A cafe today, with littler preparation on the ground and a tricky issue in a community, but a good result today and some good learnings about harvesting. Here are my notes:
Before we began the chief invited us to stand in a circle to pray and to have some introductions. I was introduced and invited the group to find beauty in the work here, identifying what they really cared about for the education of their young people. We stayed standing in the circle for a half hour while some of the Elders talked about how hurt they had been over the past several years as the work the community had done to set up and govern the education system had gone sideways. They expressed frustration at the lack of communication and transparency and a perceived lack of respect for the community’s voice and the hard work that the community had done over the years. They talked about having more meetings, and more process to include people deep in the work of building support for the education system.
When people are stuck, you cannot move forward without acknowledging where they hurt. You cannot sweep pain and feelings of injustice under the carpet. People who are willing to stand for principles and stand for their beliefs need to be heard and acknowledged. No amount of defending or apologizing for the past will always do the trick either. In fact defending leads to more stuckness and no one ends up getting what they want. Concerns need to be heard as interests and as rooted in deeply held views about how things should work. The Elders in this gathering are talking about a process that they can be involved in and an education system that they can be involved in. It’s clear and to avoid that or design a system that does not makes space for their voice or passion does not transcend the pain and bad feelings that are the residue of the catastrophic collapse of the education board in years past.
To get through messes, simply listen, acknowledge, suspend beliefs and assumptions and make sure you hear people clearly and that they are heard clearly.
What do we want for education in this community?
We began with this question. The first two rounds of conversation focused on it. From there we asked: In a perfect world, how would our community be involved in education? We then finished in a circle again.
Part of the art of hosting is dealing with fear. I am so sure of the importance of a strong field being in place that when I work in a place where the field is weak or wobbly I fear that nothing will take root. But good questions are like weed seeds. The can thrive in some of the most depleted environments. And those first seeds that fall and sprout in depleted or barren ground make plants that make more soil. Lichens and mosses break down rock and create mineral soils that larger plants can grow in. Likewise, sometimes you just need to work with what you’ve got – design a question that assumes the best intentions of a community and drop it in and see what happens. People choose their engagement in cafe, they make decisions all the time about who to be with. In many subtle ways those decisions actually work towards optimal. During the evening, the law of two feet took over in this cafe. Many people were visiting with the Elders to hear what they have to say and the Elders were strategically visiting with others to make sure people understood their perspective. This is the field of good soil that is created by a good question and the freedom for people to engage. It’s by no means a garden of rare and wonderous plants, but with careful tending, the meager harvest from tonight could at least represent a change in the life of the community around this issue.
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Ensconced at the head of an inlet in what has to be the most beautiful valley in BC. My commute yesterday to get here was a one hour flight from Vancouver over huge icefields, 9000 foot peaks, high mountain lakes and deep forested cirques. The landscape here is forbiddingly raw, and when the morning sun catches the blue glint of glacial ice in the cracks and crevacies on the icefall you are flying PAST (not over!) your heart just sings.
In this tight little valley – now rain soaked and cloud choked – a few thousand people live cheek by jowel. At one end, where the long inlet terminates, is the Nuxalk Nation where I am doing a little work, trying to bring some hasitily organized participatory process to a couple of pressing needs in th ecommunity. Today is basically about trying to host a community conversation that sees the good and the possible in a desperate and fractious context. In most First Nations communities, hurt runs deep and the kinds of dynamics that are at play here are deep currents that carry away optimisim, creativity and possibility. And yet, everyone I talk to here wants something different, a different conversation, a different wnay of looking at things. So today and tomorrow, using Cafe and Open Space, we are going to try that.
We haven’t had much time to prepare, and there is much working against making this an ideal situation, so I truly don’t know what will happen. I am just entering today as open as I can be to what’s possible, trying to embody what others are longing for.
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Anchored down in San Francisco awaiting a delayed hop to Eureka California, from where we will drive to the Hoopa Valley and work there for a couple of days. On leg five of the epic journey.
So a little time to breathe and reflect on a couple of harvests. First from Geoff Selig who was at the Pembroke Art of Hosting, and who collected the tablecloths from a final day World Cafe on what we have learned about the power of conversation.
Second, a harvest poem from the Open Space I ran yesterday in Kelowna. This was an afternoon session for the 30th anniversary of the Assembly of BC Arts Councils and 18 conversations took place that reflected the place of these volunteers and staff people who support the arts in towns, cities, islands and villages across our province. With Open Space these days I am trying as much as possible to have a place in which a meta harvest can be collected and created. Most often this looks like a graphic recorder who gathers materials and snippets from the sessions and co-creates a harvest with session conveners and participants. This gives a high level framework upon which the individual sessions can hang, and it invites another level of coherence and pattern noticing. Yesterday. we had no graphic recorder available, so I substituted with this poem that I created partly from the titles of the 18 sessions and partly from what I was seeing emerging in the conversations. As we only had 15 minutes for a closing, I presented this in lieu of a closing circle, and it made for a nice cap on the day:
The assembly of those who host space
by Chris Corrigan
Who are we? What do we do?
How do we face change while staying true
to the art that is the heart of community unity?
What body serves the life that comes to us?
Here we pause and reflect:
Youth are the truth of growing inclusivity.
Dialogue, funding, engagement are our tools
and it’s what we create with them that fuels
the passion for change
and well-ordered offerings that welcome the stranger,
the small connections that bring us into relationship
with land, citizen, government and institution.
So how to begin to offer form
that invites the spirit of the arts to warm
the cold spaces of urban waste
and rural forgetting, arts-based, human-paced
endeavours that bring us home?
How do we step up to govern and guide
theatres, galleries, facilities, the sides
of desks off of which our best work is done?
And how do we cultivate the source of our energy,
the money and bodies that make smooth
the skid roads and rip rap that brings this enterprise alive,
delivers the promise which grows and thrives?
We host space.
The spaces between people that light up with the spark of connection
recognition, a shared story, historical succession,
the tending of the coming soon that arises
from the done before rooted in the best of now.
The space of social media
both digital and tactile that expedites
the meeting of needs,
the speaking of deeds
into the record of our collective story.
The spaces of creation and illumination
like so many star-birthing clouds
spaces that resound with the colour of the voices that sound
the melodies and harmonies of our becoming.
Spaces in which we re-create, in which we see
what we could be with the power of free
expression coursing through the veins
that carry the pulse of life – the arts beat.
And here we confront our souls,
navigate the narrow channels, reefs and shoals
that want to gobble us down,
sink us in work, overwhelm and drown
our efforts in the skookumchuk
where scarcity and demand
suck and boil together and we move uncomfortably with outstretched hand.
Only and finally in THIS space,
do we recognize friends, companions
that also walk our path between elation
and struggle, who know the million details that support creation.
Thirty years we have sat in assembly
hosting a resonance that trembles
up the coast, valleys and rivers
like so many shivers
through the spine of beauty,
a reverent bass line, upon which rests
the deep song of who we are.
A deep bow to you all –
for the boards that lead
for the boards that are tread,
for the boards that are hammered together,
the music of spruce and pine and fir
forming the floor from which we stage our flight,
take wing and soar.
This poem was composed in honour of the 30th anniversary gathering of the Assembly of BC Arts Councils. It is a reflection of the issues that were articulated in 18 Open Space dialogue sessions held on the afternoon of May 2, 2009 in Kelowna, when Assembly members gathered to find wisdom in the stories and questions that were held within their community of practice.
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Lovely day here in Marin County hanging out with friends and charting some interesting paths forward on a few projects. One highlight of the day was spending time with Amy Lenzo, who I have known for a while but met only one time previously when we were on an diverse and eclectic team of facilitators holding space at the Pegasus systems thinking conference a couple of years ago. Amy is, among other things, the web goddess for The World Cafe community and we spent a lovely lunch at the excellent Buckeye Roadhouse talking over the nature of our work, the ways in which we look at the art of hosting within rich social spaces and what is at the core of our approach to things. We were reflecting on what the World Cafe, Open Space, Berkana and Art of Hosting communities (among many others) have in common and it comes down to these four things – archetypal patterns if you will:
- The source pattern for our understanding of group process is the circle
- The source pattern for leadership within that process is “hosting” or facilitative (or “holding space“)
- The source pattern for design of process is diverge – emerge – converge
- The source pattern of our worldview is living systems
These four patterns form a set of foundations about our practice. They stand in contrast to foundations of group work for which:
- The source pattern for understanding group process is the traditional school room.
- The source pattern for leadership is the teacher or command and control
- The source pattern for design is linear: moving from point A to point B
- The source pattern for worldviews is mechanistic.
These distinctions are useful because the source patterns serve as an invitation. If you find yourself in alignment with the first set of patterns, you’ll probably find kin in the Cafe, Open Space, Berkana and Art of Hosting communities. If you relate more to the second set you ‘ll probably find yourself engaged with people from more traditional training backgrounds. There is certainly a time and place for both, and the skillful application of one or the other sets of foundations is what is brought by artful process practitioners.
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Micheal Herman posted a cool cafe design to the OSLIST today. It marries the best of Cafe and Open Space:
i just facilitated an afternoon program with 120 “high potential” high school seniors as part of a final selection process for full-ride scholarships to two excellent universities. it was a cafe format, but the first session was used to write questions that these young leaders thought they and other young people should be addressing. then we did three rounds in which table hosts picked the questions and raised them with whoever rotated to their table for one session. after the first question-making session, the 20 tables went in 20 different directions, like an open space with so many small stakes in the ground. and i went around picking up cups and the last bits of box-lunch trash in cafe-style, with a small tray and quiet “can i take that out of your way?”
UPDATE: Michael has posted an excellent detailed write up of this design at his blog.