Over the years the Art of Hosting community of practice has developed some methods for large group process facilitation that have become standards alongside the methods we have imported into our work, such as Circle Way, Open Space Technology and World Cafe.
One of these, Pro Action Cafe, is one of my go to methods for hosting small and rapid fire project development. Ria Baeck, one of the co-developers of this method along with Rainer von Leoprechting shared the Pro Action Cafe origin story on the Art of Hosting list, and so here are her words and observations, for posterity:
Quite some years back – Rainer will know the date – I was hosting my ever first World Café in Brussels; in a back room of a real café. One of the participants was Rainer. He had been hosting what he called Pro Action groups of change agents in the Eur.institutions. It is was structured as groups of 10-12 people who came together one evening per month. As there were more people asking to join, he felt the pressure on his evening time. Being in this World Café, he realised that there was a key in scaling the number of people, being present at the same time.
So, we joined our forces to find a way of how the purpose of his Pro Action Groups could be blended with the key features of the World Café. We actually had a meeting in Mechelen, a Flemish city, and walked around… I remember it as a collective sensing of how we could blend the piece of Open Space – where people bring there own topics and questions – with the element of World Café, where people mix and are talking about the same question in each round. That’s how we came up with the 3 rounds and its 3 questions.
We then started in Brussels with regular Pro Action Cafés, with some food and drinks right after office time, and then diving into the Pro Action Café. All kind of questions came forward, from very, very personal to very professional and more. This open Pro Action Café is still going on in Brussels, although there have been different hosting teams holding it over the years.
Some people come and join to just see what Participatory Leadership is about – as Art of Hosting is called within the Eur. Institutions. I guess that it started to travel the world through one of the hosts, working with Toke and Monica in the Eur.context. Ursula or Helen probably know more here.
Amazing to see it travel to so many places and situations. Something I could have never imagined up front. Lesson here is: don’t hold back when you feel passioned to do something, you never know where it will have some impact.
One of the staple toolsets in the Art of Hosting community is the Chaordic Stepping Stones. Based on the chaordic lenses that Dee Hock originally put together, this tool is both a planning and project management tool that is at the very core of my work.
Now, T=thanks to Karen Mendez and Jose na Maturana of www.glocalminds.com I now have a Spanish translation of my version of the chaordic stepping stones tool. The document can be downloaded for free and is licensed, like all my work, under the Creative Common BY-NC-SA license, meaning it can be shared and developed, for non-commercial use and with attribution..
This will be a useful tool for the Chaordic Design online course that I am offering with Beehive Productions in the new year. And of course the English version, which is slightly expanded, is available for use by all.
John Ashbery has died. He was my favourite American poet for a long time, challenging to read, but the kind of poet that completely draws you in to a poem, into a little universe of wordplay and image and sense. You don’t read Ashbery so much as you taste his work. He took the legacies of modernity placed them beside the lessons of post-modernity and produced beauty, which tells you something of his genius.
The Poetry Foundation has a number of his poems online. Like all poets who cared so deeply about their words and how they were presented, I think he’s still best experienced in his books, whether the long form poems of the 1990s or the shorter works of his earlier years.
I am astounded at the breadth of his inspiration and the way he was able to draw meaning from disparate images and weave them together in a way that presented a musical, rhythmic poem that had what the Irish fiddler Martin Hayes has called “The Lonesome Note.” In his work you can feel the pining for the meaning that is his alone, privately held, implied, offered to you to discover or, in the absence of your ability to relate to what he is saying, to leave you with a sensation, an in-breath, sometimes an uneasy feeling, sometimes a feeling of delight.
He was prolific and left a huge legacy of work and a massive imprint on American and world poetry. Here’s one, sort of randomly picked, that talks about the sanitization of American life and reveals something of his poetics as well.
The One Thing That Can Save AmericaIs anything central?Orchards flung out on the land,Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills?Are place names central?Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm?As they concur with a rush at eye levelBeating themselves into eyes which have had enoughThank you, no more thank you.And they come on like scenery mingled with darknessThe damp plains, overgrown suburbs,Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity.These are connected to my version of AmericaBut the juice is elsewhere.This morning as I walked out of your roomAfter breakfast crosshatched withBackward and forward glances, backward into light,Forward into unfamiliar light,Was it our doing, and was itThe material, the lumber of life, or of livesWe were measuring, counting?A mood soon to be forgottenIn crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadowIn this morning that has seized us again?I know that I braid too much on my ownSnapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.They are private and always will be.Where then are the private turns of eventDestined to bloom later like golden chimesReleased over a city from a highest tower?The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,And you know instantly what I mean?What remote orchard reached by winding roadsHides them? Where are these roots?It is the lumps and trialsThat tell us whether we shall be knownAnd whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.All the rest is waitingFor a letter that never arrives,Day after day, the exasperationUntil finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,The two envelope halves lying on a plate.The message was wise, and seeminglyDictated a long time ago, but its time has stillNot arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limitedSteps that can be taken against dangerNow and in the future, in cool yards,In quiet small houses in the country,Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.
Nadia has a small piece this morning on one element of good design, reflecting on a book review by Ian Pinasoo. I like the way she puts this:
Great workshops are based on a creative challenge. A creative challenge is real and not fake. It matters. A creative challenge engages, pulls us in and takes us on a discovery tour. Responding to a creative challenge is like the hero’s journey of accepting a call, going through the process of revelation and returning with deep insights.
I would add that if the challenge is anchored to a common need, and the people you have identified and invited are the ones with enough agency to take on the challenge, you really start cooking.
In Tofino for this week, today preparing for 60 people who will be joining us for an Art of Hosting.
The beach here, as anyone living on the exposed west coast will know, is constantly buffeted by surf and there is an endless white noise created by the waves crashing on the four sets of reefs offshore. Once, when I was in Quinault in Washington State, I remarked to an Elder that this sound must have had a beginning at some time in the earth’s history and perhaps will have an end. But in the meantime, as long as human ears have lived on this coast, the sound of surf has always filled them.
That’s pretty much forever.
As we begin a week of teaching some of the arts of community, I am reminded of the aspects of our better nature that we humans have always had, and my focus is fixed on what ways of being community, like the sound of this surf, have accompanied human beings forever.