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Art of Hosting Facilitator Training

June 1, 2006 By Appreciative Inquiry, Art of Hosting, Conversation, Facilitation, Leadership, Learning, Open Space, World Cafe

I have been working lately with friends and fellows Brenda Chaddock, Tennson Wolf and Teresa Posakony to co-create another Art of Hosting training. We will be gathering on Bowen Island here in British Columbia from September 24-28 in a practice retreat to deeply investigate these questions:

  • What could my leadership also be?
  • What if I would practice using collective intelligence and learning in my organisation and network?
  • What could strategic conversations also be if I host them with wisdom and courage?
  • How do I create authentic involvement that leads to real implementation?

The practice retreat is structured along the following principles:

  • Our learning will grow out of participant contributions and presence – we will support each other as co-learners
  • We will learn by observation, experience and practice, using interactive processes to build a safe and inspiring learning environment – we will explore Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry, Circle Council, reflective practices, World Cafe, and other participatory methodologies
  • Taking a chance to explore – and experiment with – applying these tools to your own projects-in-progress will help you to apply your skills, as well as develop and continue a new practice that will last well beyond this training

And through a variety of processes and conversations, we will investigate:

  • Hosting conversations as a core leadership practice and competence for leading change
  • How the Art of Hosting is an organising pattern/culture that invites new ways of living and working
  • The conditions needed to create space for meaningful conversations
  • Specific interactive processes through which learning and creation can emerge
  • Sensing and shaping the conditions and timing for using particular methods and tools
  • How the practice of hosting can be applied to key strategic change projects in our lives and work

This is a powerful training, and we invite you to join us. For more information, or to register, visit the Art of Hosting page or contact me by email.

[tags]facilitation+training, art+of+hosting[/tags]

Open Space and other facilitation resources

May 29, 2006 By Facilitation, Open Space

Having a weblog in addition to having a regular website means that there are two front doors to my online home.   There have been a lot of searches here lately for facilitation and Open Space resources, so I thought I would highlight the collections that I maintain through two pages here.

I hope you find these useful.   Let me know how they are for you.

When a gift is not a gift

May 28, 2006 By Music, Philanthropy One Comment

Thoreau, from May 27, 1851:

I saw an organ-grinder this morning before a rich man’s house, thrilling the street with harmony, loosening the very paving stones and tearing the routine of life to rags and tatters, when the lady of the house shoved up a window and in a semiphilanthropic tone inquired if he wanted anything to eat. But he, very properly it seemed to me, kept on grinding and paid no attention to her question, feeding her ears with melody unasked for. So the world shoves up its window and interrogates the poet, and sets him to gauging ale casks in return. It seemed to me that the music suggested that the recompense should be as fine as the gift. It would be much nobler to enjoy the music, though you paid no money for it, than to presume always a beggarly relation. It is after all, perhaps, the best instrumental music that we have.

A complex quote, for as you will hear below, it is not clear which is the kinder gift.

mp3: Chiappa Barrel Organ – Daisy Bell and Oh Mr. Porter

[tags]Thoreau, barrel+organ[/tags]

The world we want

May 27, 2006 By Conversation, Leadership, Open Space, Philanthropy 9 Comments

One of the most incredible application of Open Space Technology I have ever seen was the Giving Conference that was sponsored by Phil Cubeta and convened and facilitated by Michael Herman with an assist from me, It started something that has flowed out all over the place, and the story has been retold in many places, most recently on Phil’s blog The World We Want

Phil challenged me, at his other blog Wealth Bondage to put together a small manifesto on the world I want. As it relates to philanthropy, open space and democracy, here are a few thoughts:

  • Spurred on by a number of ideas, books and thoughts, we can convene local conversations about giving. These conversations need to invite a huge diversity of people, from many different political, economic, social and cultural types to engage around these ideas. We need givers and activists to be in attendance as partners and peers. We need bloggers to be there to witness the power of the story and to tell it to the world. We need thinkers and visionaries to challenge us forward and we need tech people to design and implement the network supports that can emerge and serve us in the moment.
  • Connected to one another by appreciative effort, we invite engagement and local action around the world/nation/community we want, and tie our passions to responsibilities, made easier by doing things together in networks, self-organized around what we love and what we are prepared to steward.
  • Supported by local networks and conversations face to face and the ever increasing intimacy of global networks served through the web, we find local expression for our action but together contribute to an open source world of solutions and designs for people and places that are stuck.
  • Spurred on by what is behind us we make good on our promises and what is budding in our work and use micro-philanthropy to leverage invitations to more open space events, more engaged conversations and more change. Small change becomes big news and yet the money amounts stay small, and the efforts stay local but the scale takes over. Imagine if Wikipedia were not a reference work but a change effort. Imagine if every hour spent working on that was spent working for the world we want. And imagine if we could choose the pieces to work on, contributing where we can, unafraid to make mistakes and muddle through and sense the success with nothing to lose and everything to gain…

I’m up for it. How about you?

Not the practices of Open Space

May 27, 2006 By Facilitation, Leadership, Open Space, Practice

Michael Herman started thinking through the practices of Open Space again and yesterday we had a good conversation about the not-practices of Open Space. He has blogged about them here and here, trying on different words and language and making a case (:-)) for various iterations.

Briefly, these not-practices, or anti practices are:

  • Analyzing as the opposite of appreciating (and opening)
  • Protecting, defending and facilitating as the opposites of inviting
  • Problem solving and fixing as the opposites of supporting (and holding)
  • Accounting and making a good case as the opposite of making good (grounding)

For me these are important because thy help us to throw the practices of Open Space into high relief. I would say that “business as usual” highly values analysis, protection and defense of decisions and turf, problem solving and fixing (especially in the consulting world) and accounting and making a case as the “desired outcome” of all of this work. One of the reasons I have become so disenchanted with traditional strategic planning for example is that it proceeds from this particular world view:

  • Analyse the problem
  • Protect the enterprise, turf, or project from encroachment from the environment
  • Fix any problems that might be around
  • Measure what you have done and use it to make a business case or a best practice.

My problem with this is that it works at creating and maintaining boundaries, and rarely does anything happen. This is a common complaint about the modern work world and traditional conferences and meeting. Nothing seems to happen, but at least if we can make a good case, we can save some of the effort.
Sometimes that is useful, but I think in a world where the work of making good is the highest calling (no matter what enterprise you are in), the Open Space practices offer a way to do more effective planning:

  • Appreciating the resources and assets that we have by viewing them as being of multiple use and increasing value, and being open to other resources
  • Inviting choices to participate, join and work together so that people come together in a way that is more like a fellowship and less like a project team or even a community of practice
  • Supporting connections between people and enterprises which means opening the boundaries of structure to find solutions from outside and allow order to self-organize and finally;
  • Making good things happen and seeing the results spin out into the world in ways that you cannot control nor foresee, nor scarcely measure.

The efficacy of the Open Space worldview is evident in the difference between proprietary software development and the Open Source movement, for example. In the proprietary world (closed space worldview) one analyses the market and the need, defends the company and product from market encroachment by copyrighting it, takes full and exclusive responsibility for fixing, problem solving and debugging, and sells the thing by making a case for why your should use it through marketing and so on. In fact much of consumer culture is based on the fact that poorly working things have better crafted marketing messages. The quality is misplaced. Look at beer ads for example.
In the open source world, we appreciate what is out there, listen to what people want and invite each other to play. The invitation extends right through to bug fixing and problem solving. Anyone can play: you can code solutions or offer to pay someone to do it for you and invite others to incorporate your fixes. Instead of protecting code, it is released into the community, supported through places like Sourceforge and what is made is a good product. And from a good product, which in this case is given away, good things happen. Non-profits for example find themselves better able to meet their stated purpose in the world because they are using Open Office and therefore not spending huge sums of money on licensing.

So this is the value of seeing the not-practices of Open Space (if you can think of a better term for them let me know). They throw some more light on the benefits of what I call the Open Space worldview, and they help describe the reasons why Open Space is not a generally accepted way of doing business, even in progressively structured communities of practices.