The new stuff we are doing in the Art of Hosting

Looking across Lake Simcoe this morning through the thunderstorms.

I’m in Ontario these two weeks, having just run a short Art of Hosting two-day workshop for the Canadian Labour Congress and heading to Peterborough tomorrow to begin our Reimaginging Education Art of Hosting (still seats available!). And next month in Vancouver our bi-annual Art of Hosting will run November 17-19 (and still seats for that one too!).

Each workshop is always different as we continue to explore this body of work, and use different  ways of teaching, learning, and connecting. In the last few months I have been diving into teaching complexity differently, using much more embodied experiences to explore the relationship between chaos and order and the role of the practitioner in working with this dynamic.  At the CLC last week we were working with 28 experienced labour educators and so we took a dive below methods. We used several methods both to reflect on the experience of being hosted, and to meaningfully ground the learning. But we also got very deliberate on what a method actually IS and how experienced practitioners are able to understand working with constraints rather than recipes. We drew from anthro-complexity while remaining accessible by creating exercises in which participants could observe these dynamics in practice. This approach to teaching hosting is not simply for experienced practitioners. In fact I think that beginners would benefit tremendously from having this orientation to their practice: instead of gathering up tools, understand how tools are made and what they do. 

The other thing we did with the CLC was roll out a new version of the Chaordic Stepping Stones that adds some intentional work on understanding the given structural constraints of a context for work and which helps the practitioner to see more of what is usually below the surface. It also gives practitioners better questions to ask of their sponsors, those who hold a mandate for change, and the participants in the process. The goal as always is to rely on the inherent capability of the field as much as possible, both in the sensing of its own conditions and in the identification or creation of affordances for action. For facilitators this approach always requires us to do much less than we think we need to. Without a practice to help regulate our participation in the field of work, we always run the risk of shaping what is happening to meet our own desires, anxieties, ego-needs, or preferences for tools.  

The issue is how to teach hosting in such a way that folks experience what we are talking about and also take it on board as a practice.  And so, last week, we got very concrete in everything we were doing, working with real work in the room and helping people look at their own projects together using questions and activities derived from our tools but before teaching any of it.  This means our teaching components became simpler and took less time.  But reflecting on that approach and pedagogy alos opened up some great new things to add to or adjust some of the tools and methods we work with. 

Each Art of Hosting workshop I do is substantially designed in the days just before the workshop. We review collected stories and aspirations that participants share with us and teach with a frame in mind but in a way that meets the specific needs of each cohort. This period of work, from March to the end of November has given me the chance to teach six different Art of Hosting workshops allowing me to build on and test some of the new ideas I have been exploring in the blog.  

After November, you can expect to see some new artifacts here including a new version of the Charodic Stepping Stones among other things.  And the book I am currently working on – on the nature and practice of hosting dialogic containers – is coming out of much of this teaching, learning and experimenting.  So join us in person, stay tuned for more, or book a call with me to explore these ideas in more detail if I can be helpful to your own work.