A Half Dozen Learnings

Half Dozen Learnings

Last week I was part of a team that hosted a lovely group of people that work with The Center for Human Development (CHD) in La Grande, Oregon. CHD is a private nonprofit that provides behavioral health, public health, developmental disabilities services, and veteran’s services to 25,000 residents of Union County. Their work is to support healthy communities. We were together for three days, a non-residential program. Our meeting space was in a local church.

CHD has a core set of values that were created some time ago (http://www.chdinc.org/values.htm). They are really beautiful statements that have guided their work, both when their structure included a much-respected CEO, as well as now in the thick of a commitment to self-directed work teams. The values themselves were subject for much discussion at this gathering. For some, revered, grounded in years of work. For others – a third of the organization has been there for quite a short time – they have the feeling of being nice words, but lacking power without the experience of having created them. The end activity, the closing part of these three days was to place these half dozen truths in the background and invite each to speak of what they are committed too. Beautiful things were spoken, the kind that are born out of a few days together. I suspect that many of them could land on the existing half dozen truths. Good. And they carry much more power now, much more ownership.

Inspired by the half dozen truths at CHD, here are a half dozen or so key patterns I noticed through working with this group. Here is a bit below, woven into what I see as patterns in other groups.

Supporting Healthy Communities Requires Being Well at Home — I love the way that CHD wanted to do its own wellness check. Their work is in supporting healthy community. That itself requires a healthy community check with their organization. Sixty showed up, which itself is a story. Fellow hosts, Steve Ryman and Roni Wood, both internal to CHD, both had experience with the Art of Hosting Pattern. Steve shared his desire to bring the AoH to CHD wondering if he might get 20 people to show up. There was an energy of yes in this that Steve and Roni helped respond to so that many could be in this wellness check.

Grief is Part of the Work — Public health work can be intense. I heard this in many stories. There is a grief that shows up that can get embodied in the individuals and in the system. I’ve heard Meg Wheatley often say, “if you want a living system to be healthy, connect it to more of itself.” Sometimes it feels like we overlook the grief that we carry. I don’t sense it is therapy that is needed – this is not my focus. But simple witnessing of the realness of the grief helps it to flow in and through a system of people rather than festering. And also, as was apparent in this group, it is OK to witness the grief that is non-local. There is grief in the world in health care as a whole. There is grief that many systems are collapsing. Some of these are deeply personal. Each of us carries this with us. I was glad to be with other hosts, Teresa Posakony and Diane Altman Dautoff, who know much of hosting this grief. I’ve learned a lot from another host on this one, Tim Merry – don’t fix it; feel it. It is a gift to make room for grief and can be beautifully hosted to free people into other levels of work and relationship. I also learned and saw more of how leadership teams often carry so much of the grief of a system. These multiple sources of grief are too much for anyone. To witness this is to move into more health around it, just with realness.

Healthy Communication Comes from Healthy Relationships – I heard many people talk about the need for better communication, more direct communication. I heard this amplified as we made our way through the first day and the second morning. One form of better communications is clearly through some specific skills. There are people who teach these well. Sometimes this is called for. What became clear for me is the pattern of healthy communication that can grow from multiple touches with each other. It can come from being in real relationship with each other. The joys, the sorrows. For me this ties back to the Meg Wheatley statement – the Art of Hosting pattern offers multiple ways for people to connect to each other. Conversation. Small group. Large group. Play. Hosting and offering. Walks. Eating. Private journaling. The most simple structure of conversations can support this real connection with each other. When those connections are made, then we give ourselves much more room for our communications with each other. It becomes less about judgment. It becomes more about curiosity.

Open Space Cracks It Open – For this event, the first day and a half were spent in the deliberate challenges of arriving and cultivating learning. There were café conversations about why are you really here? We hosted appreciative interviews about when CHD has been at its best. There were teachings about the chaordic path, the dance between chaos and order that produces the new. There was play and the creation of agreements. And there was a groan – sometimes expressed as “when will we get to the real work?” In the afternoon of the second day we hosted in open space. Everything shifts in this. The questions move from the hosting team into the questions of the group. The self-organizing increases as people find each other in their passions. The harvest from OS was beautiful, that shift from hearing it from others to speaking it with ownership. In this event we spent much of the third day in OS also. I would like to experiment with OS earlier in the process. I wonder what is possible. And I am really curious about how the first conversations ready people for open space because of the ground in purpose and relationship.

 

Slow Down To Speed Up – For this event we had three days. For many, the first day feels a bit light. It clearly is a slowing down. It is a diverging before converging. It is a deliberate time to let go of preconceived notions, and in relationship with each other, welcome a new sensing of what we really believe. We are all such creatures of habit. Habit in thought. Habit in action. It is all so beautifully intended, and often, just perfect. But for times like this, a wellness check, a pause is just what matters most. I believe that the slowing down gives us added capacity – mostly in our relationships – to speed up. Our work shifts from assignment to invitation and creation.

Four Levels of Harvest: Content, Process, Relationships, Energy — Most of the time, I feel that people are focused on a content level of harvest. It certainly is in me. What is the work? What is the solution? What facts do we know? These are all important. Content by itself is not enough. It is the stuff that works for a while but often will end in more stuck. There is more that we can learn I feel.

Process is one of those. Process, in this case some simple conversation practices – circle, café, open space, appreciative inquiry – are the ways that we can get unstuck the next time that stuck inevitably shows up. For this group, some very simple aspects of circle were important. I say simple. I mean the deeper aspects that have simple form. Like calling people into a particular question. Like pausing to start the meeting. Like being able to propose and vote with thumbs, recognizing that often it is a few sideways thumbs when it feels like all down thumbs. Like rotating leadership. Like being deliberate in harvest. Even in self-directed work teams, it is a gift to have structure. This for me is the gift of hosting and the gift of being hosted. A river bank, if you will, to support flow.

Relationships are a third level of harvest, and maybe the most important. When we have better quality of relationship – a commitment to curiosity even in difference, we have better chance of doing our work in healthy ways. We shift from extremes of cajoling to invitations to create together. We shift from force to support. This sounds like such a light thing. In my experience, it is not. Relationships, again found with some simple mixing it up and hearing stories from others, are what lead to sustainable actions. If people leave in friendship, more work will get done and with more imagination. This is the pattern I see, and saw in one way as people noticed surprise in each other. One person shared, and later offered, his rap and hip hop work at CHD. A chance for one to be more complete or whole invites others to do similarly.

Field is the other level of harvest that I notice. It is the more difficult to voice, yet may be the most important. It is the feeling when good relationships are taken to scale. When the sweetness and effectiveness of one relationship transcends into the relationship of the whole. It is the space where trust abounds, and where information needed also abounds. It starts to feel metaphyscical, and I believe is. At some point I sense we will all find more language for this – building on what is already there, for example, when we speak of strong culture – that shows us something present but hard to see in our current habits.

In all of this, I saw much with this group. Open space sessions were called, convened, harvested, and actions were planned including each of these: Let’s Celebrate; Staff Support; Community of Practice; BHT; Simplicity in Everyday Hosting of Conversations That Matter; The Relationship Between Authority and Friendship; Chaordic Stepping Stones as a Tool for Planning Meetings; Tech Support – Beyond Just Solutions; Wise Action That Lasts; Relationship of Self-Directed Teams and an Administrative Council; Growth and Sustainability.

A bow. What a delight to be in this learning with these people. What a beautiful hosting team. In the end, I feel this is what we do. It is what I want to do. Be in friendship, learn well, do the work, build friendship, learn, do the work…

Photos and Videos

Re-entry Action Exercise — Roq Gareau

Below is an exercise created by hosting companion Roq Gareau. He led this exercise when we worked together in New Mexico earlier this year with Navajo Health Services.

Hello Marita (and friends).

I don’t have anything written up for this, and I am happy to write something up today. I created this exercise to help people have one solidly grounded, authentically motivated item for action upon re-entry into their lives after a workshop. All too often, after a workshop that stirs the soul and sounds the heartstrings, re-entry can be a real test to see if you can stand in your new awareness. This process is deliberately created to lead the participant from an introspective place to a very active, collaborating place and back to an introspective place, so that the intention is well grounded in both the inner and outer world. I experimented a lot with personal leadership plans and noticed that for many, follow through was challenging and often felt like a chore. This process was born from a bunch of failed exercises. I am constantly shifting it a little to suit the group, but the following outline seems to work well for most groups. For most participants, this yields a simple, yet often profound, action for change that they enter into joyfully – in fact, the activity itself invites the participant into the shifts needed for the action to actualize.

I have called this activity “intention for re-entry”, “personal leadership plan”, “one small step”, “the change experiment” and “the action plan harvest”. I haven’t settled on a favourite yet – take your pick or make up your own! This exercise is really a combination of tools that I have adopted and adapted from other teachers. The intention and coaching circle from Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea. The inquiry milling (question harvest) from Joanna Macy (if your fellowship is not familiar with her book “Coming Back to Life” and accompanying DVD “The Work that Reconnects,” I highly recommend both and are available on amazon.com). And the guided visualization from the work of Jean Houston. All that is needed for this process is a group that has done some good work together, one host (that also participates in the process – I have gained great clarity for wise action myself in participating as host), a space with lots of room for people to walk about and sit together, a good time keeper, some blank 8.5X11 paper or cardstock (the cardstock is more durable and easier to write on when walking around), some pens and about 1.5 hours (times can be adjusted to make this work in an hour or expand into 2+ hours).

Hosting Instructions:

STEP 1 – Intention setting (~15 minutes)

Hand out a blank piece of paper or cardstock to each participant and have them fold it in half lengthwise so that it’s like a small book. The cover of the book can be numbered page 1, the inside (when opened) can be numbered page 2 on the left and page 3 on the right, and the back cover can be numbered page 4. “At the top of page 1, write down one thing, one intention, that you would like to follow-through on after this workshop. It can be anything at all, just make sure that it is something that you have passion for and really want to do. It’s often helpful just to write down the first thing that comes to mind, and feel free to take the time that you need to write down one thing that feels true for you.” Give the group a few minutes and when it looks like about half the group is done – “Take the time that you need to set your intention, and if you are done, go ahead and draw a box around your intention and use the rest of the space on this page to list the numbers 1 to 15 as though you were starting a list.” I’ll usually draw this on the whiteboard or flipchart (a page with a box at the top and then the numbers 1-15 in a column starting below the box to the bottom of the page) so people have a visual description also. “When you have your page numbered, read you intention once again, and next to the numbers, write down the first 15 questions that pop into your head. These do not have to make sense and you are not answering them now. Just let yourself get really curious and let this curiosity flow right onto your paper without even thinking about it.” I usually give the group about 5 minutes for this and you may see a few struggling with this. I’ll often say, “some of you might have gotten 5 or 6 questions easily and then got stuck…remember this is flow writing, so if your mind is saying ‘what’s another question’ or ‘why is this so hard’ maybe that’s the very question you need to write down to get access to more.”

“When you have your 15 questions, go ahead and turn over to page 2 and re-write you intention statement in a box at the top without looking again at page 1. For some of you, your intention might shift a bit after all those questions, for some of you it might be exactly the same.”

STEP 2 – The inquiry milling (~15 minutes)

“Take the time that you need to complete your original intention statement and questions on page 1 and your re-written intention on the top of page 2. When you are done this, stand up and make your way to the back of the room (or wherever the most space happens to be) where you will find yourself bumping into another person. It’s like a pinball machine back there! When you bump into someone, face them and read your intention statement at the top of page 2 to them. They will then respond with their curiosity and share with you the first 3 questions that come to mind in relation to your intention. Write these 3 questions down – they are like nuggets of gold! Switch, do the same for the other and then move on to bumping into someone else. See how many questions you can each harvest for your intention. Resist any urge to jump into giving advice or answering questions. Stay in the inquiry, be curious!”

Eventually, the whole group will be milling around, bumping, listening and trading questions. After 10 minutes of milling, regardless of how many questions have been collected by each participant, call the group back together and have them sit together in same-sized groups (4-6 at each group works best, but have as many same-sized groups as possible i.e. if you have a group of 25 including yourself, have 5 groups of 5, or for 23 have 3 groups of 6 and 1 group of 5 etc.)

When everyone is seated, I usually hold up my worksheet and say, “by know, each of you have your intention statement and 15 questions on page 1 and your re-written intention statement at the top of page 2 followed by a bunch of questions from others in the room. Now, go ahead and turn over to page 3 and re-write you intention statement in a box at the top without looking again at page 1 or 2. Once again, for some of you, your intention might shift a bit after all those questions, for some of you it might be pretty much the same.”

STEP 3 – The Coaching Circle (~40 minutes i.e 4X10 minutes or 5X8 minutes or 6X7.5 minutes depending on group size)

“For the next 40 minutes, we are going to experience a coaching circle. We are going to split the time so each person gets the same amount of air time. When it’s your turn, share with your group your intention statement at the top of page 3 – you may even want to share your first and second intention statement if it has changed a lot so the others can get a sense of the evolution of your intention. You will be receiving some feedback from your very own council of peers, and you get to instruct the group how you would like to use your time…Do you wish to receive some advice? Some feedback? More questions? Ideas on where to start?…this is your time, you get to shape the direction of the conversation. If you ask for some advice and the conversation moves in a direction that you don’t like, stop it and share with group that it is not working for you and request what will work for you. Feel free to use the rest of page 3 to take notes on your coaching session. Your greatest gift to the group when it is your turn to be coached is to ask for what you need and open yourself to receive. Your greatest gift to the group when it is another person’s turn to be coached is to offer what you can and open yourself to give.”

Have a volunteer be a reliable time keeper in the room – it’s a good idea to have a non-verbal cue for when it’s time to switch (i.e. a drum or bell). “See who wants to go first in your group and from there we will proceed around the circle until everyone has had a turn. The sound of the bell (or drum) will mark the start of the first coaching session and will also indicate when it is time to shift to the next person.”

STEP 4 – Guided Imagery and final reflection (~20 minutes)

“I would like to invite each of you to move from this space of excitement and collaboration back into a quieter place. Shift your body as you need to and make yourself comfortable in the room. I want to invite you now into an inner journey, so, if it feels comfortable, go ahead and close your eyes and pay attention to what you see and hear in your inner landscape. Give your body permission to soften and notice what it feels like to draw breath in and out of your body. I will be offering a guided visualization and I invite you to notice what draws your attention, and just know that you are in control of your experience.”

Every time I do a guided visualization, it is slightly different based on what I am seeing and what moves me. As host, feel free to improvise here, and make sure to give your description enough shape for participants to “walk into” and enough openness so they create there own unique experience. Speak slowly and deliberately. Here is an example:

“You are walking in a forest along an old, old trail. Many people, for many years have walked this path. Notice the feel of your feet upon this path, upon the footprints of many others. Notice the light, the sound, the smells of the forest…[pause]…as you keep walking you notice that you are walking gently uphill. The air is getting thinner and the trees are getting smaller. You are at the base of a mountain and the trail is leading you up the side of the mountain. You notice how it feels different to be walking upon the stone of the mountain than the forest floor earlier. The path is getting quite steep and you get to a place where steps have been etched out of the rock to make the climb easier and safer. As you climb each step you notice the unique symbol carved into it. These steps represent generations of work. Work by others many years passed. The staircase leads you up the side of the mountain to a doorway entrance into the mountain. The door is open and you know that you are meant to enter. You stop before the threshold and you notice all of the workmanship in that doorway. Notice what it looks like. Do you recognize some of the symbols? You take a deep breath and enter through the doorway. It is dark, but in the distance you notice the flickering light of a fire dancing on the curving rock walls. You walk towards the inviting warmth and you come into an open room in the heart of the mountain. You know that you are welcome here. You look around the room and you notice an elder sitting next to the fire. You recognize this elder as one of the wisdom keepers. The elder motions you to sit in the empty chair nearby. You sit in the chair and you feel the warmth of the firelight on your skin. You look into the gentle, piercing eyes of the wisdom keeper and it begins to speak. You know that these words are for you. This is important and you know that you must remember what the elder shares. You listen…[long pause]…The wisdom keeper stops and with a warming smile you turn and look into the fire to see the last flickering flame go out, leaving only the glowing embers. You look up to notice that the elder is gone. It is time for you to leave the mountain. You stand up and thank this womb-like space and you enter the darkness of the hallway to be welcomed at the doorway by the early evening light. Feeling strength in your legs you move down the steps of the mountain with ease and you welcome the damp air of the forest in your lungs. Moving back along the familiar trail in the forest, you return to the place that you left when you began this journey and you find yourself back in this space, in this time.”

“Bring yourself back gently and take some time to write down some notes of your experience of the guided visualization at the top of page 4. What did the elder share with you? What are some of the details that you noticed? What are you noticing and feeling now?” Give participants a few minutes for this – when most of the people look like they are done, invite them to make sense of the whole experience…”Now that you have experienced being in inquiry alone and with others, have coached and been coached, and have consulted your own deep wisdom, what is surfacing now? What is your intention now? So what is this really all about? What is the intention behind all these versions of intentions? What is it that you know that you need to do now? Go ahead and write down your final intention statement now at the bottom of page 4. This process has now been harvested for you on this page and it yours to keep, to support and remind you on your journey and your re-entry into the world out there, where your wise action is needed.”

Half Dozen Learnings

Last week I was part of a team that hosted a lovely group of people that work with The Center for Human Development (CHD) in La Grande, Oregon. CHD is a private nonprofit that provides behavioral health, public health, developmental disabilities services, and veteran’s services to 25,000 residents of Union County. Their work is to support healthy communities. We were together for three days, a non-residential program. Our meeting space was in a local church.

CHD has a core set of values that were created some time ago (http://www.chdinc.org/values.htm). They are really beautiful statements that have guided their work, both when their structure included a much-respected CEO, as well as now in the thick of a commitment to self-directed work teams. The values themselves were subject for much discussion at this gathering. For some, revered, grounded in years of work. For others – a third of the organization has been there for quite a short time – they have the feeling of being nice words, but lacking power without the experience of having created them. The end activity, the closing part of these three days was to place these half dozen truths in the background and invite each to speak of what they are committed too. Beautiful things were spoken, the kind that are born out of a few days together. I suspect that many of them could land on the existing half dozen truths. Good. And they carry much more power now, much more ownership.

Inspired by the half dozen truths at CHD, here are a half dozen or so key patterns I noticed through working with this group. Here is a bit below, woven into what I see as patterns in other groups.

Supporting Healthy Communities Requires Being Well at Home — I love the way that CHD wanted to do its own wellness check. Their work is in supporting healthy community. That itself requires a healthy community check with their organization. Sixty showed up, which itself is a story. Fellow hosts, Steve Ryman and Roni Wood, both internal to CHD, both had experience with the Art of Hosting Pattern. Steve shared his desire to bring the AoH to CHD wondering if he might get 20 people to show up. There was an energy of yes in this that Steve and Roni helped respond to so that many could be in this wellness check.

Grief is Part of the Work — Public health work can be intense. I heard this in many stories. There is a grief that shows up that can get embodied in the individuals and in the system. I’ve heard Meg Wheatley often say, “if you want a living system to be healthy, connect it to more of itself.” Sometimes it feels like we overlook the grief that we carry. I don’t sense it is therapy that is needed – this is not my focus. But simple witnessing of the realness of the grief helps it to flow in and through a system of people rather than festering. And also, as was apparent in this group, it is OK to witness the grief that is non-local. There is grief in the world in health care as a whole. There is grief that many systems are collapsing. Some of these are deeply personal. Each of us carries this with us. I was glad to be with other hosts, Teresa Posakony and Diane Altman Dautoff, who know much of hosting this grief. I’ve learned a lot from another host on this one, Tim Merry – don’t fix it; feel it. It is a gift to make room for grief and can be beautifully hosted to free people into other levels of work and relationship. I also learned and saw more of how leadership teams often carry so much of the grief of a system. These multiple sources of grief are too much for anyone. To witness this is to move into more health around it, just with realness.

Healthy Communication Comes from Healthy Relationships – I heard many people talk about the need for better communication, more direct communication. I heard this amplified as we made our way through the first day and the second morning. One form of better communications is clearly through some specific skills. There are people who teach these well. Sometimes this is called for. What became clear for me is the pattern of healthy communication that can grow from multiple touches with each other. It can come from being in real relationship with each other. The joys, the sorrows. For me this ties back to the Meg Wheatley statement – the Art of Hosting pattern offers multiple ways for people to connect to each other. Conversation. Small group. Large group. Play. Hosting and offering. Walks. Eating. Private journaling. The most simple structure of conversations can support this real connection with each other. When those connections are made, then we give ourselves much more room for our communications with each other. It becomes less about judgment. It becomes more about curiosity.

Open Space Cracks It Open – For this event, the first day and a half were spent in the deliberate challenges of arriving and cultivating learning. There were café conversations about why are you really here? We hosted appreciative interviews about when CHD has been at its best. There were teachings about the chaordic path, the dance between chaos and order that produces the new. There was play and the creation of agreements. And there was a groan – sometimes expressed as “when will we get to the real work?” In the afternoon of the second day we hosted in open space. Everything shifts in this. The questions move from the hosting team into the questions of the group. The self-organizing increases as people find each other in their passions. The harvest from OS was beautiful, that shift from hearing it from others to speaking it with ownership. In this event we spent much of the third day in OS also. I would like to experiment with OS earlier in the process. I wonder what is possible. And I am really curious about how the first conversations ready people for open space because of the ground in purpose and relationship.

Slow Down To Speed Up – For this event we had three days. For many, the first day feels a bit light. It clearly is a slowing down. It is a diverging before converging. It is a deliberate time to let go of preconceived notions, and in relationship with each other, welcome a new sensing of what we really believe. We are all such creatures of habit. Habit in thought. Habit in action. It is all so beautifully intended, and often, just perfect. But for times like this, a wellness check, a pause is just what matters most. I believe that the slowing down gives us added capacity – mostly in our relationships – to speed up. Our work shifts from assignment to invitation and creation.

Four Levels of Harvest: Content, Process, Relationships, Energy — Most of the time, I feel that people are focused on a content level of harvest. It certainly is in me. What is the work? What is the solution? What facts do we know? These are all important. Content by itself is not enough. It is the stuff that works for a while but often will end in more stuck. There is more that we can learn I feel.

Process is one of those. Process, in this case some simple conversation practices – circle, café, open space, appreciative inquiry – are the ways that we can get unstuck the next time that stuck inevitably shows up. For this group, some very simple aspects of circle were important. I say simple. I mean the deeper aspects that have simple form. Like calling people into a particular question. Like pausing to start the meeting. Like being able to propose and vote with thumbs, recognizing that often it is a few sideways thumbs when it feels like all down thumbs. Like rotating leadership. Like being deliberate in harvest. Even in self-directed work teams, it is a gift to have structure. This for me is the gift of hosting and the gift of being hosted. A river bank, if you will, to support flow.

Relationships are a third level of harvest, and maybe the most important. When we have better quality of relationship – a commitment to curiosity even in difference, we have better chance of doing our work in healthy ways. We shift from extremes of cajoling to invitations to create together. We shift from force to support. This sounds like such a light thing. In my experience, it is not. Relationships, again found with some simple mixing it up and hearing stories from others, are what lead to sustainable actions. If people leave in friendship, more work will get done and with more imagination. This is the pattern I see, and saw in one way as people noticed surprise in each other. One person shared, and later offered, his rap and hip hop work at CHD. A chance for one to be more complete or whole invites others to do similarly.

Field is the other level of harvest that I notice. It is the more difficult to voice, yet may be the most important. It is the feeling when good relationships are taken to scale. When the sweetness and effectiveness of one relationship transcends into the relationship of the whole. It is the space where trust abounds, and where information needed also abounds. It starts to feel metaphyscical, and I believe is. At some point I sense we will all find more language for this – building on what is already there, for example, when we speak of strong culture – that shows us something present but hard to see in our current habits.

In all of this, I saw much with this group. Open space sessions were called, convened, harvested, and actions were planned including each of these: Let’s Celebrate; Staff Support; Community of Practice; BHT; Simplicity in Everyday Hosting of Conversations That Matter; The Relationship Between Authority and Friendship; Chaordic Stepping Stones as a Tool for Planning Meetings; Tech Support – Beyond Just Solutions; Wise Action That Lasts; Relationship of Self-Directed Teams and an Administrative Council; Growth and Sustainability.

A bow. What a delight to be in this learning with these people. What a beautiful hosting team. In the end, I feel this is what we do. It is what I want to do. Be in friendship, learn well, do the work, build friendship, learn, do the work…

Photos and Videos

Learnings from Calgary Art of Hosting

A few harvests from The Art of Hosting in Cochrane, Alberta.

“The only learning is unlearning.” Zrinka Glavas, who is in the process of becoming a tea master, and soon headed to her homeland of Croatia to open a tea house that is really about wholeness. I love the way that the form of things, in this case the tea house, is an entry into a deeper underlying purpose, in this case wholeness.

“Whenver we meet, there is a field.” Teresa Posakony, who continues to work at levels of energy in community. I love this learning about the organizing patterns among people. There is much to be said for the invisible, or the seemingly invisible. Thinking of the tea house above, the form — the meeting space — is entry into the deeper underlying purpose — healing, community, shared learning.

“DFQ at BMW.” Monica Pohlmann of Calgary referenced this in the check-out circle she was hosting. DFQ is a position — Director of Fundamental Questions. I love the attention here to the questions themselves and to building capacity and pattern to be in questions.

“We are our father’s dreams….” This is part of the lyrics from a Dougie McLean song that I used as an opening on Day 3, the last day to open us to growing seeds, to taking action out of the room. “We are our father’s dreams. We are our mother’s pride and joy. We are the seeds the grew.” What seeds can grow from here?

“Plan a harvest, not a meeting.” This is something that Chris Corrigan has shared often. A harvest will offer meaning to an experience. It will add meaning-making in the form of artifact, relationships, actions, plans, enhanced field.