Dear mates: a letter to my Art of Hosting community

Since the spring I have been wrestling with an evolution in my practice. It was prompted by a series of exchanges with Dave Snowden in response to his strong exhortation that those of us who say we are working with complexity should truly reflect on our practice. At the heart of the challenge, as I took it on board, is the claim that a hosted container is a consequential intervention in a system, but it is not the system itself. And from a complexity perspective, that also means that as a host I have an obligation to understand the effect that my role and choices have on the groups we are working with. Especially if I am making claims to be working in systems change, I need to understand that distinction more rigorously so I can become a better host and a better contributor to the change work that is being called for in the world.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a letter to Dave from the perspective of an Art of Hosting practitioner, about why his challenge moved me and why I took it on board, and also what I think this practice, the Art of Hosting, offers to the world.

This letter is to my mates within the Art of Hosting community, to share where I have been challenged in thinking through this work and what it means for how I practice the Art of Hosting. And it’s an invitation to all of us to engage with these questions with each other and with those we teach, support, and serve.

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Dear mates:

For nearly 25 years the Art of Hosting has been my practice home. The Four Fold Practice (being present, participating, hosting, and co-creating) offers key reminders to me about what helps create conversations that matter. The large-group methods we use and have developed make a meaningful difference to the organizations that I work with.

As a community we have accumulated authentic practitioner wisdom and knowledge about invitation, conditions for convening, the power of questions and inquiry, and the effectiveness of co-creation and collective harvesting. We have explored and documented an approach to facilitation that does not concern itself with the outcome, but attends to what shapes the container. We have extended that into forms of leadership, organizing, and activism that hold participation at their heart and find a home amongst those who long for inclusion, democratic governance, and better workplaces.

These are distributed, experimental, and messy lines of thought and practice that billow out from our core inquiry about hosting. For me now, the question is, “What exactly is working, and how?”

The distinction: the hosted conversation is not the system

Those of us who have been lucky enough to work in larger contexts and over longer periods of time will recognize that the dialogic container we are hosting is not the system. It is sometimes the hardest thing for me to hear when a participant says, “This is great, but what about the REAL world?” I get defensive. I insist that this IS the real world. Change can happen at many scales, including right here and now, in the midst of dialogue. And while that can be true, I have noticed that it runs the risk of dismissing what a person is saying: “I have real problems and I need this meaningful conversation to make a consequential difference now, or I have to do something else.”

For longer-term and deeper work in complex contexts, a hosted gathering creates a temporary set of conditions inside of which a group of people is gathered: I call this a dialogic container. Of course, these people and their questions are a part of the bigger context of work, but the container is not the system. It is not even a microcosm of the system. It is just a group of people with varying connections and influence in relation to the issues at hand.

A humble approach to my work invites me to consider these realities:

• People from a system are not THE system.
• Diverse perspectives alone are not representations of the system.
• Emergent insight is not the collective intelligence of the system.
• Changed relationships are not changed structures.
• Powerful experiences are not system change.

This isn’t to say that my work doesn’t matter. Temporary hosted conditions can indeed result in different interactions that can create new possibilities. It is true that small changes in a complex system can eventually lead to larger changes. But we cannot know that in advance, and making the link between different scales is especially vulnerable to exaggeration.

My engagement with complexity, including the work of Snowden and others, has brought me to a critical point in my practice where I am seeking to understand the bounded applicability of the work of hosting, while extending my practice in other ways to get at some of the real challenges associated with working in complex systems. That includes being clear about the influence that the host and the hosting team have when designing and employing methods, shaping the harvesting, choosing the questions…all of it.

Reconsidering the container

I think it is easy to be lulled into the hope that a meaningful conversation can generate what we call the “magic in the middle” that takes us to new vistas. So much good can happen in a well-hosted and meaningful conversation, and learning how to convene these moments is a good and important skill. We talk about creating and holding a container in which something beautiful can emerge.

This work comes with a tremendous amount of responsibility. When we shape an encounter, we are shaping what is possible. Surprising, moving, and genuinely novel work can legitimately arise, even while it is conditioned through the architecture out of which it emerged. Because of the power we carry into hosted spaces, we shape that architecture in every move we make before and during the gathering. The nature of our methods and practices can sometimes have us believe that what happened was genuine collective intelligence, but the design, hosting choices, and harvesting work shape what is possible.

It may be true that under the particular conditions of any specific hosted gathering, participants became capable of seeing, saying, or doing something that had not previously been possible. We use methods because they create particular conditions for emergence by shaping the interactions of participants in particular ways. But the methods aren’t the sole source of emergence and change. World Café does not reveal collective intelligence. Open Space is not system transformation. Circle does not eliminate status and influence.

For change work, this is critical to understand. Groups of people are capable of finding and developing their own solutions to problems, even within the constraints of the structural systems that they inhabit. A well-hosted process positioned as essential to change work runs a deep risk of making the group’s outcomes dependent on the host, the tools, or the process. For me, this role is seductive. I like to think that I am a good change maker because I host conversations on important topics and people often leave feeling positive, creative, and motivated.

But what is the cost of that?

Hosting is an exercise of power

One of the core contributions of the Art of Hosting as a community of practice and a body of work is our deep collective inquiry into the idea that a group of people can know more than a single expert or facilitator, given the chance to use their agency. The Four Fold Practice reminds us of the conditions that can help enable that. Methods help us practice. Circle helps us slow down conversations. Open Space gives participants extraordinary agency. World Café surfaces many perspectives on common questions, making more ideas available to a group. These are legitimate contributions of our suite of practices.

However, the presence of agency, deeper listening, and diverse perspectives does not eliminate the power that a host wields in the container. In fact, my deepest fear is that it hides it.

Good hosting can create the conditions for self-organization, but critical hosting practice needs to remember that someone called the meeting, someone made the list, someone framed the purpose and selected methods, someone made logistical choices, and someone decided on the harvest plan. Even if these decisions and choices are made and held by a hosting team drawn from and informed by collective need and purpose, the container is still shaped.

Our methods may look like they fade the power of the host into the background, but the architecture of the hosted container carries the power. That power can shape possibilities, often invisibly. My own hosting practice is especially vulnerable to what I cannot see because I deliberately remove myself from engaging in group dynamics and shaping the output.

If my deeper learning of this last year (and maybe my whole career) has landed on anything, it has landed on the unsettling realization that I and we need to do a lot more work to take responsibility for our power as designers. This matters partly because I am often playing the role of an expert in process work when I am working with a client, and so my decisions are trusted. But it is also important because my presence in working with a group of people usually comes with the sanction and mandate of people more powerful than me who have chosen to work with me, chosen to endorse the design that I have suggested, and chosen to commit to what we think might happen.

The host has meaningful power because we are sanctioned by power to do what we are doing, in the way in which we are doing it. As I began to realize that my own self-reflection wasn’t going deeply enough into the effects of this power, I started to look for ways that I could account for it, be honest about it, and make better choices about it.

Three kinds of constraint, three expressions of power

If you have been following my work in the past few months, you will have seen these two posts in which I describe a way of looking at the architecture of a held container. This triangle has become extremely important to my practice because it gives me a place to locate my own power in relationship with the distributed power of a group and the power embedded in the structures that pre-exist a hosted conversation.

Briefly, the three points of this triangle define a space and ask us to locate our work within it based on the way power shapes a participatory process:

Interactions (distributed power): We hold it as a deep principle in the Art of Hosting world that the group has collective wisdom, collective knowledge, and the ability to co-create. People are entirely capable of organizing, collaborating, being in relationship, creating and responding, and making change without a consultant or a host coming into their lives. It happens all the time, and I find it incredibly hopeful. As a host I like to think that, whatever my work is, I am serving this.

Structure (contextual power): It would be great if groups alone could just go and do the work, but every group of people is constrained by the existing structure in which they operate. Folks in organizations work within resource constraints, chains of command, organizational purposes and policies, and time boundaries. People in communities are subject to laws, biophysical constraints, and the reality of the scale they find themselves working at. These structures are critical and not always visible, and they convey tremendous power. They can squash or enable good ideas. They can alienate people (or imprison them). And importantly, especially if you are a host who is hired to do this work, they implicitly and explicitly shape possibilities through mandates and permissions.

Design (privileged power): As hosts we do not operate independently of the above two sources of power in a container. We are enmeshed in the collision of constraints, and we bring our own small but significant source of power to the conversations. These are the intentional constraints we introduce into a space: the purpose of a gathering, the choice of methods, the invitation, and the design work that goes into shaping the experience. There is privilege in this position because someone, or some group, has the power to make these decisions in the room. Even if we are hosting an Open Space, the shape of the question, the choice of the harvesting template, the purpose, and subsequent uses of the work are all choices made by someone.

Distributed power, contextual power, and privileged power intersect in every hosted conversation we are involved in. Making this space visible has been tremendously helpful in my practice. It helps me see what is needed for meaningful conversations to become truly useful conversations, and it is helping me become much more aware of the choices I make as a host and how those can disempower distributed power from doing its work.

In the Art of Hosting world we focus a lot on the Design <—> Interaction axis, thinking about how our methods and designs will shape the interactions and experiences of participants. I think we have approached the question of how the existing context structures what’s possible, but the Art of Hosting alone, and a well-hosted process in particular, is not sufficient for sustained systemic change. Even developing participatory leadership skills still leaves leaders confronting the very real problems of power, resources, and politics within their settings. When we claim that our work contributes to systems change, the test of that cannot end with what emerges in the room. We have more to learn about whether and how the work we do in rooms contributes to change in the systems around them.

Contact with context

The Art of Hosting offers promise because the ways in which we use the practice to design and host conversations, lead teams, structure organizations, and work with power seem to provide immediate ways to engage the diversity of the system. A well-hosted gathering is often thought to be essential to finding new solutions.

But a well-hosted process and a powerful conversation that do not survive contact with the strategic context they promise to shift are a problem. While two days in Open Space, for example, can often unlock some important actions, it takes a tremendous amount of resources and commitment to make such a thing happen. If the promise is fulfilled, that participants will have transformative experiences and the organization or group will be better able to deal with their problems, then the investment is worth it.

But if that’s not what happens, then even a gathering with positive evaluations might have just delayed the ability of a group to activate its distributed capacity and, worse, may have made it seem like only good hosting can provide the conditions for engagement with complex problems. That can be costly where time is an important constraint on the context. The thing I most worry about in my practice is an outcome where people loved the process and the work, but nothing in their world changed.

What I am demanding of myself now is an honest accounting of the role I play as a host. It is easy for me to look at my own discrete contribution and say, “We did a good thing,” while leaders go back to the office shaking their heads and worrying that nothing has changed. This is an ethical facet of our work and one which we can always get better at.

When I was recently working with the Evans School for Public Policy at the University of Washington, my hosting colleague Amanda Bankston told me that the research literature on public policy and engagement is shockingly silent on the role of facilitators, consulting groups, and process designers in how policy gets made, or how it doesn’t get made. Consulting firms are often evaluated on their deliverables, but we know very little about the wider effect they have on whether resources were wasted, time was misspent, or distributed agency was trampled in the name of outcomes.

When she told me that, I realized that I don’t even have a framework for understanding my own role, and hence the triangle above. It helps me interrogate and name the boundaries of my work and influence, and it helps me to be more aware of the ways in which our work is shaped by the context. It has meaningfully changed my practice, most notably through the fact that I no longer do larger-scale work without doing a complexity-informed narrative capture and sense-making process with people in the system before we decide on a design for interventions. And often, just doing this work up front means that the interventions can be less reliant on the Designer and more embedded in the Interactions of people finding ways to make change within the Structures that no longer serve.

My Art of Hosting practice taught me to be aware of these things. My complexity-informed practice has brought me to a place where I am deeply discerning about the solutions I offer for convening.

The invitation

So this leaves me with an honest invitation to you, my mates.

Increasingly, some of my most important learning comes from people outside our community whose questions and observations expose assumptions I didn’t know I was making. Taking those questions seriously has not diminished my trust in this practice. It has made me more discerning about when and how I use it.

Questions like:

• What are the boundaries of the spaces I help create, and what can they genuinely affect?
• What forms of power am I exercising through design, hosting, and harvesting, and how can I account for their effects?
• What structural constraints shape the context in which my work is embedded, and how do they shape what I can or cannot do?
• What happens when what we are doing in any given conversation encounters the world outside the meeting room?
• What else do I need to learn to contribute when the work requires something that the Art of Hosting can’t provide?

This has been a year of honest accounting and reflection for me. I find myself with a deeper appreciation for the core of our work and the genuine contribution it makes, while becoming more careful about the promises I make for it. I want to know more clearly what this practice can do, what it cannot do, what power I exercise when I use it, and what else I need to learn. I offer you these questions too, in that spirit of curiosity, learning, and mateship.