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Working with core teams

November 20, 2007 By Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Flow

One of the patterns emerging from our work in the Art of Hosting, is the practice of developing and supporting a core team that can collectively hold the bigger work that is being done.

At the moment I am working consciously with the core team pattern at VIATT, with the WK Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference, with the Quinault Indian Nation on a tribal strategic plan and with smaller conferences and gatherings, including one next week – a conference exploring collaboration in the child welfare and family services practice field.   On that one we have been working with a core organizing team to co-create the process and a workbook for the conference to use.   Today on our last conference call before the meeting, the organizers asked about catastrophic plan in case something happened to me and I couldn’t make it on the day.   I replied that in that unlikely event, we should reflect on the fact that we have planned this entire gathering collaboratively and that if I got hit by a truck next week, any one of them could hold space on the day, working with the group through the set of exercises and experiences we have planned together.   Everyone immediately recognized the power of a core team and the power of co-creation.   It reuslts in co-ownership.

Working with core teams is differnt from facilitating a planning committee.   When I work with core teams I join them as a host to discover the heart of a project, and to develop a co-created capacity to host a project together.   This is not the same as acting as a facilitator for a team, inmy experience.   Core team work comes from the inside of the group, not the outside.   This is especially true of the large scale change work, because those projects need more than one person to generate and hold the deepest need, and to create capacity that lasts, that holding must be within the project.   The core team then becomes the host for the project and the project become the host for change in the world, or the organization or the community.   These fractal levels of work are very interesting to me at the moment, and very important to learn about as well.   We’ll be rolling a lot of this thinking into the module Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen and I are leading at the Shambhala Institute this coming summer.

Conversation as a radical act.

November 20, 2007 By Conversation, Leadership, World Cafe

The big posting from the Systems Thinking in Action Conference on a session with Juanita Brown, Nancy Margulis, Nancy White and Amy Lenzo on conversation as a radical act.
There are days, and this is one of them, when I pinch myself at how lucky I am to be able to call these women my friends.

Ten finds

November 20, 2007 By Art of Harvesting, Being, Collaboration, Leadership, Organization, Poetry

Photo by Darwin Bell

Hyperlinks –

follow these leads

a thread.

Where certainty comes from

November 20, 2007 By Appreciative Inquiry, Being, Leadership 2 Comments

From a conference call this morning with friends around some big work.   We spoke about the fact that the work we are in – large scale systemic change – is plagued with doubt.   There is no certainty that what we are doing is the right thing, or whether it will even work.   But the project itself exists in a field of doubt, and as that doubt begins to pervade our core teams, the search for certainty becomes desperate.   People begin to focus on little things that are going wrong and a depreciative world view takes hold.

Doubt hunts us on the trail.   It picks up our scent and dogs our heels ntil we find ourselves running faster and faster away from it.   We expend our energy avoiding it and become exhausted and depleted.

In these moments what is needed is a stand.   We must stop running from it, turn around on the path and face it down.   We need to muster up the courage and confront the energy of doubt unless we wishe to have it erode our efforts from within.

Large scale change is never certain.   Our running from the doubts simply feeds the fear of that uncertainty.   IN the worse case, we become consumed by it and look outside of ourselves for confirmation that what we are doing is the right thing to do.   The truth of it is that the certainty we need is not outside of us.   If it is not within us, we will never find it.   We must generate it in the field of our work together or abandon our work to the poisonous cynicism that wants to consume it in the end.   At some point we choose to confront the predator or become its prey.

Not just any talk is conversation

November 19, 2007 By Art of Hosting, Being, CoHo, Conversation One Comment

Just back from an amazing Art of Hosting in rural Pennsylvania.   Found this in my email box upon my return, send to me by my friend Toke:

Not just any talk is conversation
Not any talk raises consciousness
good conversation has an edge
It opens your eyes to something
It quickens your ears

And good conversation reverberates
It keeps on talking in your mind later in the day;
The next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said
The reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness
Your mind and heart have been moved
Your are at another level with your reflections.

— James Hillman

This is what it is all about.