Dear Dave: A letter on hosting, complexity and practice

A humpback whale called “Nova” that we saw the other day. She is about to dive deep.

Over the past year I have been corralling my thinking on the Art of Hosting, complexity, dialogic containers and practice into a new shape. If you have been following along here since January, you have seen this thinking taking place in the open. At the heart of the matter is my desire to wrestle with questions of power, epistemic justice and humility, and a desire to become a better teacher and host/facilitator.

It has been quite a year of reflection! A number of factors launched me into this work, and one in particular was an important set of blog posts from Dave Snowden that named the Art of Hosting along side other communities of practices and lineages who make a claim that they work with complexity. His posts sought to distinguish his approach to anthro-complexity from the systems thinking lineages out of which many of us come, knowingly or unknowingly. I think there is merit in this distinction and as a person that has been formed in my practice by both the Art of Hosting community (which does indeed owe a debt of lineage to these practices) and the anthro-complexity community, I felt it was important to wrestle with the similarities and distinctions between these bodies of knowledge and practice.

I recognize for many people that this conversation seems very abstract and theoretical, but I think it has deeply important practical questions to ask us as facilitators, consultants and Art of Hosting practitioners, and that is why I have spent the year thinking this through.

This is the first of a few pieces I will be writing about this. This post is an open letter to Dave Snowden, fulfilling a promise I made to him to take his critiques seriously and understand them through the lens of practice. I promised him my response would be messy, and it certainly has been over the past few months! But this letter gathers up what I have learned from his writing, and returns it to him. I find myself agreeing with much of his critique while also becoming clearer about the value I continue to find in the Art of Hosting as a practice, a community and a way of approaching these questions.

The global Art of Hosting community is a massive, distributed group of people who explore this practice from a myriad of perspectives. It is a community that learns and shares with one another and hangs together around a simple and generative practice framework, along with a set of hosting methods that largely informed that framework. Even saying that, it is almost impossible to make a general statement about how Art of Hosting practitioners practice. The community is more of a collision of experience than a settled and regulated body of work.

Having said that, here is my response to Dave, written after considering my notes, learnings and practical applications of ideas inspired by his work.

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Dave,

Your estuary work sharpened something I had already been wrestling with: the danger of confusing a hosted gathering with the system of which it is a part. A workshop is not a representative miniature of an organization or a system just because we have gathered a diverse group of people. A powerful conversation is not evidence of system change. What happens under the temporary conditions of a facilitated gathering may have very little effect on the structures, incentives, networks and relationships that operate when people leave.  It is easy to be seduced by what happens in a good conversation to believe that change and transformation can occur there.

As I was feeling my way through this, and trying to figure out how to write about it, your blog posts came along. I started to pay much more attention to whether the work we do survives contact with the context it is supposed to affect. I also became more reflective and precise about some of the language I use about emergence. We can choose the people, frame the question, select the method, set the time, establish the boundaries and decide how the work will be harvested, and then marvel at the emergence that happens inside those conditions. Of course humans interacting under any set of constraints will produce things nobody predicted. The more useful question, from both a practical and ethical perspective, is whether what emerges is relevant to the field from which those people came and whether it has any life once they return to it. That was the question I was beginning to ask in The Inundated Delta. 

Your critique of the helper has landed too. I recognize in my own practice that facilitators and hosts can become far too important in our own accounts of what happened. We can frame the problem, interpret the group, name the pattern, harvest the meaning and then explain people’s experience back to them. The practitioner who is supposed to be enabling agency can become the central epistemic authority in the room. 

The gift of this collision of ideas, and the directness with which they were offered, is that I became much more curious about what I think I am doing when I facilitate. Over the past number of months this has become the core research project of my hosting and teaching practice, and it will continue to be.

Where I now place the work of hosting dialogic containers

I think a hosted gathering is a temporary intervention in an existing field. People arrive already entangled in histories, relationships, identities, authority, obligations, institutions and material conditions. They don’t leave these things at the door. The organization doesn’t disappear because we put the chairs in a circle, and hierarchy doesn’t vanish because everyone gets equal time with a talking piece. I think broadly speaking many of my experienced colleagues in the Art of Hosting community know this too.

As a student of the phenomenon of dialogic containers, this has always been interesting to me, and my own thinking about containers has followed this curiosity for decades. Your work has massively contributed to this thinking.

Over that time I have changed my language about containers. I am much less inclined now to say that I create or hold a container, a common idea in facilitation practice. For me, a container is something that emerges from the constraints operating in a situation. As hosts we can influence some of those constraints, sometimes quite significantly, but we don’t control the pattern that results. For me, the practice of hosting lies largely in learning how to work responsibly with the constraints we can influence while becoming more attentive to those we can’t.

Over the past few months I have been developing a simple triangle as a diagnostic tool to help me pay attention to this. It distinguishes three sources of constraint in hosted work: structure, interactions and design. Structure includes what is already shaping the situation: authority, history, policy, resources, organizational roles, physical arrangements and cultural expectations. Interactions are what people actually do together, including resistance, relationship, coalition, interpretation, novelty and all the self-organization that nobody controls. Design concerns intentional constraints introduced by people who have enough power to make those intentions consequential: the invitation, the question, the boundaries, the process, the timing and the ways participation is organized.

I don’t think this is an ontology of human systems. It is a diagnostic for hosted work. It helps me ask what is already shaping this situation, what people are doing together, and what I am introducing through my own choices. Most importantly, it doesn’t allow the facilitator to disappear.

Design is an exercise of power

This is perhaps the biggest change in my practice this year. It has always been clear to me that facilitator’s and hosts have a tremendous amount of power in a room. This is an important fact and pre-occupation of the facilitation world in general. But through this inquiry I have become much more explicit about design as an exercise of power. If I ask a question, I constrain attention. If I choose Open Space instead of presentations, I change the affordances for interaction. If I decide who is invited, I make a consequential intervention before anyone enters the room. If a leader invites people to “co-create” something while retaining the authority to reject everything they produce, that shapes the container too.

In the Art of Hosting world we talk a lot about design, and we have developed tools and practices for bringing multiple perspectives into the design process and connecting the design to the field in which we are working. We work in hosting teams, and we use tools like the Chaordic Stepping Stones to create designs that can remain flexible and responsive.

However, I don’t think I have paid enough attention to design as a vector of power and constraint that can influence a dialogic container in ways that suppress emergence and distributed intelligence. Design as “fjordic,” you might say.

This isn’t a reason not to design. Somebody is going to design the gathering. Our work – my work o is to to become more conscious of the power involved in doing it.

Throughout my career I have found myself doing work inside channels already carved by power: some structural, through legislation, policy, resources and institutional authority; others intentionally created through the mandates and purposes held by people with power. And still others exercised by the distributed power of the people in the room. Until recently, I’m not sure I had a way to distinguish these clearly from the design choices I was then making inside them. In recent months I have found myself asking some very simple questions much more often: What is already fixed? What is genuinely open? Who can say no? What can these people actually influence? What will happen to what they produce? What does the person convening this work have the authority to change, and what are they prepared to let go of?

Those questions often tell me more about the possibilities for participation than a method ever could. They also make it harder to use participatory language to disguise a process in which the consequential decisions have already been made.

Why I think the Art of Hosting matters

Human beings gather deliberately. We gather to decide things, learn together, negotiate, organize, inquire, coordinate, grieve, celebrate, reconcile and make sense of what is happening. Some of those gatherings are attempts to intervene in complex systems and some aren’t. A community meeting, a strategy session, a memorial, a learning event and a group trying to figure out what to do next are different kinds of gatherings with different purposes.

In many of them somebody has consequential choices to make about how people will meet. I think learning to make those choices well is a legitimate domain of practice.

The Art of Hosting has given me a community in which to spend more than twenty years developing that practice. It taught me to pay attention to my own presence and power, to participate in the systems in which I work rather than pretend to stand outside them, to create conditions for people to exercise agency, and to work with self-organization instead of assuming that everything needs to be directed. These commitments were part of my practice before I encountered Cynefin. Anthro-complexity has made me much more precise about them.

I wrote in Control, facilitation, and the Golden Rule about the effect Open Space had on me thirty years ago. It changed my understanding of facilitation from managing conversation to working with constraints that allow people much more freedom to organize their own interactions. That remains one of the foundations of my practice. I don’t know what people will talk about, what relationship will form, what difference will become important or what somebody will learn. I don’t need to know. My responsibility is to make good choices about the constraints I actually have the authority to influence and then pay attention to what happens. 

That seems to me entirely coherent with complexity. And it puts me in need of a heuristic to understand how to orient myself in this form of facilitation that we call hosting. The Art of Hosting community sprang from an inquiry into the forms of facilitation that are helpful to a group’s needs in the moment, and the work that needs to be done to ensure that whatever we do as hosts remains in contact with the context in which it is embedded. Complexity theory provides useful guidance for this stance when the work is complex.

Methods are not the practice

When I began my career as a facilitator of large group methods, I became enamoured with the process. Open Space in particular shows us what facilitation can also be, when one is not standing at a flipchart, listing and reframing ideas, or guiding the substance or tone of a conversation. One thing I am teaching differently now is the relationship between practice and methods. I am less interested in teaching people that participatory methods are preferable to other forms. Sometimes Open Space is exactly what is needed. Sometimes people need a tightly structured meeting. Sometimes they need to sit in a circle and listen carefully to one another. Sometimes they shouldn’t be in a meeting at all; they need to go out and observe what is actually happening before they have anything useful to talk about.

The idea of bounded applicability is critical. There is no intrinsically good facilitation method outside of the context in which it is useful. And so the question becomes one of practice simply choosing from a menu of methods. A method changes the constraints on interaction. That is why we use it. The question isn’t whether a method is participatory or emergent. The questions are: what does this make possible, what does it make harder, and is that useful here?

This is changing how I teach and use the Chaordic Stepping Stones as well. I am increasingly interested in the questions as ways of helping practitioners encounter context before making design choices: What is the need? Who are the people? What is already given? What principles or constraints matter? Who can say no? What will happen to the work afterwards? Each question can change what the practitioner sees, and therefore change what they choose to do. The framework improves the inquiry. In the next few months I’ll be updating that framework, because the current version is nearly ten years old, and we’ve learned so much in its use and application over the past decade. It’s time for a major version change.

How do I know what to do?

This has become one of the central questions in my teaching this year. If methods aren’t answers, and frameworks can’t prescribe action in a complex situation, how does a practitioner know what to do?

The answer, of course, is that we never know completely. We make choices, act and pay attention to what happens. But we can become better at making those choices.

That is where I now locate much of the value of practice. I want practitioners who can notice before interpreting, read context, understand constraints, see their own power, distinguish what is given from what is genuinely open, make an intervention without becoming attached to it, and recognize when less facilitation is needed. I want people who can learn from the response of the field rather than explain it away when their design doesn’t produce what they expected.

No framework can do that for us. Cynefin can’t. The Four Fold Practice can’t. The Chaordic Stepping Stones can’t. My triangle certainly can’t. They can all help us notice things we might otherwise miss, but practical judgment is something we develop by practising.

This is where I think the Four Fold Practice has considerable value. Presence, participation, hosting and co-creation aren’t a checklist of required conditions. They invite us into practices through which our judgment might become better.

What I have learned from you

When you wrote Leadership in the Estuary, you put Art of Hosting, systems leadership and anthro-complexity alongside one another and said that these traditions share more common ground than their internal debates sometimes suggest. I think that is right. 

I don’t need Art of Hosting to become anthro-complexity, and anthro-complexity certainly doesn’t need to validate Art of Hosting. They are different bodies of practice with different histories, purposes and claims. But your work has given people in my practice community some important things to attend to: context before intervention, distributed rather than facilitator-centred sensemaking, constraints and affordances, epistemic humility, the brown-field nature of change, and a sharper account of power.

The effect on me has been quite practical, not just this year, but going back to where I first encountered your ideas. I am more circumspect about facilitation. I make fewer claims about collective intelligence and emergence. I pay more attention to what is already shaping a situation before I introduce a process. I am more explicit about power. I am more interested in what happens after people leave the room. I teach methods less as answers and questions more as ways of developing attention. And I have become increasingly interested in helping practitioners develop judgment rather than simply expand their repertoires.

I think Art of Hosting has something useful to offer in the other direction too. It has accumulated a substantial body of practical knowledge about convening: how invitations work, how participation can be structured, how hosts cultivate attention, how groups can be given room to organize themselves, and how practitioners can develop enough confidence to intervene lightly and get out of the way when they are no longer needed.

Neither body of work needs to swallow the other. Your critique has made me a better Art of Hosting practitioner because it has forced me to become clearer about what the practice can and cannot do, more modest about what I claim for it, and more attentive to the consequences of my own design choices. I am grateful for that.

At the same time, I remain committed to the idea that the practice of hosting itself is worth taking seriously. If human beings are going to keep gathering intentionally to do things together, then there is value in learning how to shape those gatherings with skill, humility and attention to the fields in which they actually live.

So this is my letter back to you, a promised report, with thanks, on where your work has directed my attention. And it is also a stand upon the ground of what we have built and developed together in the Art of Hosting world. I’ll compose a similar letter to colleagues in that community, because I think there is learning to carry in both directions. The work for me now is to keep developing the practice: testing it, adjusting it, being clearer about its limits, and continuing to build our capacity to meet the work that presents itself.