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Category Archives "World Cafe"

Meg Wheatley’s 12 principles for supporting healthy community

May 25, 2010 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, BC, Being, Collaboration, Conversation, Design, Facilitation, Invitation, Leadership, Open Space, Organization, Philanthropy, World Cafe, Youth 5 Comments

I’m a sucker for principles, because principles help us to design and do what is needed and help us to avoid bringing pre-packaged ideas and one-size-fits-all solutions to every problem.  And of course, I’m a sucker for my friend Meg Wheatley. Today, in our Art of Hosting workshop in central Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony brought some of Meg’s recent thinking on these principles to a group of 60 community developers working in education, child and family services, and restorative justice.  We’re excited to be working nwith these principles in the work we’re doing with Berkana Institute.  Here’s what I heard:

1. People support what they create. Where are you NOT co-creating?  Even the most participatory process always have an edge of focused control or design.  Sometimes that is wise, but more often than not we design, host and harvest without consciousness.  Are we engaging with everyone who has a stake in this issue?

2. People act most responsibly when they care. Passion and responsibility is how work gets done.  We know this from Open Space – as Peggy Holman is fond of saying, invite people to take responsibility for what they love.  What is it you can’t NOT do?  Sometime during this week I have heard someone describe an exercise where you strip away everything you are doing and you discover what it is you would ALWAYS do under any circumstances.  Are we working on the issues that people really care about?

3. Conversation is the way that humans have always thought together.  In conversation we discover shared meaning. It is the primal human organizing tool.  Even in the corridors of power, very little real action happens in debate, but rather in the side rooms, the hallways, the lunches, the times away from the ritual spaces of authority and in the the relaxed spaces of being human. In all of our design of meetings, engagement, planning or whatever, if you aren’t building conversation into the process, you will not benefit from the collective power and wisdom of humans thinking together.  These are not “soft” processes.  This is how wars get started and how wars end.  It’s how money is made, lives started, freedom realized. It is the core human organizing competency.

4. To change the conversation, change who is in the conversation. It is a really hard to see our own blind spots.  Even with a good intention to shift the conversation, without bringing in new perspectives, new lived experiences and new voices, our shift can become abstract.  If you are talking ABOUT youth with youth in the process, you are in the wrong conversation.  If you are talking about ending a war and you can’t contemplate sitting down with the enemy, you will not end the war, no matter how much your policy has shifted.  Once you shift the composition of the group, you can shift the status and power as well.  What if your became the mentors to adults?  What if clients directed our services?

5. Expect leadership to come from anywhere. If you expect leadership to come from the same places that it has always come from, you will likely get the same results you have always been getting.  That is fine to stabilize what is working, but in communities, leadership can come from anywhere.  Who is surprising you with their leadership?

6. Focus on what’s working, ask what’s possible, not what’s wrong. Energy for change in communities comes from working with what is working. When we accelerate and amplify what is working, we can apply those things to the issues in community that drain life and energy.  Not everything we have in immediately useful for every issue in a community, but hardly anything truly has to be invented.  Instead, find people who are doing things that are close to what you want to do and work with them and others to refine it and bring it to places that are needed.  Who is already changing the way services are provided?  Which youth organize naturally in community and how can we invite them to organize what is needed?  What gives us energy in our work?

7. Wisdom resides within us. I often start Open Space meetings by saying that “no angels will parachute in here to save us.  Rather, the angel is all of us together.”  Experts can’t do it, folks.  They can be helpful but the wisdom for implementation and acting is within us.  It has to be.

8. Everything is a failure in the middle, change occurs in  cycles. We’re doing new things, and as we try them, many things will “fail.”  How do we act when that happens?  Are we  tyrannized  by the belief that everything we do has to move us forward?

9. Learning is the only way we become smarter about what we do. Duh.  But how many of us work in environments where we have to guard against failure?  Are you allowed to have a project or a meeting go sideways, or is the demand for accountability and effectiveness so overwhelming that we have to scale back expectations or lie about what we are doing.

10.  Meaningful work is a powerful human motivator. What is the deepest purpose that calls us to our work and how often do we remember this?

11. Humans can handle anything as long as we’re together. That doesn’t mean we can stop tsunamis, but it means that when we have tended to relationships, we can make it through what comes next.  Without relationships our communities die, individuals give up, and possibility evaporates.  The time for apologizing for relationship building is over.  We need each other, and we need to be with each other well.

12. Generosity, forgiveness and love.  These are the most important elements in a community. We need all of our energy to be devoted to our work.  If we use our energy to blame, resent or hate, then we deplete our capacity, we give away our power and our effectiveness.  This is NOT soft and cuddly work.  Adam Kahane has recently written about the complimentarity of love and power, and this principle, more than any other is the one that should draw our attention to that fact.  Love and power are connected.  One is not possible without the other.  Paying attention to this quality of being together is hard, and for many people it is frightening.  Many people won’t even have this conversation because the work of the heart makes us vulnerable.  But what do we really get for being guarded with one another, for hoarding, blaming and despising?

We could probably do a full three workshop on these principles (and in the circle just now we agreed to!).  But as key organizing principles, these are brilliant points of reflection for communities to engage in conversations about what is really going on.

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Art of Hosting Tofino, day 2

December 18, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, BC, Design, Facilitation, First Nations, Practice, Travel, World Cafe 3 Comments

Questions for community

Today, the new moon rises, a time of aupicious beginnings, especially coming so close to the winter solstice.  These are important moments in Nuu-Cha-Nulth culture, and the times are important in Nuu-Chah-Nulth history.  Last month, five Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribes won a landmark court case that gave them the right to sell the fish that they catch.  Not on an industrial scale mind you, but on a scale big enough to create small local commercially viable fisheries for communities that desperately need both the work and the reconnection to the sea.  Moreover, the courta case declared this as an Aboriginal right, a significant ruling for coastal First Nations in general but for the Nuu-Chah-Nulth in particular.

All of this leads to a time when participatory leadership is needed to seize the opportunity of building culture and community back and doing real, powerful and grounded marine use planning.  So today was a good day to get to work.

We begun with 20 minutes of Warrior of the Heart practice, introducing the concept of irime, entering in, joining energies with an attacker and helping them lead a situation to peace.  This check in this morning was a powerful reminder to some about the way their work as hosts needs to change, to be able to stand in the fire of aggressive energy and work with it.  Fisheries and marine use planning is full of passion and the work these folks will be doing will not be easy.  But the passion that drives the aggressive fight for rights and allocations can be used also to build and heal community, and if we enter into that space well, grounded and ready and knowing a little bit, we can do something with that energy.

So today we heard a little about the court case and then we spent some time learning about  the seven helpers with this harvest as a result:

From this morning’s sessionshort piece on designing meetings: Four groups of questions to ask before conducting any meeting, to help you choose a good way to get what you need:

BE PRESENT* How will we bring people together in a way that invites them to be present? * How do we make people comfortable to share from their heart and listen together for wisdom and learning?

KNOW YOUR HARVEST * What do we want to take away from this meeting? In what form? (notes? graphics? photos? video? audio?) * How will we use what we gather from the meeting?

HAVE A GOOD QUESTION * What question(s) could we ask that would invite contributions from everyone?

LISTENING PIECE * What is a listening tool that helps us have enough time for people to make their contributions and hear each other? * What kinds of activities and exercises can we use for people to explore content together and provide their own thoughts on our question?

If you use this checklist as a way of organizing your thoughts before a meeting, it will help you to stay focused and to ensure that everything you do is tied to the purpose of the meeting.

Nice…a basic set of planning guidelines for any conversation that keeps us focused on the harvest, and keeps us conscious about process.

After lunch we took the advice of our Elder Levi and the participants went out on the land to think about their work going into the community.  This was the time to do a little oosumich, connecting with themselves and presencing the future that starts next week when they return to their communities.  When they returned, we went into a really beautiful World Cafe around two questions that Laura and Norinne cracked.  The first question was an appreciative question about a time when community was truly engaged.  The second question, which we did two rounds on, was on question we could ask to bring community together around marine use planning.

The harvest from this was great, a real set of tools and ideas for them to use when they go home to start the conversation.

And sweet practice this evening.  Bruce Lucas put on a potlatch DVD and some of us played Scrabble while Nuu-chah-Nulth tunes echoed through our dining space.  Two or three kids played while we feasted on chicken, salmon and some great vegetable dishes prepared by our local caterer.  This groups is really gelling, and becoming fast friends.  They are tooling up on facebook and Skype to stay together as they move into this work seperately.

Tonight I can hear some geese flying overhead, moving south on the warm winds that have come in.  The rain has stopped and the surf still pounds, the ever present sound of sae and land meeting, creating one another out of their shared conversation.

Tsawalk indeed.

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Hosting an inner climate village

December 9, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, World Cafe, Youth

As part of a global call to host Inner Climate Global Villages, tomorrow my daughter Aine and I will host a cafe at her learning centre with 16 young people aged 11-14 on these questions:
  • What is it as young people that helps us feel connected to a big global issue like climate change without fear?
  • How can we learn and contribute and make change from a place that is not based in fear?
As part of the day we will be watching this video on fun behaviour change.
We will try to harvest with video and photos and send something along to Cop15, to my friends who are working there to compile similar gatherings and harvests into strategies and inspiration.  Hopefully we can discover some strategies and principles that will be helpful for leaders in recruiting the support of young people in joyful contribution.  I’ll post the harvest here too.
You can be a part of this movement too.  Host and post!

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Strategic planning using the World Cafe and Open Space

October 29, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Conversation, Design, Facilitation, Open Space, World Cafe 5 Comments

Today John Inman had a great post on using the world cafe for a five hour strategic planning session with a non-profit.  His process works as follows:

First I asked that the whole system be in the retreat. We had board members, a customer, grant writer, community member, and contractors.

1. Introduction in group setting
2. Introduce the process
3. Pose the question
4. Three cafe tables with three people each, start the cafe
5. Three rounds of conversation each 20 minutes
6. Returned people to original table and asked them to capture the main themes at each table. 20 minutes
7. Harvested main themes in group
8. Group process for prioritization and assessing performance on each focus
9. Opportunity map outcomes
10. Group process to explore opportunities to work on and time frames
11. Assign teams to develop tactical plans to address opportunities
12. Used affinity process to capture everyone’s values, and group into value titles
13. Developed the values for the non-profit from this harvest
14. From conversation developed mission for the non-profit
15. Created list of what the non-profit is and is not for them to develop a story about their organization and it role in the community
16. Provided a foundation for a vision statement to be drafted.
17. Reflection session and adjourn

And all of this in 5 hours. It was the most productive planning session I have ever had and I believe that is in no small part due to driving them into conversation early and the power of conversation transformed the session.

Years ago I developed a process for doing something similar in Open Space.  the challenge was how to hold an open planning conversation on the future of the organization, but address key areas without being controlling.  We designed a day and a half strategic planning retreat with a non-profit by first identifying the key areas which the plan needed to cover.  In this case the organization needed to plan in five basic areas: services, funding, human resources, government relations and labour relations.  We then issued an invitation to everyone who needed to come.  Our process ran like this:

  1. Prepare a harvest wall with five blank spots for reporting, each with one of the five topic headings.
  2. Open Space and invite any conversations to take place but point out that only those conversations that touch on the five planning topics will go forward into the plan.
  3. Open Space as usual with convenors hosting sessions and taking notes.  Convenors type notes up on laptops and print them out, placing the printed copy in one of the five topic areas (or outside the five topic areas, if the conversation was not relevant to planning).
  4. Overnight, compile the reports from each of the five groups and print a copy for each participant.
  5. In the morning, there are five breakout spaces in the meeting room each one focusing on one of the five topics.
  6. People self-organize their participation in a 1.5 to 2 hour conversation on each of these five areas.  I think we asked them to undertake specific tasks such as identifying key priorities, and planning action (including preliminary resource estimates and communications implications).  Also we asked them to identify initial implementation steps.  Rules of Open Space applied, especially the law of two feet.
  7. Groups met and then reported back.  Their initial plans were then sent to the executive of the organization for refining and more detailed resource costing (everyone knew that going in).

Like John, my experience of the process was incredibly productive and the plans were excellent, and sustainable over the long term because there was a huge amount of buy-in from the co-creation process.

These participatory processes are far more than “just talk” and with wise planning and focussed harvests, they are a very fast way to make headway on what can otherwise be tedious planning processes.

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What do we dare to choose now?

September 11, 2009 By Chris Corrigan BC, Conversation, Design, Facilitation, First Nations, Invitation, Leadership, Open Space, World Cafe 3 Comments

“My grandmother was the one that inspired me,” said my friend Liz over lunch at the Valley Inn in Bella Coola. “She said that the world was once all together, and then it came apart and one day it will be all together again. So I just try to bring things together.”

Liz is a pretty remarkable woman. She worked for years in family reunification in Vancouver, bringing together First Nations kids with their birth families, reconnecting them to their culture and communities. She is at home now in Bella Coola on council, working for the Ministry as a social worker, but always about bringing people together. The reason I am here, for these two days of community conversations, is simply to be a part of designing and hosting community meetings that do that.

The Nuxalk Nation reserves sit in this stunning valley, at the mouth of the Bella Coola River, where it meets the ocean at North Bentinck Arm, still nearly 150 kilometres inland from the open Pacific coast. At the Bella Coola town site is an old cannery, an icehouse and a wharf. There are a couple of hotels and restaurants, a Coop store, some repair shops and and RCMP station. Across the street from that is one of the Nuxalk communities, an old part of the reserve called “Downtown.” It mostly consists of old Department of Indian Affairs Housing, never designed for the wet climate of the Pacific coast, some trailers that house the band office and a couple of community buildings and a playground. Yards are full of mullein, plantain and blackberry bushes and the occasional carved headstone can be seen in a yard. A small creek winds through the reserve and joins the river on the north side of the community. At this time of year there are people out on the river, drift netting their food fish, gathering coho for canning and smoking. The Nuxalk fisheries personnel are trying to find some sockeye to take eggs from so they can stock some of the streams and lakes around the territory. Like everywhere the fish are dwindling. In the past, oolichans ran through here in the millions, but now only a handful return in the early spring and the once rich Nuxalk grease, one of the healthiest human produced foods in the world, is now gone.

Up the river from here is the newer community of Four Mile, a subdivision of larger lots and larger houses. Kids roam around on their bikes and young families are out walking. The houses look like any rural subdivision but there are telltale signs you are still on Nuxalk lands. Poles dote the neighbourhood, carving studios take up garage space, and the occasional lawn has a fish boat parked on it.

As the Bella Coola valley winds eastward, a few more communities dot the landscape – Hagensborg is the biggest, another 10 kilometres along highway 20. It is an old Norwegian settlement, and here the houses look bigger, more durable, and on large lots featuring manicured lawns and gardens. No one is outside, the kids get dropped off from the school bus and head right inside in contrast to the reserves, where the kids scatter in all directions after school. As highway 20 heads up towards Williams Lake, it climbs the “hill” a steep grade of narrow switch backs with no guard rail, that is said by some to be the most terrifying drive in Canada. If you don’t fly out, or leave for Vancouver Island far to the south by ferry, this is the only way to go.

This is the valley in which I have been working this week. A place of stunning natural beauty and deep social alienation. Liz and the Nuxalk elected chief, Spencer, were both fed up with the kinds of community meetings that have been going on for years, where people come and yell at one another, where anger becomes unbottled rage and questions are asked that have no answers that will ever satisfy. Both realized that how we talk to one another is important, so we agreed to try an experiment, and see what might happen if we ran meetings using participatory methodologies.

The first day was a World Cafe, which I wrote about earlier, and yesterday we tried an Open Space meeting for a general community meeting. As is not uncommon, we started very late, once people had arrived, and a pot of moose stew appeared and everyone was settled, it was 5:00 – 90 minutes past the posted opening. We had about 20 people sitting in a circle wondering what would happen, and I was wondering the same. Most folks were Band employees, present to give information and participate in conversations as best they could. A number had been reluctant to come because they had no idea what would happen, and feared community members being out of control. “How are you going to stop people from getting on their high horses?” one man had asked me. “I’m not,” I replied. “But the way we do this will lessen the chance of that happening.” He wasn’t convinced. It was as if I had just described the concept of magic to him. I clearly knew my stuff, but that didn’t make me any more in touch with reality.

After a prayer and a quiet opening welcome, I stepped into the circle, with really nothing but an invitation to talk differently. We had not been able to do very much planning, and the notices for the meeting had only gone out to the community a couple of days before. Still, the invitation was to move from some visioning that the community had been doing for an Indian Affairs mandated planning process, to something more based in what the people wanted. I walked the circle, explained the process, reminded them that they had the power to set the agenda, and waited for what might happen.

Always in Open Space meetings, there is this moment of being on the edge of the complete unknown. All of the preparation and time spent building the invitation and the theme and the question usually pay off in that moment. If we have done all of that right and produced a strong social field, the ideas flood into the centre. But there are times when the conditions don’t tap the passion of the community, when people just remain confused about why they are there and what they are supposed to do. When they haven’t seen through their cynicism far enough to even listen to the instructions. Those times only happen if there has been little preparation in the community or organization. Open Space is not a magic wand – it does not automatically generate participation. Invitation is the magic wand and Open Space is the place where the magic can happen. Yesterday, I feared that the wand had not been well used. That we would be staring at the floor between our feet for a while.

But sometimes passion trumps preparation. It turns out that in Nuxalk, there are plenty of things to talk about. Life is hard for most people. There is 90% unemployment, the fish are disappearing, huge scale land rights issues loom over the heads of 1600 people, the language and culture is hanging by a thread, youth are drinking and drugging and getting pregnant. It’s no wonder really that people shout at community meetings. It’s the last place to rail against the morass of conditions that keeps these communities poor and out of the loop. The last place where people can feel their power, even if it comes at the expense of others.

So last night, as I sat down, four people rose up and we were off. One Elder who had been a vocal critic of how bad the Council was at communicating with the people convened a session on how she wanted to see it done It felt at some level like there was some forgiveness buried in her question. Let’s move on, she seemed to be saying. Let’s figure out how to do this better.

There were similar sentiments around jobs and youth and culture and language. Ten small groups were formed, and there was lots of visiting over the next hour as we did all the sessions in one time slot. Laughter broke out all around the room. More community members, who had been hanging around the outside of the hall, joined us. Liz picked up a conversation that she had started two years ago when I had been here before working with her. She introduced people to her idea of a community house – an intergenerational space where people could gather and be with one another.

As we gathered in the circle at the end, we talked about what it felt like to be working like this. People had a good feeling towards one another. I asked when was the last time people had left a community meeting feeling good. There was hearty laughter. “Never!” said one Elder, her eyes wide with the absurdity of the question. “Feels good now though,” she said.

We have a choice. We can meet in ways that get nothing done in the name of “information sharing” and “accountability” or we can meet in ways which allow our hearts to set the agenda, and our hands and feet to see it through to action. We didn’t begin massive amounts of work last night, but we cracked open something – a possibility that it could be different. Hopefully we opened a jar out of which choice flowed. As Thomas King once said, you can’t pretend not to have heard the story If you were there last night, you would have seen and felt something different. You can spin it to say some guy came up from the south and ran this kooky meeting and we talked in small groups. But no one who was there can deny that it DID feel good at the end. We felt like something was accomplished.

What do we dare choose now?

Liz reminded me that when we worked together two years ago, a young woman uttered a phrase that is stark in it’s power and implication for communities like Nuxalk: Leadership is seeing the beauty in others. It’s to draw together the world again, as Liz’s grandmother says. To heal by making whole, which is not to say fixing everything, but rather to bring things closer together.

As we left the hall last night, Spencer, the chief, waved at a man coming across the playground. He was a “trooper” one of the small number of chronic alcoholics in the community who have the hardest time of all. “What’s happening Spence?” the trooper cried out. “Community meeting,” replied the young chief getting into his truck. “We were just talking.”

“Oh, mmmhmm,” said the trooper. “That’s good.”

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