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Short time, World Cafe to the rescue

September 25, 2018 By Conversation, Facilitation, Featured, World Cafe One Comment

Helping a friend with a design challenge today. He is running a small group process at the end of a day of presentations about energy futures in a small community. He initially thought that it would be good to end the day – in which 120 people are gathered to hear about energy futures – with action steps, but these kinds of gatherings are not good places to come up with action planning.  Instead I advised him to use a World Cafe for reflection process to produce the elements of a shared vision.  IN a little over an hour, good work can get done without raising expectations to high or demanding too much commitment from folks who just came to hear some presentations. 

Here is the design I sent him.

You have a short time. Here’s a design:

Get people into groups of four. If you can, get them around tables with some markers and paper in the middle. If not, just have them move into groups of four chairs.

Tell people not to get comfortable. They will be moving twice in the next hour.

Give them a simple question: “what have you heard today that excites you about our future here?”

Tell them they have 20 minutes to share in their groups and discuss that question.

After 20 minutes stop them all, have everyone stand up together and move to different groups.

Repeat

And repeat again.

Towards the end of the third round, say fifteen minutes in, give each group three post it notes and a pen. Ask them to reflect and agree on three things they heard commonly across all conversations.

To harvest, your ask anyone to read out one of their post it notes. Then you invite any group with a similar one to shout BINGO! And bring the notes to a wall in a nice neat cluster. I’m serious. The goal of the process is to get clusters.

Repeat until all the post it notes are on the wall. Have people come up to the wall and give the clusters names. Get the core team to look at the clusters and write a shared purpose statement from it. This is what you can present back the next day.

World Cafe is perfect for this. It works because it is based on a basic structure of small groups of four people, switching conversations to allow a whole group to deeply explore a question, and a harvesting strategy that makes visible what’s being collectively learned. And you can do it in a little over an hour.

Learn more about The World Cafe.

Designing nesting thresholds

September 23, 2018 By Art of Hosting, Chaordic design, Conversation, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Invitation 2 Comments

All facilitation work happens within containers and those containers are separated from the rest of the world by thresholds.  When you enter a meeting, you are removing yourself from the world and entering into a space where specific work is being done.  It’s no exaggeration to say that this is almost a ritual experience, especially if the work you are doing involves creating intangible outcomes such as team building, good relations, conflict resolution or community.  

Good participatory meetings have the characteristics of the Four Fold Practice within them: people are present and hosted with good process.  They participate and co-create.  In order to do this, participants need to make a conscious step over a threshold into the container.

Thresholds are as old as humanity.  The boundary between in and out is ancient. Being welcomed into a home, a family, a structure or a group comes with ritual behaviours to let you know that you have left one world behind and entered into another.

In meetings, these thresholds are multiple and nested.  My friend Christie Diamond once said “the conversation begins long before the meeting starts, and continues long after the meeting is over.”  That has rung true for the thousands of conversations I have hosted and participated in over my life. And on reflection, I can trace a series of threshold that are crossed as we enter into and leave a conversational space.  At each step, my “yes” becomes more solid and my commitment to the work becomes more important and concrete. See if this scheme makes sense:

  1. Invitation is noticed
  2. Engage with the call, connect it to my own needs
  3. Making time and space to engage (committing my resources)
  4. Physically moving to the space
  5. Arriving in the field of work
  6. Entering the physical space
  7. BEGINNING THE WORK
  8. PARTICIPATING IN SUB-CONTAINERS WITHIN THE MEETING
  9. FINISHING THE WORK
  10. Leaving the space
  11. Exiting the field of work
  12. Returning home
  13. Reorganizing resources to support the change
  14. Re-engaging with the world
  15. Working from a changed stance

Each one of these crossings happens whether you are coming into someting as mundane as a staff meeting or something as important as attending your own wedding.  Often time facilitators pay attention only to numbers 7-9 and many times 7 and 9 are given short shrift.  

I’m curious to hear about your own experiences of crossing thresholds for important meetings.  

A simple way to explore the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting

July 19, 2018 By Art of Hosting, Featured, Leadership, Practice

The Art of Hosting is predicated on a very simple set of practices which we call the Four Fold Practice. This framework emerged from a conversation in the late 1990s between Toke Moeller,  Monica Nissen, Carsten Ohm and Jan-Hein Nillson about what patterns make for a meaningful conversation. After talking about it for days, the clarity that arose was that people experience meaningful conversations when they are present, when they participate, when they are hosted and when they co-create something. Simple.

The next question then became, what if these four patterns were actually practices that could be cultivated both by individual leaders/facilitators and by groups? What would that be called?

The answer was, “That would be called the art of hosting.” And so a collective inquiry was born that has spread around the world and been taken up by tens of thousands of people working in all forms of leadership, organization, and community.

I sometimes feel that the four fold practice doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Sometimes people can confuse the Art of Hosting with the methods we use or the way we harvest conversations or the tools that help us design things. But that’s not what it is.  The Art of Hosting, at its deepest essence, is these four practices.

Today we are beginning an Art of Hosting workshop with some community foundations in British Columbia and tonight we began by introducing the four fold practice in some depth, because when all else fails, coming back to these practices will at least remind you how to invoke patterns that make engagement and dialogue meaningful.  We began by telling the story of the practice and where it came from (you can learn a bit about that here) and then we led people in a simple exercise to explore it.

Getting into pairs we asked people to spend 5 minutes on the question “Which of these practices are you strongest on, and what’s a story about that?” We heard a bit in plenary about what was strong with folks, and there are lots of assets and experiences in the room

Then we asked people to talk about which of these practices they were weakest on and what they were eager to learn about. These learning questions were captured on index cards and placed in our centre where we will use them to focus our teaching and inquiry over the next three days.

It’s a simple way to dive into these practices, acknowledge that there are lots of ways to come into an Art of Hosting workshop, and build on the strengths that people have. And it allows us to discover the learning agenda in the room and tie it to the practice.  It’s a rich harvest.

A beautiful reflection on the Art of Hosting on Bowen Island

June 20, 2018 By Art of Hosting, Being, Bowen, Facilitation, Featured, Learning One Comment

Bowen Island is where I live and work.  Since 2004 there has been an annual Art of Hosting learning event offered by a really solid team of my most deeply experienced and connected friends and colleagues.

Last year Scott Macklin came and made a beautiful video capturing the experience we craft here.  Enjoy it and if you would like to experience it for yourself, please join us this November.

Selecting weak signals and building in diversity and equity

June 14, 2018 By Art of Harvesting, Complexity, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured 3 Comments

When working in complexity, and when trying to create new approaches to things, it’s important to pay attention to ideas that lie outside of the known ways of doing things.  These are sometimes called “weak signals” and by their very nature they are hard to hear and see.

At the Participatory Narrative Inquiry Institute, they have been thinking about this stuff.  On May 31, Cynthia Kurtz posted a useful blog post on how we choose what to pay attention to:

If you think of all the famous detectives you know of, fictional or real, they are always distinguished by their ability to hone in on signals — that is, to choose signals to pay attention to — based on their deep understanding of what they are listening for and why. That’s also why we use the symbol of a magnifying glass for a detective: it draws our gaze to some things by excluding other things. Knowing where to point the glass, and where not to point it, is the mark of a good detective.

In other words, a signal does not arise out of noise because it is louder than the noise. A signal arises out of noise because it matters. And we can only decide what matters if we understand our purpose.

That is helpful. In complexity, purpose and a sense of direction helps us to choose courses of action from making sense of the data we are seeing to acting on it.

By necessity that creates a narrowing of focus and so paying attention to how weak signals work is alos important. Yesterday the PNI Institute discussed this on a call which resulted in a nice set of observations about the people seeking weka signals an dthe nature of the signals themselves:

We thought of five ways that have to do with the observer of the signal:

  1. Ignorance – We don’t know what to look for. (Example: the detective knows more about wear patterns on boots than anyone else.)
  2. Blindness [sic]- We don’t look past what we assume to be true. (No example needed!)
  3. Disinterest – We don’t care enough about what we’re seeing to look further. (Example: parents understand their toddlers, nobody else does.)
  4. Habituation – We stopped looking a long time ago because nothing ever seems to change. (Example: A sign changes on a road, nobody notices it for weeks.)
  5. Unwillingness – It’s too much effort to look, so we don’t. (Example: The “looking for your keys under the street light” story is one of these.)

And we listed five ways a signal can be weak that have to do with the system in which the observer is embedded:

  1. Rare – It just doesn’t happen often.
  2. Novel – It’s so new that nobody has noticed it yet.
  3. Overshadowed – It does happen, but something else happens so much more that we notice that instead.
  4. Taboo – Nobody talks about it.
  5. Powerless – Sometimes a signal is literally weak, as in, those who are trying to transmit it have no power.

You can see that this has important implications for building in equity and diversity into sense-making processes. People with different lived experiences, ways of knowing and ways of seeing will pay attention to signals differently. If you are trying to build a group with the increased capacity to scan and make sense of a complex problem, having cognitive and experiential diversity will help you to find many new ideas that re useful in addressing complex problems.  Furthermore, you need to pay attention to people whose voices are traditionally quieted in a group so as to amplify their perspectives on powerless signals.