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Live from Food and Society 2008

April 29, 2008 By Art of Hosting, Open Space, World Cafe 3 Comments

Taking a moment here in the newsroom to blog a little about the WK Kellogg Foundation Food and Society 2008 gathering here in Phoenix. It is halfway through day one of this two-plus day gathering to look at connecting and inspiring leadership in the good food movement across the USA.

For the past nine months my Art of Hosting colleagues Tim Merry, Toke Moeller, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Monica Nissen and Phil Cass and I have been working with the Kellogg Foundation and their partner Winrock International to craft a conference that was fundamentally different from the previous eight conferences that have supported this movement. Last year, Tim was invited to attend Food and Society as a slam poet to help with the harvest at that gathering. As a result of him sitting in the design meetings and debriefs, he was able to show up more and more as the process consultant that he is most of the time. After inviting the possibility that the conference could shift to focus on relationships, Kellogg opened up and decided to try something different, to connect and inspire leadership instead of a traditional conference format of keynote speaker and break out session.   That’s how we all got involved in the design and hosting of a gathering of 550 people looking at fundamentally changing the American food system.
This year we are tipping the conference design much more into a participatory and engaged gathering. We are in the middle of a Good Food Village Square, featuring 17 projects from around the United States who are sharing their leading edge questions, rather than slick presentations. They are inviting people to work with them to address issues like scaling good food distribution, working to alleviate the poverty embedded in the food production system, growing small operations larger while retaining core principles, and engaging community in the production, distribution and consumption of their own food for health, culture and prosperity.

Instead of keynote speakers, we have provocateurs, including Norma Flores, an incredible woman who works with the Association of Farmworker Opportunities Programs spoke this morning of her experiences growing up as a farmworker from a very young age. She spoke of the child labour practices, the health risks and the exploitation of farm workers to produce cheap food cheaply. We also had an incredible montage about migrant farmworkers from The Migrant Project to focus our thinking on the social justice imperative for this movement.   Later on today we have a world cafe to sense what is cooking with good food.

Tomorrow we’re into Open Space for most of the day, looking at how to organize for action within the good food movement and see what good food can also do. 550 is the largest Open Space I have ever run, but despite the logistics being more complex, the feeling is the same. Working with good friends also makes a huge difference.

[tags] fas2008[/tags]

Living systems in action

April 24, 2008 By Flow, Leadership One Comment

I had a lovely conversation the other day with Rob Paterson and Johnnie Moore as we discussed three videos that are lovely examples of living systems in action.   It was all recorded and uploaded at The Phoric, and I encourage you to go there and have a look and listen to our conversation.

Thanks to Rob and Johnnie for the invitation.   What fun!

Simple conditions for shift

April 23, 2008 By Art of Hosting, Flow, Invitation, Leadership 2 Comments

From a conversation with Tenneson this morning, we were playing with a pattern of shifting systems that flows from skilfully hosted conversations.   A simple pattern emerged, which is about bringing people together, shifting power and developing and hosting emerging beauty.   In a linear form it goes like this:

  • Gather people together from wholeness, including inviting the deeply personal into the work.
  • Understand and work with a willingness to shift power.
  • Cultivate curiosity: what could we really do together?
  • Harvest what our Navajo friends call “the beauty way” a way forward that serves life and keeps people engaged in their pursuit for change to the better.

Simple eh?   Right.   The shifting power one is especially interesting to me.   Working with leaders to move control and power to their people is the most challenging aspect of working systemic change.   Without this shift, only constrained action is possible and sustainability is difficult.   With a shift, many things can unfold and the people themselves can take responsibility for the results.

Where this really hits the ground, it seems to me, is in the process of invitation and calling.   Leaders who are callers must be willing to let go of power and control if new levels of work and being are to emerge.   They also have to shift the culture of the organization or community from an answer-based one to a curiosity-based one, where inquiry and co-sensing becomes a normal way of working.   Communicating this in an invitation to a gathering is difficult and not adequate.   We look at many more ways to invite that builds a field of inquiry, an appetite for curiosity so that when people meet together it is simeply one phase in an ongoing project to change the way things are done.

So what are your experiences in shifting power and generating curiosity, especially in large groups?

Life is unpredictable

April 21, 2008 By Being

A great quote from a fun article on knuckleballers:

“Throwing a knuckleball for a strike is like throwing a butterfly with hiccups across the street into your neighbor’s mailbox” – Willie Stargill.

Good work is collaboration with friends

April 21, 2008 By CoHo, Collaboration, Flow, Leadership, Poetry 6 Comments

Farewells

Two good friends of mine, Roq Gareau who works for the Canadian Border Services Agency and Orlando Pioche who works for the Indian Health Service in Shiprock, NM. Men doing serious work who work together as deep friends.

From Wendel Berry:

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health.
It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no ear hears it except in fragments.

Sent out to all my friends, especially Steven, Kathryn, Tenneson and Beverley, with whom I did some good work this week. And to those good friends I will be working with this coming week in Phoenix at the Good Food Gathering – Toke, Monica, Tim, Phil and Tuesday.
Working with friends is perhaps the wisest thing one can do in pursuing larcge scale change. Only with the ears and hearts of friends tuned to one another’s needs can we hear more of the wholeness of the music that only comes to us in fragments.

I’m in some big work these days, whether it is in the child and family services system here in British Columbia, or hosting a 500 person World Cafe and Open Space at the Good Food Gathering to help the good food movement find it’s way with renewed leadership and vigour. None of this is remotley possible alone.   I am working with close friends.

While it may be true that one person can make a difference in the world, I believe that the difference one person makes is choosing to work with others. We have long since exited the age of heros, and I wonder if we were ever in that age.

I once sat with Tenneson Woolf on a beach on my home island and we gazed across the Strait of Georgia. We talked about how huge everything is, how small we are in relation to the vast world. And we asked this question: if we are born of this world, knowing deeply the scale in which we live in relation to everything else, why do we feel like we can make an impact? What put that impulse there? We are the only creatures that entertain the delusion that we can shift things, and yet, we persist. AND, it’s true, to the extent that we can even shift the climate of our home world. There is almost a drive to do it.

There is nothing around you right now that is not the result of a group of people working together. No structure, no machine, no community, no idea exists because one person thought of it. Everything is born in relationship, and to the extent that our relationships are filled with quality, the work we do will be filled with quality. I choose first of all to work with friends, and from there to find the work that we can do together. When we attend to this quality of relationship, everything else becomes possible. Nothing around you has ever emerged otherwise.

So thank you to my friends who make it possible for me to satisfy my personal version of the human drive to make an impact. Together, as we tune to one another and reach into possibility, we can find the holy chords of that fragmented music, and sing.