I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice. We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of “What time it is in the world?” We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing. We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were emerging. At the end of the Cafe, the hosts gathered in a fishbowl in the middle of the rest of the group and shared their insights, sensing into the patterns that were emerging. I listened with a poet’s ear tuned to the harvest and this is what I heard:
You have to be ready to die on the hill atop which you have heard the deepest call of the world
When you open the smallest space in your life, passion can erode obligation. You become more social, unable to be unaware.
You cannot see yourself in the window of a rushing train but only for a second. You need to slow down so that the reflection can be studied, a life examined.
What would a world looki like that is flowing in responsibility, courage, reverence and wakanza?
Responsibility and courage are individual acts. Reverance and wakanza are products of the collective context, they are responses that are woken up in us by the times.
Our children our the gift we make to the future, they are the long stake in the long view, the holders of wisdom, those carriers of what we have learned about how we have lived.
We are the ones we have been waiting for, and we have been waiting for lives and times beyond our own, living in lives and times beyond our own. We see ourselves as the gift to ourselves when others make it clear in relationship.
Our conversations touch every single other conversation. The world unfolds as one point presses upon another in a great chain of implication and connectivity. The technology of interconnection is vulnerability – the capacity to be open to one another. In that small open space, influence takes root. Ideas enter in that seem to have always been there.
I move and leave pieces of myself behind, and I have no story of grieving? No way to midwife the new in the hospice of the dying? What is being born when things are dying, what enters in when there is a puase in the breath between generations, between conversations, between breaths and between heart beats?
In the moments of silence that open between sounds, there is a chance for the smallest voice to be heard. The babble dies down and there is a pause and a small call has its chance to invite. Judgement kills that voice – sometimes aborts it before it even ever enters the world.
All we have are ideas – take a stand, do what you can to help others to stand. You can reach back to the head of every river to see why it is full of what it is full of. Every tributary signs its joining with specific minerals, with salts and metals, with vegetation and fish. You can find home by simply following the taste of it.
Host others, but host yourself first. Listen to others but first learn to listen to the wind, to listen to the birds and the way the ground moves beneath the feet of the deer. Learn to listen to why people say the things they say. To what soil or water fills their syllables with longing.
Presence. When you host you can become the vehicle through which the world speaks its story. And you hear what you are built for and you speak what you see in yourself.
We are not too busy for change, we are instead addicted to avoiding what is real and what needs doing. People are the agents for their own freedom. But that freedom cannot be won without something being let go. We are in a culture that doesn’t end things very well, but instead loads layers and layers of more on top of the foundation. With no rite of passage available, nothing gets completed and ushered out, there is no way to make space for the new. Honour and reverence.
We are crying for passages through and for the rites to understand them and to be invited into them.
Can you be authentic in your work if you’re not authentic in your personal life? How do you discover you are not aware of yourself without rites of passage and ceremonies that acknowledge what is coming and what is gone, what is to be picked up and what is to be put down.
How do we foster self-awareness when we perceive crises and emergency? We tell the truth and we tell all the stories, even the ones that represent success and resilience and that buck the trend of the depressing scarcity that keeps us embedded in fear, we insert pauses where previously we would rush to solutions.
We are a greedy culture, but we can be greedy for community and that hurts no one because it only activates the abundance that sleeps in a cradle of scarcity. We can’t afford to throw a few things on the grill and offer some to the neighbours? Come to me in the late sun of the evening when the wind is still and the birds think before they sing, and cars pass by quietly in the languid air. Come and share a meal, and tell me what is in your heart.
Like Meg says,
Notice what is going on.
Get started.
Learn as you go.
Stick together.
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In a recent email thread between Bob Stilger and a bunch of us friends and colleagues about how to support community rebuilding in Japan, Nancy Margulies shared this story of working in post-Katrina New Orleans with a series of World Cafes:
I hosted a number of World Cafés in New Orleans. The participants were a mix of people who had been directly impacted by the flood and those who had less or no material loss. We used the time for people to exchange their stories, share their feelings and listen to one another. This story-telling seemed to be so necessary that we didn’t attempt more initially. However, during the last round I asked the question, “What can community be for you at a time like this?” or a similar question. My co-hosts for these events were churches and local non-profits.
After a few months I offered “Cafés of Hope”. In those events we provided a sheet of paper that is placemat sized in front of each participant. I asked them to draw a symbol that represents hope for the future and then with lines radiating from the center write down key words or images to convey examples of what gives them hope. We did this in silence. Then people shared at their tables and as they listened if they heard something that they agreed was hopeful they added it to their “Map of Hope”.
As people moved to new tables they took their maps with them and build upon them as they heard more stories of hope. One variation I used was to ask each table to leave behind a few words or images that represent hope (by drawing/writing on another sheet of paper that was in the center of the table). This remained with one person who shared its meaning with the 3 new people who joined the conversation at that table.
At the end of the Cafe we harvested the ideas and each person was encouraged to take their map of hope home and share it with someone else, post it and add to it as more moments of hope came to mind.
After the initial work of providing immediate aid and safety for people, in disasters there is the need to rebuild community. It might not be an immediate need but it is an important one. Relationships are critical to rebuilding. A few years ago, speaking with a colleague that works in refugee camps in sub-Saharan Africa, I learned that most people, when they first arrive in a camp fleeing violence, malnutrition or worse, ask first about their families and friends. If they are able to connect to people quickly in the camp their chance at survival increases. Community resilience is built on those connection of the heart.
Nancy’s cafe design provides a brilliant and quick way to begin this process.
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A colleague emailed today and asked me this question: “which tool do you use when you have to analyse the content of your harvest with groups?”
My answer was that it depends on so much. Which means there is no one rule or tool but rather a principle. The principle would be this: “Participatory process, participatory harvest, simple process, simple harvest” The primary tool I use in complex decision making domains is diversity.
A story. Once, working with the harvest of a a series of 4 world cafes that had about 100 people in each, I ended up with 400 index cards, each containing a single insight which we later transcribed. It would be folly for me to work with a taxonomy of my own design, so I invited eight people to help me make sense of the work. We all read the 18 peages of raw data and noticed what spoke to us. From there we created a conversation that drew forth those insights and organized them into patterns. The final result was a report to the 400 people that had gathered that was rich and diverse and as complex as the group itself without being overly complicated to implement.
So it depends. If you use the Cynefin framework, which I have been studying and using a lot lately, you will see that different domains of action require different harvesting and sense making tools. So be careful, use what is appropriate and try to never have a place where one point of view dominates the meaning making if you are indeed operating the realms of complexity, chaos or disorder..
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Back in November, I worked with my mate Teresa Posakony on a two day gathering the object of which was to work to apply brain science to policy questions on the prevention of adverse childhood experiences. On the first day I facilitated an Open Space event that brought together reserachers and brain scientists to discuss their findings and on the second day, we had panelists and Teresa ran a half day cafe to look at the implications of the research for policy making. I composed a poem at the end of the day.
As a part of the experience, we were shown a powerful video of the still face experiment, a test to see how infants respond when their care givers break the connection with them. It is very very powerful. Here it is:
Later in the day one of the panelists, Jennifer Rodriguez, referred to this video by saying that collectively, “society is the still face” when it comes to our children and youth.
That was the hook I needed for the poem, which was also informed by the words I saw and heard during the cafe. I read the poem and got a generous standing ovation.
Today I got an email from our clients which was sent by the researcher you see in the video, Dr. Ed. Tronick. Dr. Tronick was responding to our client, who sent him the poem and the recording of me reading it:
I really am quite moved by the poem and your comment about how much impact it has. When I began this work in my lab I had no idea that it might one day be so useful in getting children and families what they so desperately need. I love the poem – I will get it up in my office somewhere, especially what it brings together and the rhythm of it. Please tell Chris how much I appreciate it. It is just amazing. And more important than the SF or the poem is the work you and everyone at the conference are doing.
It is not enough to do work in the world without adding as much beauty as we can. The power resides in the songs, the poems, the images that we use to capture our collective experiences and to throw a light on how important they are to us as human beings.
Enjoy the harvest.
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Flipcharts. Let me count the ways that we are tyrannized by them:
1. Power accretes around a flipchart. The next time you are in a meeting, see if you can tell where the front of the room is. It’s likely that, even if you are in a circle, the “front” will be where the flipchart is. As I wrote this I am in an Open Space meeting where people are gathered around flipcharts, and rather than organize in tight circles, several groups are arranged in semi circles facing one person holding a marker and writing on the flipchart. This defeats the purpose of a conversation in which every voice is equal. Who controls the flipchart, controls the story. Be very careful about having an easel stand in the room. People are easily silenced and controlled by them at a deep unconscious level.
2. We have to write everything down. Having a flip chart in a meeting seems to demand that everything spoken gets written down for all to see. This does not facilitate a good flow in a conversation, and it is rarely a useful harvest of a discussion. In free conversations, not everything is useful, not everything is weighted the same, not everything matters.
3. Flipcharts are linear beasts. Unless you use a flipchart creatively, such as by mind mapping or the way Jim Rough does it in Dynamic Facilitation, flipcharts are useless linear beasts. Most people simply write lists of points on them, in sequential order and when the page is full, they flip it over and keep writing. Wisdom disappears over the fold, every point is given equal weight and conversations tend to proceed in linear ways rather than emergent ways.
4. Renting easel stands is a scam. Hotels charge exorbitant rates to rent a flipchart stand. It is not un common for these things to go for $50 a day and at one hotel I worked at, the Sheraton in Atlanta, they charged $170 for a flipchart stand with half a pad of news print paper on it. NEVER rent them. (Look at this scam!)
5. Post it flipchart pads are a bigger scam. If you use flipcharts in any kind of creative way you will have already discovered that the overpriced post-it flipcharts are incredibly confining. You can only hang them one way, it is difficult to cut them into smaller pieces, it is awkward to roll up notes at the end of a meeting because everything sticks to everything else. Give me a pad of 75 sheets of large white paper, and I’m happy. I can cut them into quarters for Open Space topics, or tape them on a wall together to make large murals, or cover cafe tables with them. Seventy-seven dollars for a pad is plain wrong.
So what is a GOOD way to use flipcharts and easels?
1. Put the paper in the middle. In small meetings, say in a board room, take the paper off the easel stand and put it flat on the table. If possible, allow everyone access to the paper so that multiple notes can be taken. Putting the harvest tool in the middle of the table allows everything we are doing to be directed towards the centre. This is the basis of the way we harvest in World Cafe and it is brilliant. It democratizes the harvesting tools in a powerful way. Your conversations WILL be different.
2. Make a mind map. Get used to taking notes in a non-linear way. Mind maps are much better ways to capture the essence of a conversation because the group can see linkages and watch the emerging whole of the conversation.
3. Use easels to make signs. Easels are useful for static signs pointing out times and places, instructions and so on. The moment they become the focus of attention, you will notice that they play on different levels. The note taker is above the group, and the notes are elevated. In improv we call this a status game. So neutralize the status. Use easels for signs.
4. See what you can do with tape, scissors and paper. Tape helps you make flipchart pads bigger by taping several sheets together. Scissors help you make flipchart pads smaller. In these three tools you have everything you need to scale your work.
5. Learn how to do graphic recording. The Grove teaches this skill. And what I love the best about the graphic recorders I work with is how they quietly listen and create harvests without being a dominating presence in a room. even though the murals they create are huge, their presence is small as they are working, allowing groups to focus on conversation and listening rather than “speaking to the record.” Also, learning to use basic graphic recording tools such as icons, diagrams and pictures helps make your own notes less linear, more meaningful and more useful in general for a group.
So, banish the easel, liberate the pads, be creative, be aware of power. Have fun.