Chris Corrigan posted this whittling down of his evolving elevator speech about what the Art of Hosting is. I like it:

The most pressing challenges we are in are challenges thrown at us by complexity.  Complexity produce emergent effects in our societies and requires emergent practices in order for us to find our way forward.  The Art of Hosting supports wholeness by bringing together a loose set of tools, maps, models and practices that serve wholeness. We use dialogue to work with diversity to create emergent solutions, to hold groups and communities in the uncertainty and fear of not knowing, and to converge, prototype and design wise action.  When we are telling the story about why this work matters, these touchstones seem to be essential to touch upon.  From there we can go deeper into the worldview that embraces complexity (thank you Cynefin and the chaordic models of Dee Hock) or into the practices that support individual and collective leadership and resilience in times of change, uncertainty and fear.

A meal of a post from Bob Stilger on Cultivating Resilience. An excerpt I loved:
I’m told that one of the biggest limitations in current community movements is not technical — it is relational.  People’s egos get in the way.  They find it impossible to hold the tension of differences.  They are unable to listen deeply for understanding rather than rushing to judgments.  When there is an overwhelming and obvious disaster, we can put those things aside and work together.  However, we’ve lost some of the relationship skills which make it possible to continue to do this week-in, week-out for the rest of our lives.

The Art of Hosting Conversations That Matter movement, in the US and around the world, has been helping people learn how to reweave this relational field.  This is one of the essential capacities in building a transformational movement.

Read more here: http://resilientcommunities.org/?p=720

Sent on the TELUS Mobility network with BlackBerry

Loving Chris Corrigan's post on Interior Transformation. These two excerpts in particular (emphasis mine)....

 

I once had a very good friend and teacher, Bob Wing, point this out to me.  We were together in a small Open Space, and we were in different conversations.  In my conversation a small group of us cracked a vexing problem by stumbling on a new map that seemed to make a great deal of sense in describing where we were.  It was exciting and we were fired up.  When we shared this map back with our colleagues, they listened politely to our exuberance and then Bob very calmly looked me in the eye and said “I like it.  I like it a lot.  But I don’t trust it, because I didn’t help create it.”  Where we thought we had produced a solution, Bob reminded us that at best we had merely produced and invitation, and that our exuberance for our own experience of transformation had made that a very bad and incomplete invitation.

 

We are trying to teach and learn about a form of leadership and being together in organization and community that innovates with more diversity than we are comfortable with, to build relationships that can hold more confusion that we are comfortable with, so that we can develop solutions that will have effects that we can only imagine.  I don’t know any other way to develop the capacity, person by person, to survive the external transformations that are upon us.

 

 

Sweet, rich thoughts Chris.

"We all carry a bag of tools and games we've used before. We all create default plans for our participants. Yet, I believe the moment of action is sacred, and demands to be a crisp, new page. It may be part of a longer story, or it may stand out as a unique, clean canvas of possibility. The applied improvisation facilitator must be humbly ready to invent, and improvise something that is profoundly new, prepared to drop everything they were thinking of doing up to that moment. And if they do decide to revert to default, or use something from the kit bag, then that decision should equally be one that is improvised, and that is truly  born of the infinity of the now."

 

From Creating Coversations for Change:

How to avoid death by feedback

Having someone from each working group feed back, one by one, to the whole group can lead to ‘death by feedback’. If you use a reporting in format, encourage variety and creativity. Invite people to present in a format (of their choice) that is not a conventional spoken summary. Ideas to play with include:

•  a drawing or visual representation of some kind such as a symbol

•  a proverb, riddle or inspiring quote if any come to mind  

•  a story (short) 

•  a poem – haikus are good for keeping things brief and to the point or koans – short contradictory

sounding statements that appear diametrically opposed 

•  a song or chant 

•  a role play or two minute drama 

•  an embodiment of some kind e.g. gestures, mime, a collective body sculpture 

•  a personal or found object (available at the event/venue or from outside/nature if access is easy) 

•  a single key word (or word from each member of the small group).

All of us are angels but with one wing. We just need to embrace each other to fly.

Here are all my mind maps from the evening and day long event with Margaret Wheatley in October 2011 - forgive the spelling errors as these were done live-on-the-fly. The theme of the event was Meg's book, Perseverance: Leadership in Turbulent Times. My notes from her book are here. 

 

Evening Map 1

Evening Map 2

Evening Map 3

Evening Map 4

Day Map 1

Day Map 2

Day Map 3

Day Map 4

Day Map 5