Monthly Archives: June 2008

Collective Learning & Co-Creative Engagement

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“None of us is as smart as all of us. …the problems we face are too complex to be solved by any one person or any one discipline. Our only chance is to bring people together from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines who can refract a problem through the prism of complementary minds allied in common purpose.”

Whether our quest is to solve complex social issues and wicked environmental problems, or our need is to create sustainable value in partnership with the entire value chain of suppliers, employees and customers, Collective Learning is an essential process for integrating and aligning diverse perspectives and knowledge. Over the past 25-30 years, our collective grasp of the interconnectedness of economic, environmental and social systems has risen greatly. We increasingly recognize that more synergistic, innovative and sustainable solutions can ultimately be developed when the collective intelligence and multiple perspective of many minds is focused together.

Collective Learning occurs though group conversations around questions that matter. Such conversations can take place either through one-time, multiple or ongoing activities involving in-person meetings or workshops, online- or tele- conferencing, or multiple engagement processes involving a combination of all of these. The goal of Collective Learning in an organizational or community group is to increase the collective knowledge, understanding, and capacity of members around the issue, such that independent individual action and decisions, as well as any collective action, can be aligned with the system’s interests.

Collective learning involves thinking and reflecting together about complex issues in order to generate new insights and possibilities. Such thinking must rise above the lowest common denominator of understanding often associated with debate to tap the full potential of collective intelligence and wisdom in the group.

Read the full paper I wrote in 2006 about Collective Learning and Co-Creative Engagement including such topics as:

  • Collective Learning Antecedants
  • The Art and Practice of Collective Learning
  • Collective Learning Questions & Practices
  • Co-Creative Engagement Methods
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More on Hosting and Facilitating (cont’d)

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I received an email from my friend Chris Corrigan in response to my previous blog as he was having trouble posting a comment. Hopefully I’ve fixed that problem and Chris can weigh back in directly as I truly value his contributions and how he stimulates my thinking. One of the questions Chris asked me is “.. what are the conversations that are alive and edgy in the communities of practice you are in? What is the living edge for C2D2 and IAF at the moment? I wonder how those of us around the world in these conversations can reach across our bounded communities and into, what, I wonder?”

There is a sense of discovery and newness in the AoH community – Chris refers to it as ‘wow…shiny!”, as for the first time people experience the power of co-creative engagement space. They contrast this to what they have known before and want to make distinctions, and ‘better than’, or ‘different than’, or ‘more than’, or ‘not that’ is often the result. Beyond my own personal experience, when I ‘listen in’ to the AoH Flickr photos and other retreat AoH Harvests, and tap into the energy of the videos, I get a sense of how profound it is for people to connect in their humanity with others in natural, conversational space around deep questions. This is all new to them, potent, juicy, ‘real’, and I do understand it and am glad for it. Simultaneously I am wary that it not lead to division and hair splitting. To feel comfortable calling myself a member of the AoH community, I need what we do to be about strengthening the ranks of people who understand the importance, necessity and power of co-creative engagement, rather than contributing to distinctions amongst practitioners about whether a ‘host’ is different and superior to a ‘facilitator”.

Chris asks where is the ‘living edge’ of this similar excitement in other communities of practice, and I’m glad to have a chance to provide some context here. For the International Association of Facilitators, it showed up a long time ago – well over 13 years ago for me anyway at the 1995 Denver conference, when Billie Alban and Barbara Bunker featured their research findings about the power and potential of large group, whole system interactive methods. There was a palpable sense of discovery, amazement, and possibility at that conference, when I first learned about and subsequently began to attend training programs in all these methods – taking Harrison Owen’s 6-day training on Open Space with Dell Spencer, the Dannemiller Tyson training on Real Time Strategic Change, later rebranded as Whole Scale Change, Future Search and The Conference Model from the Axelrods and Sandra Janoff, Appreciative Inquiry from Gervase Bushe, Dialogue from Glenna Gerard, and so on. The excitement for these methods also showed up at the same time in the OD Network field.

For the Dialogue and Deliberation community, an explosion of interest and excitement in these methods took place in 2002 with their first conference of the National Coalition on Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD). A visit to the NCDD website is well worth it for the wealth of resources, materials, links, and connections to a huge community of communities – probably the largest intersecting gathering place of community and organizational interest from all avenues – practitioners, researchers, academics, community leaders, activitists. The Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (C2D2) is part of this phenomenal rise in interest, learning, application.

The Nexus for Change is another field where practitioners and the original founders of these methods are exploring what we know about whole systems and participative change and what were are learning so that each of us and all of us are more competent to act in these times.

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More on Hosting and Facilitating

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Yesterday I spent over half an hour viewing the “The Art of Hosting” video with interest as I have both attended and helped to host local AoH events. For me, the contribution of AoH to the field of facilitation and the nexus for change is about the integration, design, and flow of wholistic group methods that enable and support meaningful conversations and outcomes. I admit, however, to being dismayed to see rise up again the theme of wanting to create a dichotomy that sets “hosting” apart from “facilitation”. As I understand it, the distinction suggests that facilitation comes from a ‘mechanistic view’ of organizations and communities, whereas hosting comes from a ‘living systems’ view. Quotes from the video that exemplify this:

Ravi Tangri: “A facilitator for me stands outside of the group like a symphony conductor guiding and controlling them with various processes. A host steps into the field of the system and senses what it needs to support itself on its way forward; a host provides the minimum amount of structure to allow the living system to align and self-organize and go where it needs to go.”

Monica Nissen: “Facilitation for me has more a quality of entering outside the field and ‘doing something – making things easier’, whereas hosting is actually entering into the field and inviting people into your own field – the quality with which we tend to hold these processes.”

This sense of a dichotomy is one that I have previously taken up on my blog – see Facilitation and Hosting: A Dichotomy or a Continuum with my colleague Chris Corrigan (and posted to the Art of Hosting listserve), and challenged as creating a real disservice to the field. The end result is that Chris agreed with the notion of a continuum, though he also advocated the importance of charting a path of wisdom from the start, so that facilitators learn how to work as a servant leader (or host) as they acquire new methods and processes.

Perhaps a clue to some of the underlying assumptions at play in the AoH community can be found in this statement on the video by Ravi Tangri: “While a good facilitator can work with maybe 50 people, a hosting team can work with 100’s and 1000’s of people at the same time, working with them as a living system.”

As an IAF Certified Professional Facilitator who has used and blended whole system, large group interactive change methodologies such as Open Space, Real Time Strategic Change, Whole Scale Change, The Conference Model For Work Redesign, World Café, Appreciative Inquiry, Dialogue, Future Search, the ICA Technology of Participation, and many others since 1990, this statement is very surprising and reveals a misunderstanding of what a good facilitator actually is capable of doing and how s/he works. In my world, facilitators: 1) are skilled in large group methods; 2) do work collaboratively in partnership teams composed of facilitators and the client group; and 3) engage in real time redesign during sessions, as needed to respond to emerging issues and needs.

Leaving dichotomies of ‘hosting’ vs. ‘facilitation’ aside, as I continued to listen to the AoH video, to me the key point being made by Ravi Tangri and others which I fully agree with (though do not believe is unique to AoH) is the importance of attending to the living, interactive, conversational space that is created as we blend methods and processes. As servant leaders, our intent should be to ensure meaningful conversations and real work occur around those questions that profoundly matter to the client organizations and communities we serve, such that greater health and wholeness of the system is fostered.

(Ravi Tangri, AoH video) “… it is what connects all those practices, a resonance, a life pattern, a living systems pattern – all the methods are ways or entry points of how to be different with one another.”

For me, masterful facilitation is both an outer art and an inner practice. “Outer facilitation” is the art (and technology) of assisting a community of participants to achieve their stated purpose and desired outcomes, through the skilful use and blending of methods and processes in accordance with principles and other articulated norms for working together. “Inner facilitation’ – which my AoH friends would refer to as ‘presence’ is attending to what is actually emerging in the ‘living field of interaction and community’, and being willing to change the design to best serve the health and wholeness of the group in the moment.

(quote from AoH video) “… it is not the methodologies, because you can use those tools out of books, but about the art of what is needed inside oneself to sense what tools to use, how to design the processes the group needs to go through, what is needed inside yourself to hold a group of people”.

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