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My Experience: Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter and Participatory Leadership. Bowen Island, BC. November 2019.

9/18/2019

A testimonial by Jill Alison

In the Fall of 2019, the Campbell River Arts Council was forming a proposal to work in collaboration with a network of organisations to address homelessness in the downtown core. As a community-engaged artist and visual facilitator, I was invited into the process. We were developing a systems change project, using an arts-based approach to create dialogue and engagement with street involved people, as well as their allies and other service providers, who were working to alleviate suffering in the affected communities.

The Art of Hosting was proposed as a way of working together, by introducing a set of systems change tools that would interrupt the current power structure representative of the typical meeting style. The goal was to move towards a more inclusive and equitable process of engagement, by bringing the voices of marginalized people into the centre and allowing a process of creative facilitation, dialogue, and participation to bring forward emergent solutions.

I was invited to attend the three-day, Art of Hosting training on Bowen Island with the intention of learning more about the practice. I felt at home in the space, nestled in a retreat-like atmosphere, with nourishing food and welcoming people. On the first evening, there was an opening circle where everyone introduced themselves and spoke briefly about why they were there. As the circle went around, Chris was quietly gathering snippets of people’s voices and composing a poem. When he read the poem out loud, a sense of wonder filled the room. His creative act was a kind of threshold, inviting an energy of unity and playfulness into the group. The experience showed me that creativity is a powerful way of opening space!

During the training, I met like minded people from all fields of practice and parts of the world. I felt seen and heard by others, and allowed myself to confront some of the blocks that were holding me back. I showed my vulnerability and stepped out of my comfort zone, using my voice in new ways. I sat in playful circles with fun-loving people and tense circles with spirited people having difficult conversations. I was blessed by people who were willing to listen and witness, coming away from the whole experience feeling more integrated and whole.

The Art of Hosting makes sense to me on a deep level and I felt both grounded and affirmed by the experience. As a visual scribe who practices deep listening, I value even the smallest voice in the room and intuitively sense that the group holds space together, forming an invisible field of presence. The training showed me that there is a skill in sensing both the seen and unseen energies in the room. To witness the team of highly skilled facilitators (Caitlin, Teresa, Amanda and Chris) work together in such a cohesive way was inspiring. They showed me how important it is to have both supportive colleagues and a community of practice that you know and trust. I came away feeling that my values can be aligned with a set of working principles, integrated into a creative process that is actionable and effective.

Thank you for this valuable training! I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to work with people in authentic and collaborative ways.

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The Sacred Gift of Hosting

8/14/2019

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By Kelly Foxcraft Porier

“Every time we gather, we are collaborating to create in the present, the possibility for a collective future…Let’s create those spaces.” – Adrienne Marie Brown

This past New Year we delivered a small-scale Art of Hosting Training in one of our local First Nations Communities with a group working in Community Engagement for their Comprehensive Community Planning. In the weekend-long training the Elders, youth and others resonated strongly with the same feeling: “we KNOW how to do this!”

This is the beauty of the Art of Hosting - that it feels like a homecoming to so many of us. In particular, it resonates deeply for many of us grounded in cultures that understand that gathering well, hosting well, feeding people beautifully is powerful. When combined with providing agency and autonomy for folks, to undertake the ‘business’ that is top most on their hearts and minds, to come forth with intention and attention, you are able to generate powerful outcomes that ripple out into collective action.

Every single day communities, organizations and institutions are seeking ways to ‘do engagement better’, to ‘outreach with community’ and I hear folks so often express their feelings of being overwhelmed and daunted by the complexity of figuring out what that looks like and how to be effective. This emphasis on productive, effective and outcome orientation often leads to unmanageable ‘laundry lists’ at the end of meetings, to checklists and barreling forward into an agenda that considers the outcomes and objectives far more strongly than the context and/or the actual people’s realities that joined you in doing the work in the first place. That is simply how the entire practice of ‘engagement’ falls apart. It becomes inauthentic and not driven by a shared values-based centre.

This is where the ‘hosting’ of the Art of Hosting is so central, simple and powerful. For our Indigenous cohorts doing work in community especially, words like ‘facilitation’ and ‘engagement’ don’t always feel meaningful, and jargon like ‘consultation’ has not only become meaningless but also harmful and damaging! BUT HOSTING! Now there is a strength-based value that runs strongly within the ancestry and DNA of all of the Indigenous folks we work with across ages, formal training and capacities. Hosting is a practice that reaches back and reaches forward in powerful ways – and is a practice that we all know deep in our bones how to do. It invites in beauty, care, dignity and much of what can be missing in the agenda/objective/checklist driven ways of doing business.

Speaking as a Tseshaht First Nations mother, daughter and aunty, I can say beyond a doubt that Indigenous people KNOW HOW TO HOST! It is a core value that everything from governance to ceremony is driven by. AND the truly great thing is, that ALL people can connect with what it is to host a dinner, a party, or a more austere gathering like a celebration of life with care, attention to detail and INTENTION.

This is what is so beautiful about the Art of Hosting and the suite of tools, methods and more - it is not a FACILITATION training, it is touching in on some of our greatest human practices, our natural and best ways of remembering how to gather with each other in ways that are connected, generative and hold space.

This Spring, along with my colleagues, we spent time in Ontario out on the land in Manatoulin Island receiving traditional teachings, while a sugar shack reduced down the maple sap into beautiful sweet maple syrup. So much resonated with us and the work we do in offering the Art of Hosting, in the work taking place: folks working together, in relationship and wholeness with the land, the trees and each other.

So many teachings were offered, but one in particular resonated strongly, as if to crystalize what the often-daunting notion of ‘engagement’ truly boils down to. In essence it is hosting:

“The only thing you need for ceremony is to be simple, authentic & sincere - Aanishinabe ‘diamond’ teaching

I think we often think of engagement as something overwhelming, we get swamped emotionally and physically in so much of the mechanics of strategy and to do lists that we forget the simple truth; when we are gathering people, for any reason what so ever, we are asking them to offer their most sacred resources - time, trust and lived experience/wisdom.

In receiving these gifts from our participant, when we gather people together, we need to realize that we are shifting into a sacred space, and even into ceremony, where we really need to intentionally and sincerely gather. Some types of gatherings do require austerity - but we can also host A LOT of complexity with simplicity. When we speak of the sacredness of our contribution of our limited time and energy resources that is absolutely sacred - and every community event or gathering DOES need to be considered with this kind of deep care at the centre - but also, we don’t want to get caught up in the weeds. It is so essential to also be visionary, and remember it does not need to be fancy, it just needs to be sincere. A community potluck with paper plates can often be MORE effective, and honour the context MORE, than a hotel ballroom with a 5-star catered chef meal.

This is where the Art of Hosting and its emphasis on hosting fills such an important contribution to dialogic and participatory practices for us in our community work. Within our human systems we need to consider not just the way we drive a room of people towards a checklist of objectives with all of the bells and whistles and conference ‘swag’ bags. We can and must also deeply consider the way that the spaces, formats and methods employed in our events and ‘engagements’ honour the people, offers them dignity, trust and agency to create what is most needed AND reciprocates their time and wisdom.

In my experiences, from that small CCP group, to much larger gatherings and community engagements - the Art of Hosting provides the tools to dance between and enrich the possibility for us to gather in ways that honour the people and host them well, elevating our collective experience while also achieving layers of objectives and core needs at once.

Throughout my more than 10 years as a practitioner and learner of the methods, I feel more invigorated and passionate than ever that our work and world will be transformed if we can shift beyond facilitation and meetings and move more deeply into the territory of ‘hosting’ each other. Honouring the most sacred contribution we could all give in these harried busy days - our time.

I truly believe that the investment of time and energy into Art of Hosting training offers a kind of leveling up of professional skills while sharpening personal practice and lenses in which to see your work and world anew. It is a sacred gift that your work and our world truly needs RIGHT NOW!

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A World Increasingly Void of Context -- Reclaiming Story Through The Circle Way

9/21/2017

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By Tenneson Woolf
Originally Published at www.tennesonwoolf.com

Many of us live in a world that is increasingly being stripped of its context. Headlines captivate more attention than the article or report. Even the article or report captures more attention than the story of what actually happened and it’s many meanings. Facebook is loaded with oodles of good shares, but they too tend to be snippets, ultimately skewed to the delights-only aspects of people’s lives, scrubbed clean of real-life challenges inherent in the every day. Twitter has us not only sharing, but thinking in 140 character messages. The every-day requires a bit more space.

Make no mistake, I value clarity and brevity immensely. It is a skill of maturity, I think, to be able to find the essence of a story, or the principle of a paragraph. It is mad skill to be able to identify talking points rooted in principles or key questions that center a complex situation.

The problem isn’t the skill of summarizing. The problem is when the summary is so often taken out of context and without enough connection to the stories from which they originated. We human beings are starved of context in most of our environments as we continue to spiral ourselves further into a love affair with speed and efficiency that trumps pace and depth.

Let’s just interrupt that, shall we. Let’s just reclaim more of the expectation for context.

One of the things that I love about The Circle Way, is that it gives us a container to reclaim the need and hunger for context. It’s one of the ways that I’ve been introducing Circle lately, and then inviting people to tell a story. The Circle Way can be expressed and invited in many time frames. It won’t always be an hour or two together (this is what people often fear with circle, isn’t it) — sometimes the spirit of circle is practiced and enacted with two people in two minutes. Circle, however, regardless of time choice, gives us a way to paint more than just the edges of our lives and of our learning with one another.

Here’s a recent example, from Circle, Song, and Ceremony, an event with 26 people that I co-convened with Barbara McAfee and Quanita Roberson (pictured on the right above, along with Katie Boone, a wonderfully skilled practitioner based in Minnesota). Our opening evening, in which I’ve come to feel that the real job is to say hello to each other, to make the transition from “out there” to “in here” and being available to each other, had several exercises. Beautiful song. Some recommended agreements and commitments. Some questions that each of us brought to the weekend gathering. An exercise to express six words to describe the state that we were arriving in. The six words were spoken out loud. It’s a good exercise. It was a good exercise that night. These words, and the spirit in which they were spoken, helped to introduce us to each other. “Tired. Curious. Happy. Nervous. Ready. Lonely.” Great teasers for depth, right.

The next day, we invited more context to be spoken in the container of the 26 of us. Not six words, but maybe six paragraphs. In circle. “Who are you? Why did you choose to come to this gathering? Give us a bit of your story.” This circle got big quickly. In time. In content. It got full. And honest. We’d planned on it going for 60-75 minutes, and it did. Deliciously. Because, we had the weekend together, this was not time getting away from us. This was essential weaving together.

There were four things that I learned (relearned) in that circle.

One, people are hungry to share context and to be heard in their context.
Two, we learn who we are by sharing our story — as well as learning more of who we are by hearing other people share their stories.
Three, the desire for story is in our DNA — it has been cultural practice for generations gone by, and even without direct experience, we recognize the need for context and story in the deeper places of our psyche and memory.
Four, as Quanita referenced, one of the reasons that circles get big when invited to share story is that people are so starved of the opportunity. It’s rare. In that scarcity, many of us feel that we must say everything (more than even the six paragraphs permits) because this is our only chance. Argh!

I love Circle. As a form of meeting. As a way of being. As a container to re-insert context and honesty into these many encounters we humans have with one another, while trying to do good with the things and people that we care about.

Context matters. Essentially. The Circle Way gives us format to welcome it.

Learn more of The Circle Way and other participative formats that reclaim purpose and meaning in working with groups. Register now for The Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations and Participatory Leadership, November 12-15, 2017 with Chris Corrigan, Caitlin Frost, Teresa Posakony, Amanda Fenton, and Tenneson Woolf.

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Why offer an Art of Hosting?

1/28/2016

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What I love about the Art of Hosting is that it is made of a global community of practice of people who are learning about “participatory leadership: in all kinds of guises. When we talk about the Art of Hosting, we are referring to a practice that includes four pillars: self-hosting (personal practice), participation (in dialogue and community), hosting others and co-creation. So it’s more of a leadership practice than a facilitation workshop. Yes, we teach about and use methods like Open Space Technology, World Cafe and The Circle Way among others, but I don’t tell people it’s a facilitation workshop. Instead they get hosted in these method, a chance to practice using it, and a chance to be coached and dive more deeply into it.

Art of Hosting workshops also explore worldviews and theory about complexity and living systems, and we also use a number of different design tools for organizing strategic initiatives, whether it is hosting a single conversation or planning a longer term project, all of which are based on keeping participation at the centre of the work.

So it’s not really a facilitation workshop. I tell people that pretty clearly. What I do say is that our goal is to have people leave an Art of Hosting workshop as a practitioner, meaning that they go back to their daily lives with a focus to develop some aspect of their leadership: it could be facilitation or participating in dialogue or just good personal practice. Some of those people catch fire as facilitators, and start or continue on a path of developing their own practice.

I have never seen a facilitation workshop that makes you a skillful facilitator. Facilitation is an art that can only be learned by doing it. There is no way anyone can directly transmit quality skills in a workshop. Instead, what many experience is an offering that helps them ground their practice in good theory and personal practice. And that CAN help people in their facilitation practice. It’s not the workshops that make you a better facilitator, but the experience of pausing to reflect, learn and integrate your practice and maybe learn one or two new things.

This is why we don’t certify people. You can’t certify people after taking a single workshop. A real learner will probably do a poor job the first time they facilitate a meeting, regardless of the training they have had, because they start raw and get better. You don’t paint a Mona Lisa the first time you try. It is impossible to say how well-equipped anyone is leaving any facilitation workshop. That all depends on the person, the workshop and the context of their next gig. They might subsequently do a great job in a non-profit Boardroom meeting, be lost in a community setting and then nail a corporate World Cafe. How much of that is down to a “training?” I would never dare promise that anyone will be “well-equipped” and I wouldn’t trust anyone who said they could equip a person to facilitate well in any context after a single workshop.

As for the methods, we introduce them through experience rather than talking about them much. Usually most Art of Hosting workshops I have done have included a full half day Open Space, a full two hour World Cafe and small group Circle practice of at least an hour. We also usually do a half day Pro-Action Cafe as well.

Each of these methods has it’s integrity, but in the Art of Hosting, we are exploring the “river beneath the river.” In other words, what are the leadership stances that these methods imply or rely on? These are really interesting questions because for me, the effectiveness of these methods points to bigger implications for how we lead and organize in the world. Being curious about that is where Art of Hosting came from.

These methods are actually easy to learn. Read the user’s guides and do and do it. The best way to become a skilled facilitator is to go out and host conversations. The best way to learn Open Space is to run one. Most of us who have been facilitating OST for a long time for example learned because we were curious and we were hosted well in an OST meeting. And so in the Art of Hosting, we try to give people a quality experience of each method so that, if they are there to learn the method, they get a participant’s eye view of the process and they can then go and learn more.

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The Power of a Good Question

11/3/2015

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Below is an article that Tenneson wrote with a colleague. You'll see from the content that there are several ways to improve the kinds of questions we ask with each other and how that connects to the outcomes we desire and the communities we yearn to create. Bowen Island Art of Hosting is a place where this feels particularly keen, and with really skilled hosts that know this work deeply.

The Power of a Good Question:
Organizations are Shaped By the Questions They Ask
Tenneson Woolf (tenneson@tennesonwoolf.com) and Kathleen Masters (kmasters@umcmission.org)
Adapted from UMC Participatory Leadership Journal, Published on Tenneson's Website

It is often said, “There is nothing so powerful as a good question.” A question is to participative leadership what a match is to fire. It is the start. The spark. The thing that gets it all going.

In participative and conversational leadership, your question can have significant impact on whether a conversation takes off or not. Whether it ignites a group into energetic sharing or just smolders and dampens the group’s learning.

There are really dozens of ways to improve questions. A few of those are below to stir your thinking.

Is the question meaningful?

Of course, right. Meaningful to the particular people that are participating. Meaningful to the project that you are supporting. Does it help feed energy into the primary purpose of your work? Does it help invoke additional needed clarity? Notice that you do not need to provide the meaning. It is more about asking a question that helps people discover what is meaningful. For example, “Why is this project important to you?” “Why does it matter?” “What difference do you think it will make?”

Does the question invite curiosity and reflective thinking?

To be curious with one another is to contribute to an overall commitment to learning together. Sometimes we need to engage one another with the simplicity of yes or no answers. But not all the time. Maybe even, infrequently. More likely, we need nuance. We need to see through the kaleidoscope that is multiple perspectives from multiple people. For example, “What is really going on here?” “What are the most fruitful ways that we could think about this issue?” and “If we were to suspend certainty for a moment, what else would we see here?”

Does the question challenge assumptions?

Have you ever been in one of those conversations where one assumption seems to block everything? For example, “We don’t have budget so there is nothing that we can do.” Sometimes the best questions we can ask of each other are ones that cut through an assumption, even temporarily. “What if budget were not the issue?” “If resourceful creativity is what we need, even without budget, what other resources can we utilize?” Questions that challenge assumptions invite us to nibble, or even feast, on the very roots of our thinking.

Does the question lead to other questions?

This can be frustrating for some. After all, what is the good of creating a messy pile of questions that paralyze action? It is important, of course, to move to action. Yet, many of us live in an “answer culture.” We are taught to be certain (or fake it) because good leaders are certain, right.

Part of the broader shift that we can create in participative leadership is for communities to practice inquiry together. To become defined by the questions we are asking each other, and by the very fact that we are able to ask questions with each other. For most of us, questions enliven. They invite people to think out loud about the truths that they are exploring. For example, “What is different about the opportunities and challenges we face now?” “What is the same?” “What does this have to do with our larger mission?”

Is the question simple?

The best questions, the ones that people really jump into, are often the most simple questions. These questions are short and get to the heart of it. “Why does this matter to you?” tends to be a better question than a longer run-on question that has the same essence. “In the broader context of a church that is reinventing itself, with a desire for increased participation, as a commitment to God and community that is underserved, what matters most to us now?” The former is a question that people can hold. It is one that can anchor many thoughts and many other questions. The latter is a good question with good context. Yet that question is just more difficult for people to get their brains around.

It is fine to nuance your questions. All of the context that goes into a good simple question matters. You can say these things out loud to your group. But the one that you write on the flip chart paper or on the white board ought to be the simple version.

Does the question lead to possibility?

Amidst all of the attention that we give to problems, it is a needed skill and discipline to shift attention to what is possible. Questions that point to possibility are questions that tend to invoke creativity and imagination. They help all of us wake up to what has energy.
For example, “What could this also be?” The “also be” part of this is important. It doesn’t deny that there already is effort and attention. Yet, the question challenges most of us into thinking at a next level of relevance, a next layer in the evolution of our work and projects.

Does the question welcome a quality of caring together?

As corollary to the opening statement of this article, that “There is nothing as useful as a good question.” there are several questions that point to the kind of caring that most of us want with and from one another. For example, “Who is this for, really?” Or, “If we were to act from compassion, what would we now feel was essential?” There are ways to focus on love. “What is it that you love about this congregation?” Or, “What do you love about what you are learning now?” If the need is for participants’ contribution, ask, “What are the next levels of possibility here for you to contribute to?” Or, “What contribution would satisfy your deep longings of the heart?”

Does the question look for more than yes or no as a response?

Yes or no questions can be fun as games, but if your point is to create a deeper kind of interaction, ask for more than one word responses. For example, instead of, “Do you like the way things are going?” ask, “What is important to you in how things are going?” Or, stepping back even further, “What do you see happening here?” There are times when data and knowledge are needed. These times tend to point more to questions that ask for responses of “right” or “wrong.” More often, you can serve the group better by using questions that invite experience. For example, “When have you experienced good listening?”

Is the question appropriately sequenced?

If you are in a situation when you will ask several questions in different parts, sequence them thoughtfully. Don’t start with a question that asks for conclusions. Save that for the end. Begin with something that brings people into a shared response together. If the quality that you want more of is, for example, hospitality, a great first round questions is, “When have you experienced hospitality?” It doesn’t matter if the people respond with church stories or not.

A second round of questions can link the conversation back to your specific circumstances. For example, “What hospitality do you hope for here?” This brings people’s attention back to working on their particular needs. A third question invites application. “What hospitality are your inspired to experiment with here?” The question is an invitation.

Tips:

* Remember that asking questions is not only the ability to put words into meaningful syntax. Asking good questions is a disposition and attitude. It is about living a life defined by genuine curiosity and the possibility that the group can help surface together what can’t be surfaced alone.
* Resist the need to neatly tuck everything in too quickly. Some questions are not meant to be answered in twenty minutes or in an hour. Some are meant to last longer. It’s okay to take on a question for a limited period of time, but be transparent with how you are doing that. It’s far better than having people feel that you’ve collectively pretended to solve something in a ridiculously short time.
* Notice that there is an important choice of wording in questions -- whether asked as “we” or as “you” questions. Often, at the start, asking for the group “we” can be paralyzing. Start by asking “you” questions to first draw out personal experience. For example, “What is it that you see is possible here?” This is different than asking people what “we” see is possible. By having all people speak personally, a sense of the whole emerges and becomes discernible, and then ripe for “we” questions.
* On the one hand, the question that you ask is of great importance. Prepare your questions with full attention. On the other hand, know that most important questions are interrelated. Even if you don’t ask the perfect question, know that the question will likely create an entry point into other important questions.

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Hosting ourselves, each other, our work in the world

10/15/2015

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Posted by Caitlin Frost

This summer I had the privilege of co-hosting a 3 day intensive training with 95 leaders and change-makers from more than 17 European countries. We took a morning to dive into the crucial area of hosting ourselves in the form of working with our own stuck places, fears and patterns.

In order to be able to fully step into the challenges we are facing - both the large scale, deeply complex issues like transforming our financial system, or poverty, or racism...and the seemingly smaller but sometimes also challenging areas of how we collaborate and work through our differences in our teams, families and communities - we need rigorous and compassionate personal practice to allow us not just to move through the places we get triggered or stuck, but to actually fully engage the learning that is available at that threshold.

It is always a powerful experience to sit in a circle of our colleagues and make visible the often hidden territory of our own shadowed thinking, and to hear the patterns and shared places we get stuck. It is a first, valuable step in bringing these patterns to light where we can work with them - individually and collectively.

Noticing the patterns of belief about our own value or our own capacity to show up and do the work (“I don’t have enough experience”); our judgements and assumptions about other people or groups of people (“They don’t get it” “They can’t be trusted”); our fears of what will happen (“it will fail” “I will lose my job” “people will get hurt”), and also the big fears that can immobilize us (“it is too late” “the problems are too big”.)

While it is valuable (and often a relief) to see and hear the beliefs and patterns that are holding us back individually and collectively, we also need to engage deeply and skillfully with them so that we can learn what we need to learn for our own evolution, and to allow for the evolution of our work in the world to come from new ways of thinking.

Join us at the Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations and Participatory Leadership on Bowen Island from November 8th to 11th where we will explore practices for hosting yourself alongside practices for hosting others, to strengthen your ability to work with complexity, uncertainty & change. Or join our mailing list to hear about upcoming events (enter your contact info at the bottom of this page).

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Doing Meetings Better

10/6/2015

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Posted by Amanda Fenton

Every time we gather becomes a model of the future we want to create. – Peter Block

In today's world we live with the paradox that meetings are an important tool for leaders and change-makers, yet they can be an ineffective and expensive strategy.

We are used to attending meetings we don’t know the purpose of, meetings where people interrupt and talk over each other, meetings where the same people almost never speak, meetings that shy away from difficult dynamics, meetings that end without anything tangible in our hands that can be followed-up on, and meetings where decisions are made that few people support.

The good news: We can do meetings differently. It is possible to create a participatory meeting structure where the purpose is clear, relationships are fostered, diverse opinions are welcomed, creative solutions are generated, and difficult decisions are made.

Our hosting colleague Tenneson Woolf describes this as “Better Skills, Better Meetings”:

This is what many people want. It is as basic to organizational health as regular exercise is to personal health. The Art of Hosting, and the general framing of participative leadership, offers a set of tools, methodologies, perspectives, and practices to help improve meetings. Committee meetings. Staff meetings. Or repeated meetings that are engagement strategies for long-term community involvement. Our intent at The Art of Hosting is to help all participants leave as improved practitioners able to host better and more meaningful meetings.

Hosting meetings differently can be a strategic disruptor that shifts stuck teams, catalyzes projects, and creates new patterns that lead to better results. People are hungry for more effective meetings and practices for working better together amidst times of rapid change and high complexity.

Join us at the Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations and Participatory Leadership on Bowen Island from November 8th to 11th (more info is here). Discover new ways to host better and more meaningful meetings.

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The core imperative: develop a practice

9/22/2015

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Posted by Chris Corrigan

When you make your living in the world as a facilitator, you can’t help but notice the quality of conversation that surrounds you. People come up to me all the time asking advice about how to have this or that chat with colleagues or loved ones. Folks download on me their grief that our civic conversations have been polluted by rudeness and the inability to listen. We feel an overall malaise that somehow our organizations or communities could be doing better.

I have recently been published in a new book on Dialogic Organizational Development, a way of looking at OD that will be familiar to anyone who is curious about the Art of Hosting and participatory leadership. In Dialogic OD we see the world as a set of conversations. Organizations exist in the conversations we have with each other. Culture is born of narrative. On the personal level, our identities are constructed by the stories we tell ourselves, especially the ones we believe.

Changing the conversation changes the world. It's an old truism but it is a key part of our work. And not just changing the conversation, but changing HOW we have the conversation. We shift from telling to inquiry. Shift from certainty to curiosity, shift from domination to mutuality. More is possible when we realize that we are all in this together, and alone, we don't know what to do.

It boggles my mind that management training doesn’t often include a dedicated and rigourous exploration of hosting and participating in conversations. We consider good managers to have strategic, leadership, financial and technical skills. But we rarely hire people because of what they DON’T know. How many people have been in a job interview where the best answer to a question was “I don’t know what I would do. What would you do?”

And yet, that vulnerability, that presence of mind, that openness to the counsel and wisdom of others is exactly the kind of leadership that helps organizations and communities lean into uncertainty and complexity and come out with opportunities and clarity.

The Art of Hosting is a practice. It is about learning how to do that. Our greatest hope for anyone coming to our workshops is that you will leave be willing to try new ways of hosting story, inquiry and conversation. We don't expect you to be perfect - goodness knows none of us are! But we do try to equip you with the courage and practice to get out there and begin to shift the way conversations shape our world.

Will you join us on Bowen Island this November?

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Art of Hosting Values -- A Statement of Important Things

6/27/2015

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Originally Posted June 9, 2015 by Tenneson Woolf
(http://tennesonwoolf.com/art-of-hosting-values-a-statement-of-important-things/)

At Art of Hosting, Bowen Island, we learn good things. Always. It's the team -- Chris, Caitlin, Teresa, Amanda, myself -- we each come with stories and inquiries. We're honest about that. It's also the experience of seeing application at many levels. We apply what we know to the level of improving how meetings happen and tasks are accomplished. We also apply at the level of culture making, the deeper changes of evolving who we are and how we are together. That "we" is all of us. In our jobs, our communities, our networks, our organizations, our families.

Join us. As a first-timer. Or as a repeat participant. Come as a team -- even better to hold the learning together. There is much for us to stay in together, at this most unique of locations. Perhaps some of these statements below attract your interest, whether to apply to meetings or to the deep shifts. If so, you will be in good company.

Tenneson

Recently Jerry Nagel, friend and colleague, offered a statement of values and principles embedded in an Art of Hosting worldview. These were what he discovered through many interviews with practitioners. Jerry was writing his PhD dissertation, for which I got to be a reader and reflective partner.

One of the things I love about Jerry is that he is committed to seeing a meta level. That takes discipline. Worldview has always been at the root of it for me. It’s always felt a bit silly to me to get too serious about the surface of behaviors absent awareness of world view. Jerry is one who gets that.

As posted, Jerry name values as “statements of importance.” His principles connoted a “kind of action.” I’ve included just the values below because, well, I want to hold them spaciously. They are statements (in red) that deserve more than a speed date. With each, I’ve included a few of my reflections.

Values:

Being curious is essential and being curious means being willing to step into a place of not knowing. Yup, there it is. Being curious. “Be present, be curious” has been a kind of mantra for me over the last ten years. It doesn’t always mean not knowing, but it does mean a kind of relationship with not knowing. A relationship to be familiar with.
Diverse perspectives open up new possibilities. All the voices from all local forms of life are welcome and invited into the conversation without fear. This one is worth unpacking too. I wonder sometimes if many of us just fear diversity. Or fear the letting go that is required to explore another person’s certainty. Or resist inclusion because it is inconvenient. I do, sometimes. Or I know that feeling in me. There is a rather high cost to these barriers, isn’t there. Absence of sustainability is high on that list.
We create and hold space for a multiple of local realities to be in dialogue with each other in different but equal relationship. It’s not every day that we get to do this. Nor perhaps need too. But there are some days when this is an absolute must. I’ve heard Jerry say it a number of times, that “the practice is the work.” Creating and holding this kind of space is a practice for a lifetime!
As practitioners we work toward the common good. We are committed to making the world as a whole a better place. It’s an inspiring value, isn’t it. The world as better place. I would add that this common good occurs simultaneously to the world inside of us, and, to the world outside of us. Movement and attention within each feeds the other.
We believe in human goodness. We work to support personal aspirations. I relate to this one from my early work with The Berkana Institute in the 1990s. We stated it slightly different — we “rely” on human goodness. Count on it. There are people everywhere in the world that want good and want to offer good. This reality sometimes is obscured by tragedy, pain, injustice.
We work in the place of emergence without preconceived notions of what must happen, instead allowing what wants to come forth to emerge. We trust in the not knowing. We trust in the generative field of co-creation. Yup. I count on three anchors this way. Emergence. Self-organization. Life, and organizations, as living systems.
Participation by all is central to the work. It may not be by all. But the movement to more inclusion and an interruption of the mindset that is isolation feels very needed. Very central.
We take time to be aware of our own prejudices and habits and take time to reflect on our (re)actions as part of our ongoing learning as hosts. This takes courage, doesn’t it. And friendship. I’m reminded of yesterday’s post, inspired by Tuesday Ryan Hart, Relationship is the Resolution. Her and another colleague made their learning public.
We practice generosity. We share what we know and invite others into the field of co-learning. I’m grateful to know some people who really embody this. Chris Corrigan comes to mind. Many in the Art of Hosting practitioners group. I continue to learn about what this means.

Indeed, a few important things. Thanks Jerry.

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Some Questions I Bring Into the Room

2/9/2015

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By Amanda Fenton, and cross-published at amandafenton.com.

As part of my preparation for the Art of Hosting on Bowen Island in February I have been reflecting on what’s alive in my work these days. An Art of Hosting learning experience is not delivered from a standard curriculum that we dust off and teach. Rather, it is informed by what inquiries participants bring into the room, as well as the edges of our practice as a hosting team. And then we activate the art: choosing what maps, models, frameworks, tools, processes and practices will resonate and stretch all of us beyond our current ways of seeing and doing.

So what are some of the threads I bring into the room? Here are a few….

What are radically better ways we can be in organizations?

This thread is informed by looking at organizations as living systems – natural and evolving, which is different than seeing organizations and groups and machines. My curiosity has focused on key organizational practices such as purpose (the unique purpose the organization wants to manifest in the world), colleague principles (values and behaviours for safe-enough space, what is encouraged), meeting practices (practices that ensure everyone’s voice is heard, to invite everyone’s contribution – space for creativity and better conversations), decision-making (increasing self-management) and conflict resolution (as the practice through which peers hold each other to account for their mutual commitments). The Art of Hosting, and one of my core practices, The Circle Way, offers us some helpful approaches in bringing to life this next stage of consciousness in our organizations.

We yearn for more, for radically better ways to be in organizations. Many of us don’t need convincing that new types of companies, schools, and hospitals are called for. An increasing number of us yearn to create soulful organizations, if only we knew how. But is that genuinely possible, or mere wishful thinking? What do organizations molded around the next stage of consciousness look and feel like? If it turns out that it is possible to create organizations that draw out more of our human potential, then what do such organizations look like? How do we bring them to life? ~ Federic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations

What is the value and impact of building capacity to participate in conversations?

Some of my work lately has been supporting conversations in a number of communities about the things they care most about, so that transformative changes might happen. We have focused on bringing people together to talk and listen, to reflect and act across boundaries, hierarchies and cultures – whether they work in the same or very different team, organization, profession, or sector. This is not an easy deliverable for funders to feel comfortable with! After one two-hour community conversation we will not have well formulated ideas with the mandate, strategic interventions and capacity to begin prototyping. What we do have is a group of people who are learning how to participate in conversations in a new way, and harvest those conversations themselves so they can seed and feed what might come next. We are learning to articulate a number of impacts from these initial sessions such as changing psychology (we can do this together, no one will come and tell us what to do for the future, shift from problem finding to possibility/solutions), creating new connections and illuminating perspectives across ages and sectors, discovering the resources already available in the community – people, skills, talents, leadership, physical resources etc, and noting the hot topics/passionate ideas and who else cares about those topics in the community.

My curiosity here has focused on creating some simple developmental evaluation questions that help articulate both the learning curve and value of building capacity for being participants and harvesters in collaborative conversation. The next phase is looking at what of support is needed for the grassroots initiatives and to help prepare those who are ready to shift to hosting their own community conversations.

Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes when networks of relationships form among people who share a common cause and vision of what’s possible. This is good news for those of us intent on creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don’t need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits. Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage and commitment that lead to broad-based change. ~Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale, 2006

What is possible if we move beyond vision and purpose to shared work?

You might notice some friction in these threads. Above we have ‘purpose as key practice for radically better organizations’. And now here I am wondering about releasing the desire for shared vision and purpose and instead focusing on shared work. When we have multiple service providers, agencies, and organizations and citizens trying to work together, creating a shared vision can pour molasses on any potential momentum. There are inherent tensions between what their boards and executives are measured by and their internal priorities. What if a challenge or opportunity is enough to start – maybe discovered collectively through a question like “What is an important issue to work on together that none of us can address alone?”. Then from there we discover what will make participation valuable and what shared work we might undertake together to make a difference. What if we hold shared vision and purpose loosely – let’s not laminate it – but get enough of a glimpse to move forward and DO things together?

In wildly diverse groups of people, insisting that we must share a perspective or vision at the outset is often a recipe for group deterioration and/or getting stuck. Forcing common analysis or shared aspiration at these times is not only counterproductive, it is false, and it undermines our work. The work is over before it even begins.

So, what do we do?

I think one answer is Shared Work. I’ve found in my own work in organizations and communities that sometimes we just need to get to work and figure how to navigate perspectives, visions, and purposes as we’re working. In Shared Work, our differences will arise, and we develop processes that help us navigate them while continuing to move forward. Instead of setting up preconditions or false consensus, we centralize the work and getting it done. ~ Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Art of Hosting Practitioner, from Shared Work Not Analysis or Aspiration

So how about you? What are your most burning questions about your own practice of hosting and harvesting conversations that matter?

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My Experience: Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter and Participatory Leadership. Bowen Island, BC. November 2019.

The Sacred Gift of Hosting

A World Increasingly Void of Context -- Reclaiming Story Through The Circle Way

Why offer an Art of Hosting?

The Power of a Good Question

Hosting ourselves, each other, our work in the world

Doing Meetings Better

The core imperative: develop a practice

Art of Hosting Values -- A Statement of Important Things

Some Questions I Bring Into the Room

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