A dry summer and fall has switched to cold rain and high snow.
This mornings rainbow on Howe Sound.
First snow as seen from the Bowen Queen, our replacement ferry, while our regular boat is in for an annual refit.
And a not very good photo of a small pod of dolphins seen off our starboard side while heading home.
As a facilitator, people often comment on “safety” in group settings. Most group work I have done in my career has been safe, relatively speaking. There may have been the possibility of retaliatory actions for speaking up, workplace bullying or general boorish behaviour, but I have hardly ever (!) worked in spaces where real physical safety was an issue.
Still, the issue of safety and fear comes up surprisingly often, and this article at the edge.org gave me a few insights about this problem.
This article looks to ancient human history to understand some of these dynamics and it begins by looking at two kinds of status in humans: dominance and prestige. In dominance hierarchies we are afraid of the higher status person and there is deference and backing away. In prestige hierarchies we are drawn to the higher status person because they have information that can help us survive.
In some organizations where there is fear it may be that dominance is the mode. So the teaching here is to find ways to gather information so that you are valuable to the organization. What questions does the organization not have answers to? Gathering that information. It levels the playing field so that people who are physically dominant find themselves in a different status relationship.
Another area that we’ve worked on is social status. Early work on human status just took humans to have a kind of status that stems from non-human status. Chimps, other primates, have dominant status. The assumption for a long time was that status in humans was just a kind of human version of this dominant status, but if you apply this gene culture co-evolutionary thinking, the idea that culture is one of the major selection pressures in human evolution, you come up with this idea that there might be a second kind of status. We call this status prestige.
This is the kind of status you get from being particularly knowledgeable or skilled in an area, and the reason it’s a kind of status is because once animals, humans in this case, can learn from each other, they can possess resources. You have information resources that can be tapped, and then you want to isolate the members of your group who are most likely to have a lot of this resources, meaning a lot of the knowledge or information that could be useful to you in the future. This causes you to focus on those individuals, differentially attend to them, preferentially listen to them and give them deference in exchange for knowledge that you get back, for copying opportunities in the future.
It turns out that adaptation to fluctuating environments makes it important for people with knowledge, as opposed to force, to be dominant. Physical dominance won’t help you survive fluctuations that are bigger than you can control.
Of course, the evidence available in the Paleolithic record is pretty sparse, so another possibility is that it emerged about 800,000 years ago. One theoretical reason to think that that might be an important time to emerge is that there’s theoretical models that show that culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments. If you look at the paleo-climatic record, you can see that the environment starts to fluctuate a lot starting about 900,000 years ago and going to about six or five hundred thousand years ago.
This would have created a selection pressure for lots of cultural learning for lots of focusing on other members of your group, and taking advantage of that cumulative body of non-genetic knowledge.
Status is a really interesting phenomenon in group settings. In the improv world we play with status and rank: rank is fixed but status is malleable. Organizations are rife with status games. Watching any episode of The Office will quickly alert you to this fact. It’s funny when Michael Scott, the manager, adopts the high handed status of a mini CEO and equally funny when he makes a trip to the warehouse and cowers in the shadow of the highest status people on the show: the warehouse workers.
Because status is malleable, we can work with it to get the best from groups of people. When we are confronted with fluctuating environments for example, processes like Open Space Technology work well to level the status field and to invite anyone with knowledge to assume a leadership role. Such a process allows us to learn from others and allows for the emergence of communities of practice, which, if the are harnessed right, can support deep organizational and collective learning.
More on that in part 2.
Wearing an orange equality ring over my wedding ring. In Minnesota last week these were being handed out to people who wanted to show support for marriage equality. There is an initiative on the November ballot that would add an amendment to the state Constitution that declares that only men and women can be married. I’m wearing this orange ring over my own wedding ring in solidarity with those who want marriage to be fully legal in Minnesota.
I cannot understand how a country that prides itself on equality can even dare contemplate denying equal rights to a group if people. I hope voters in Minnesota reject the amendment in November. And I hope that following that, the institution of marriage will be made fully legal in the state.
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Nice to be back on my home island where we have a sophisticated relationship with time. I’m here briefly, spending some time hiking and camping with my son’s school an then off to the US for three weeks.
Appreciating moments out of time and the flow of being back in my own village.
Sitting in the circle on the last day of our learning village here in Castle Statenberg in Slovenia. These are my initial impressions I am leaving her with.
I came to this place with this community to spend deep time with friends face to face. I came to make art, to sing, and to be a participant in the experience. I craved the freedom of being able to spend long periods of time with old friends and long periods of time investing in new friends as well. For me nothing replaces the power of spending personal time with another human. It allows me to draw on a well of relationship even as we stay connected over time and distance.
When I arrived I was asked from the heart if I would step into to the hosting team, to fill the space left by two of the hosts who couldn’t make it. I agreed, without knowing really what would be involved. Of course there was the role of sensing and holding the centre of the gathering, but this was difficult for me as I had prepared myself to come with my own purpose, and I wasn’t a part of the planning or the hosting team. It was hard to find a way into the culture of the team, and that combined with being drawn away to tend to my partner Caitlin who was sick and the needs of my kids who were craving good family time meant that I couldn’t be full time devoted to the centre.
These journeys away from the centre however opened my eyes to what was happening around the margins of the gathering. There were all kinds of experiences unfolding and all kinds of desires being met quite apart from what was being formally hosted. So I spent a lot of time with people on the edge of the circle, recognizing of course that they weren’t at all on an edge but rather right at the centre of something different.
What emerged here was what emerges in any village. Many circles of activities happen, each the centre of it’s own little world, each feeling important in it’s own right. No circle was more important than any other, not even the core hosting circle. The circle that was the most important was the one of the land and the building and the local community. It was here that the real hosting was going on.
Slovenia is a magical little country. If you look for it on a map you will sometimes see it and sometimes you can’t see it at all. If you were to travel the coast from Italy to Croatia, you would pass through Slovenia only for a few minutes. It seems to appear when it is needed and recede into the distance when it is not. Of course it was a part of the former Yugoslavia, but I can’t recall ever hearing about it during the Balkan Wars. It seemed to quietly disappear during that time only to emerge later in it’s own right.
Slovenia was the real host for this gathering, and more precisely, the sharply rolling hills and valleys of Terra Parzival, the land of Parcival, the knight who undertook the quest for the Holy Grail. The Grail castle, Castle Borl was the place at which, in a gathering more than 10 years ago, the Art of Hosting community was really born. Borl is currently in a dangerous state of disrepair, but I visited there two days ago and got a sense of the reason why that castle was able to hold such magical energy. it is situated on a high bench over looking a big river and the plains of the territory. The view extends for many miles all around. It is a places that hosts the long coming and going of quests and journeys. THat is one of the qualities of this place.
Stantenberg itself, the castle we have been at this week, os another story. Formerly the summer house of a wealthy Austrian family, it is seeing a rebirth under the heartfelt guidance of Franc and a team of local people who have begun to restore the building so it can be used to host concerts and art shows and gatherings like ours. to improve the accommodations, village families sponsored a room and came to paint and repair and stock them with furniture so that we could stay here during our time. Each room was lovely restored by a person or a family and we hosted by that.
This spirit of giving permeated our gathering. Because the task for getting Statenberg ready was so huge, Franc ran out of time to restore and old chapel in the building that had been the victim of many fires and many decades of neglect. The chapel walls were rotting and falling apart and the floor was covered with 50 cms of dirt and debris. Franc began to clean it by taking 148 wheelbarrows of dirt out, but he had hardly made a dent. On our first day one of our participants had the idea that working together we could clean that chapel in a week. It truly seemed impossible, even with 100 of us helping out.
But Bertram filled the 149th wheelbarrow and many joined him. At some point early on the kids and youth here got it in their minds that this is where they would practice. They had tired easily of the adults precious talk of changing the world and the gathered through the week to lead us all in doing hours and hours of work to get the chapel cleaned. My daughter Aine and her friends carried hundreds of wheelbarrows of dirt and stone out and by yesterday morning, the chapel floor was clean and people were beginning to beautify it. Last night we had a little ceremony to honour the building. We invited the villagers from Makole to join us and we all took little candles and stood in the chapel, bringing a gentle health fire back to the building. A thunderstorm passed outside while local people sang traditional Slovenian songs. We gave thanks to the hands that that did the work and my heart was fully tuned to the reality that these young people had done the work. The whole building had been cleaned and beautified without any struggle at all. Everyone who worked on was tired and joyful. And impossible situation had been transformed and a gift had been revealed which we as a temporary community could give back to the villagers of Makole who had given so much to host us.
Who or what is really doing the hosting?
Those of us that create processes for people to get work done sometimes fall into the trap that we are the hosts – I made this mistake in a bad way in Hawaii. The truth is we are only the catalysts for hosting to happen, for a field of people to move together because of the bigger things that are hosting them. My journey at the edges of our hosting teams work showed me that no matter what we think is at our centre, no matter what intention and expectation we carry, real transformation can never be known. It emerges from the margins. If we don’t take the time to lift our eyes from what we think is important we fail to see the truly significant emerging around us. And when we can exercise the wisdom to bring that back into the centre, then we align ourselves with the true hosts of our world – timing and place.
I will be grateful to this place for a long time for the insight it gave me about the art of commitment. The authentic joining with friends, the full commitment to shared effort and action, and the sensitivity to know that I am merely a small part of what is really going on.