselves.
I hope to get back up to the Nuxalk Nation in the not too distant future, to check in on where they are at and contribute where I can. You can contribute too if you like, by donating money to the community house fund, the project which started entirely in Open Space. If you could even spare $10 that would be fantastic, and to have it come from far flung parts of the globe would be an inspiration for the community members working hard to improve the lives of their children and families.
Yesterday, in preparing for two days of teaching and training I spent the morning over breakfast reading some of th stories of Clayton Mack, the grandfather of my friend and client Liz Hall. I was reading about the way in which Nuxalk people gathered food from the land, whether it was the fish, game or plants and berries. He talked about the way the amlh – the spring salmon – were harvested using fishtraps. At one time there were 22 traps on the river. These traps would form barriers that the salmon would need to jump. When they jumped they were caught in a trap on the other side. There they would wait and the fishers would just gather them up. Whatever was surplus was let go upriver to other traps and villages.
This is a beautiful way to harvest fish, because it preserves life and delivers fresh animals to all who need them. It is the essence of a Nuxalk way of doing things.
Later that morning in the opening circle I asked why people had chosen to be in this training rather than anywhere else. From that conversation came a powerful statement. One woman, who works at the transition house in the community said quite simply and powerfully that leadership is simple revealing our own beauty to each other. We talked about the profound nature of that statement with respect to individual leadership but also in terms of the way communities lead as well. What would it mean if an organization within a community revealed it’s beauty in it’s work? What if communities exhibited leadership that way too?
From there we dove into a deep exploration of the power of appreciative inquiry. We went through the 4D process and then played with the Discovery phase by pairing up to look at another theme that emerged in the opening circle: the idea that Nuxalk culture should be at the centre of everything. A community reveals its beauty through its culture, and so we asked the question of each other: tell a story about a time when Nuxalk culture inspired you?
In encouraging people to interview on another, I invited people to practice the role of the Elder and the student. All of us will be Elders one day and the mark of an Elder is when you are called upon to tell your story as a teaching. And so, especially with some of the younger adults in our group, being invited to tell a story as if it is a teaching is a powerful invitation. And be invited to listen to a story as a student is a gift. When appreciative interviews are structured this way it creates a mutual relationship of gifting and support, and invites us to practice being both teacher and student.
The response to this set of interviews were very powerful, including stories of people who first saw their culture in all it’s glory after they were liberated from residential school. From those conversations we harvested a small set of principles around the teachings that we jokingly called “How the Nuxalk Nation saved the world.” The wisdom contained in these teachings is ancient, powerful, reality based and available. It provides a concrete set of principles around which people could design Nuxalk programs or organizations that are in line with a cultural perspective on the world.
On the second day, we spent time looking at leadership as an act of courage. We are playing with etymology in these days, looking at heart based leadership that proceeds from seeing. Heart-based leadership has courage at its root, derived from the French word coeur, meaning heart. We talked about the chaordic path as a path of finding the courage to encourage others and keep moving in the face of discouragement. Strengthening heart is a powerful leadership capacity and one which is in short supply in indigenous communities that have lived through decades of discouragement.
Leadership also comes from seeing. Spectare is the Latin worked that gives rise to the words speculate, inspect, respect and perspective. These are leadership capacities, the ability to see something that touches your heart and convene a conversation around it is a leadership moment available to all in which any member of a community can step up and start something. In fact it is truly the only way anything does happen.
This afternoon, we concluded our day with a world cafe on the question of “If you could do one thing to improve the lives of children and families in this community what would that be?” The idea was to demonstrate how The World Cafe can be a powerful process for getting a group through the groan zone by building shared perspective. What I didn’t expect was the harvest we took from this cafe. In an hour the group hatched an idea for a community house, in which people would be able to come and shine – radiating their beauty and their leadership, to cook and eat together, hang out together and learn the Nuxalk language and culture. Such a building could be built by the community and an enthusiastic team of people may well step forward in our Open Space tomorrow to lead the way on this project.
It has been a good two days of teaching and learning here, and tomorrow we run an Open Space with the community on what it will take reclaim control over child and family services for th Nuxalk Nation. With the capacity that is building here and the enthusiastic leadership, I’m looking forward to the day.
Bella Coola, BC
I’m up in Bella Coola this week working with the Nuxalk Nation. I am running some facilitation training and then on Saturday, an Open Space meeting here in the community on the subject of reclaiming Nuxalk child and family services.
This place is out in the middle of virtually nowhere. It’s 450 kms west of Williams Lake, but only an hour and a quarter by plane. However, the Bella Coola valley is surrounded by the tallest mountains in the Coastal Range and man are they huge. We flew PAST them this morning, over the Monarch Icefield, in what was one of the most breathtaking flights I have ever taken.
After landing, I went to lunch with the Elders and we ate the first spring salmon of the year. The fish were half smoked and then finished on a barbeque, cooked over a fire right outside the church where we were eating. Nuxalk fishers are pouring onto the river this week, catching fish by drifting in a boat with the current and setting nets. The fish swim up and the nets are carried down and after an hour of drifting, you have yourself some fish. Everyone’s excited at the prospect of fresh salmon again. Much of the traditional fishery has disappeared these days including the essential eulachon fishery which once provided a massive staple to the community. Eulachons are so healthy that they act as a virtually prevention medicine cabinet. There has been an eulachon run on the Bella Coola river in 15 years.
After lunch my client, Liz Hall and I joined her sister Sylvia and her husband Mark and we hiked up to the incredibly impressive petroglyphs up Thorsen Creek. These are old, some carved as long ago as 3500 years by Sylvia’s reckoning. There are more modern ones as well, made with metal implements, and consisting of thinner lines.
It’s breathtaking up here, good spirits are with us and I’m keen to look get working tomorrow.
Seattle, WA
There is a creation story we tell in the art of hosting workshops called “The Chaordic Path” which describes the dance of chaos and order in the service of generative emergence. Today, in Seattle many of us good friends and mates sat in the audience as our friend Thomas Arthur told this story through his production of Luminous Edge. The show is about a wizard who is responsible for juggling into existence the orderly patterns of our human world and then fixing them in place with his spiral of integration. He is assisted by an apprentice who is taken with more natural patterns and who plays more on the natural and chaotic side of the dance. In his inheritance of his teacher’s work, the apprentice works with a healing shaman who helps him find some balance between the natural order of sprials and waves, and the human order of lines and grooves.
It is really a quite lovely show, gently inviting us to notice how these patterns emerge and echo and mimic one another. Thomas blends juggling, music, sound and video, moving in lines and circles and spirals to embody the patterns he is describing. My friend Christy Lee-Engle said it was like watching someone tell the story of one’s work from the inside out.
Last night, Christy, along with Peggy Holman, Ashley Cooper, Teresa Posakony, Bruce Takata and others were in the audience. All of us I think to some extent work with the story that Thomas was portraying. In many ways for those of us who are process artists trying to uncover and work with the natural patterns of human conversation and organization, Thomas’s performance was like a landscape painting of one’s own home town. It had a deep familiarity to it, recognizable landmarks and was the kind of thing you want to have to hang in your space and remind you of where you come from. And like all good landscapes, it takes these familiar elements and brings an artistic eye to them adding a narrative that sets this up in a way that simply begins the story. Thomas’s artistic eye opens from a deep vulnerability to notice these archetypes alive in his own work, to invite us to see them in ourselves and wonder aloud about where they may take us.
Thanks pal.