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Complexity facilitation competencies

August 1, 2019 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Complexity, Facilitation 6 Comments

Came across a Medium piece by Sahana Chattopadhyay today in which she discusses facilitation competencies for working in emergence and complexity. She points out in the article that this kind of facilitation practice is different from what passes for facilitation in many more familiar and simpler contexts:

Facilitation is often mistaken for some methods and processes that experienced trainers use during workshops to run successful sessions. I am not talking about that kind of facilitation, which is an important skill by itself.

I am talking about Facilitation as a way of being that offers safe space, creates a container for exploration, makes way for emergence, enables collaboration and co-creation, builds a culture of inclusion, and helps to align discrete actions with and towards a larger purpose. 

I might have a quibble with the “align discrete actions towards a larger purpose” as this can sometimes be taken as license for a facilitator to direct a group’s choices towards a particular future state, as if that is a knowable thing. In complexity, you really want to help group explore emergent pathways, some of them often quite divergent in nature, but that drive in a chosen direction of travel.

Nevertheless, she has a short list that is actually quite good, and can form the basis of some focus for learning. These are practice competencies, and so you will always find yourself learning and growing along these. Hers are:

  • Hold space for complexity and emergence
  • Stay centered on the participatory process
  • Tap into the potential present in the room
  • Be aware of the different capacities of individuals
  • Help the system see itself.

To these I might add something like:

  • Practice seeing your limiting beliefs and unconscious biases that influence your choice of methods.
  • Understand the theory beneath the problems you are working with.

What else would you add as a way of developing a list of complex facilitation competencies? A friendly warning, I’ll challenge and engage you in the comments! Let’s see what we can make.

Who do you love?

July 31, 2019 By Being, Music, Practice 5 Comments

I think we are living in a time when every emotion we are capable of generating is seen as a potential for making money. Our loyalty is co-opted by brands. Our anger is co-opted by politicians who channel it towards groups they scapegoat and then ride in as saviours of our condition. Our sense of reverence is owned by Hollywood, who exploits it for the latest superhero movie. Our love is sucked up by celebrities who are ciphers for the qualities in ourselves we can no longer recognize.

The most disempowering thing you can do to another human being is rob them of their ability to love themselves, not in a narcissistic way, but in an authentic acceptance of who they are, full of gifts and flaws and unique ways of seeing the world. There is nothing more dispiriting I think than being unable to love yourself. You think you are never capable of loving others or being loved. And all the while we tap “like” and “love” on our social media accounts and take the dopamine hits from pixels flying from one user to another through the filter of a money making machine.

So yesterday, when I saw this thread tweet, it stopped me in my tracks:

RuPaul’s been telling us for years, “If you don’t love yourself, how the HELL you gonna love anybody else?”

And we agreed.

But then, Lizzo switched it up in her Tiny-Ass Desk Concert. She said, “If you can love me, you can love yourself.”

And I can’t stop thinking about that.— Angela Mayfield (@pinkrocktopus) July 30, 2019

I was struck by how that one almost throwaway line at the end of the performance became a full on sermon for Angela Mayfield. That’s a wicked perception. And following along a little further, I clicked through to the link of Lizzo’s Tiny(-Ass) Desk Concert and could not stop smiling for 17 straight minutes, which you should do right now.

Lizzo is right. If you are capable of loving someone else, or even shouting out at a concert “I LOVE YOU!” then you are indeed capable of shouting it at yourself. It’s a reminder of me to not be exclusively directed my emotions outward, but instead to notice how love, anger, loyalty, and reverence can be a healthy part of my inner life, and not merely directed outwardly all the time. In an era where we project ourselves into the world through media like this, where our images, words and thoughts are put outside of ourselves first and foremost, thereby separating us from our feelings, Lizzo’s small invitation is a powerful reminder to me to take it all in too.

What I’m up to these days

July 29, 2019 By Art of Hosting, Being, Chaordic design, Collaboration, Complexity, Evaluation, Facilitation, Featured, Open Space, World Cafe 2 Comments

My last blog post here was back in March, at the beginning of a colossal few months of travel and work during which I was away from home and working in the Netherlands, Germany, northern Ontario, New York City, Vancouver Island, and several locations in Japan. In the course of my travels I was away from home for 64 days, had two major airline cancellations (one airline went bankrupt, one couldn’t get me home without massively creative re-routing). I probably doubled the number of foods I’ve tasted in my life, just from the 28 day trip to Japan alone, and I’ve come back to find myself taking stock of where I am these days.

Summer is good for that.

In reflecting on my work offerings these days, I find myself doing these kinds of things:

  • Helping organizations and communities by facilitating large scale meetings and participatory processes to understand and act in complexity. I do this through meeting design and facilitation. That’s the bread and butter.
  • Using technology to support strategic work in complexity. This year I’m working with both Sensemaker and NarraFirma in different projects to help groups collect, analyse, and act from stories. I love this work and it has taken me into the realm of deep developmental evaluation. The software is helping us to be able to generate deeply informed strategic insights with our clients and to create innovative ways to address stuck problems. It’s amazing and powerful participatory research and support for strategy.
  • To that end, I have been also been working closely with evaluators in some interesting emerging community projects as well as developing teaching modules to run workshops on participatory methods and evaluation.

That’s the basic strategic work. There is lots of capacity building work I’m doing as well. For me that focuses on teaching, first and foremost:

  • Teaching Art of Hosting workshops, including upcoming ones in the next year on Bowen Island, and in the Whitehorse, Montreal, and Calgary.
  • Teaching complexity courses. One with Bronagh Gallagher focused on complexity for social activists, and one with Caitlin Frost on complexity basics, using Human Systems Dynamics, Cynefin, The Work and dialogue methods. I’ve taught several one and two day complexity course this past year, and feel like we’ve really got a good introductory course.
  • A one day workshop on dialogic containers that I gave to good reviews at Nanzan University in Japan. It is based on two papers I wrote over the past few years on Hosting and Holding Dialogic Containers, and one Dave Snowden’s ABIDE framework (now mooshed with Glenda Eoyang’s CDE framework) as a way of using containers to work with complexity. At Nanzen, Caitlin added a neat little piece on Self as Container as well.
  • A course on evaluation, which I first offered online with Beehive Productions this past winter, and then has developed into a two day course offered in New York with Rita Fierro and Dominica McBride. That might morph again and meet the Art of Hosting, so if you’re and evaluator, look out for an offering that joins up those two worlds.
  • Leadership 2020, a nine month participatory leadership program for leaders in the Social Services Sector and child and family services ministries in British Columbia. We are coming up on ten years of this work, with a redesigned program so that we can get more leaders through it in a slightly compressed time frame.
  • I continue to offer a one-day course at Simon Fraser University on World Cafe and Open Space Technology as part of the certificate in Dialogue and Civic Engagement. You can come to that if you like.
  • And I have a few coaching clients as well, folks I spend an hour or so with here and there, thinking through issues in their own practice, working on workshop designs and supporting their confidence to take risk.

As for writing, I have long promised a book on Chaordic Design, and that may still come to pass, but I can see it now being a joint effort with my partner Caitlin Frost. We have been using the Chaordic Stepping Stones tool in every context imaginable and have a ton of stories of application to share. The basic model on my website is due for a revision as well, so perhaps I’l have a chance to do that in the coming few months. When Caitlin and I can find some time to go away and write, we might actually get some stuff on the page.

And here is the blog, my old friend, the place I have recorded thoughts and insights and ideas and events over the past 17 years or so. It needs a bit of attention and it needs to be used, so look for more blog posts more frequently. And they won’t all be well crafted essays – could be just more musings, things that are longer than tweets, and that properly belong free in the world and not locked into the blue prison of facebook. Maybe you’ll even see something of the other passions that are in my life, including my love of soccer, music, and some of the local community projects I’m up to.

Does any of that grab your interest? Is there anything you’d like to hear more about? Can I support your organization or community, or individual practice in any way? Wanna play?

The folly of political lines

April 5, 2019 By Travel 4 Comments

I’m on my way to Europe for a week, cobbling together the first leg of a 26 day trip that will take me to The Hague, Hamburg, Manitoulin Island, Thornbury Ontario, and New York City.

On this leg I’m flying with Jet Airways, an Indian carrier that is in the throes of financial troubles at the moment, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. At any rate, this flight from Toronto to Delhi stops in Amsterdam and so it is full of a mix of travellers of all ages and every ethnicity you can imagine. There are people wearing visible symbols of at least four religions. There is a baby in the row in front of me and a serene half blind nonagenarian Indian woman wearing a Ferrari t-shirt and surrounded by four generations of her family who are doting on her and caring for her.

I never really watch movies on long flights, preferring to read and sleep to music or long rambling podcasts that remind me of being a child, falling asleep to the radio, fading wakefulness snatching at half-heard phrases in the dim glow of the radio dial. On overnight flights like this I like to grab a north facing window seat to pass the time looking for meteors (saw two) or the faintest hints of the northern lights.

I do however keep the live map on, feeding another fascination from childhood – geography. I have an incurable attraction to maps of all kinds.

On the interactive map on this flight comes a small disclaimer: “Physical Features Map Only. No Political Borders Depicted.” Given the kind of airline this is and the huge diversity of its passengers I can see why they do this. There are no national borders depicted, only state boundaries, provincial boundaries and, inexplicably, the Welsh and Scottish borders with England.

The map has roads, cities, mountains and water labelled. Truthfully, to understand earth, this is all you need. Cities are the most enduring human features on earth and the roads that connect us are also ancient, both can be thousands of years old. The political lines are the most arbitrary feature – practically drawn in pencil in historic terms – and yet are the ones that inflame the most passion. I’ve had a long standing aversion to nationalism born from my experiences as a temporary immigrant in Thatcher’s Britain where British nationalism was trumpeted by the National Front and parroted by some of the boys at my school who made sure to add that to the arsenal of insults and physical abuses that were unleashed upon me from time to time.

So something about this small message gives me peace, even though I understand the reason for it. Those national boundaries are not necessary in order to understand where you are on earth. They are as ephemeral as the very idea of nationhood, and are nothing up against the mountain ranges, cities, rivers, lakes, and oceans upon which the lines are childishly drawn.

Why it’s hard to talk about dialogic containers in English

March 14, 2019 By Art of Hosting, Chaordic design, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured, First Nations, Organization, Poetry 14 Comments

On the Art of Hosting list today there has been a very interesting conversation about some of the Japanese words that are used to describe space and container. As I will be working this spring in Japan with these very concepts, I thought it would be interesting to hear from my colleagues Yurie Makihara and Kazuhiko Nakamura about these ideas of “wa,” “ma,” “ba,” and “tokoro.” Yurie shared her thoughts, on some of these words, including noting that the word “ba” is often cited by foreigners as an example of a word describing the quality of dialogic container that exists in Japanese and not English. I learned today that all of these words are similar, and include not just ideas about the quality of space but time as well. Anyone who engages in dialogue will know that there is a time and a place for everything.

Over my career I’ve had the gift of working extensively in indigenous communities in North America and one of the features of many (but not all) indigenous languages is the fact that they are verb-based as opposed to English which is very noun-based. Indigenous languages here contain many words and ideas that are similar to the ones Yurie described, and I have experienced language speaking Elders and others cautioning me that “this time isn’t right” or “the space is wrong” in a way that is hard to put into English. When they say those things, the English ear hears the word “time” or “space” (the nouns in the sentence), but the words the Elders use are pointing to the qualities of the relationships between things in the container of time or space.

In English we lack relational language. We have to use metaphors like “safe space” or “brave space” or “juicy” or “a ripe time” that point a bit at the feel, but use words as metaphors and not direct. Over the years, teaching about containers to people who speak these languages I have begun to learn a few concepts. In Diné there is a word – “k’e” – which describes the quality of connection between an individual and their clan and family that is critical for survival and sustainability. In Nuu-Chah-Nulth, the word “tsawalk” meaning “oneness” really is a word that points to the presence of a texture in a container that helps us see the connection between things (people, animals, land…) and the relationship between the spiritual and physical world. Without tsawalk we are not doing good work, because we are not doing work that attends to the many relational fields that are necessary to create space that is fully alive. More of my reflections here.

Ove the years I’ve learned of similar words and ideas in other languages an cultures: in fact this seems to be a feature of human language in a way that isn’t quite available to unilingual English speakers like myself. Its the reason we find these other languages and concepts attractive. They fill a need we have.

In some ways it’s too bad that we use English in the Art of Hosting community as our global language! The most important thing for us as a community – the quality of a container – is the one thing that is difficult to explain properly in English. The word itself is actually a metaphor and used in indigenous-settler contexts, as my friend Jerry Nagel pointed out in an email this morning, it can be taken to mean the very core act of colonization: to contain a group of people. So be careful!

Perhaps this is why for the most part, people I work with in English are interested in tools and processes, and why we have a hard time explaining the “art” of the Art of Hosting. It’s easier to talk about the nouns we use because we have language for them. It’s hard to talk about what happens when we approach space and container as artists, with an eye to hosting the quality of relationships and interactions that create generative action. In English there is no satisfying way to talk about this, at least not that I’ve found. We have to default to poetry, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Or, we default to using words from other languages, but we use these too as metaphors: “we don’t have a word in English, but the Nuu-Cha-Nulth word is…” as if these give the ideas some weight. My learning over the years is to be very careful when using words and concepts from other languages, because as an English speaker I can only use them as metaphors and not with the realness with which a fluent speaker of a language uses their own words. Helpful, but never the whole story…