Category: Edited

• Helpful open source software approach to harvesting in large groups / conferences from Luke Closs: http://bit.ly/SbzZIA 
• Utah friends, please consider supporting this 10/27 fundraiser to benefit good friend, Lisa Lires and family: http://bit.ly/WNVseu 
• A favorite line from yesterdays Leadership Summit from Gemma Mendez-Smith: Go where you are celebrated, not tolerated. #summit
• Involved in convening in relation with faith communities to create change? Like us here on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/OociyD 
• Hungry to hear and share stories on convening in faith communities? Check this http://bit.ly/RERt2z  and join us here http://bit.ly/SAJBex 
• If you use the 2-loops model, an interesting read from Whitney Johnson and Juan Mendez (thanks Shari Black): http://bit.ly/RzSvdh 
• For those leading in faith communities, like us on facebook to see updates for Nov 28-Dec 1 AoH event: http://on.fb.me/OociyD 
• Helpful post here from my friend Kathy Jourdain on what helps create hosting team success: http://bit.ly/RtsCMl 
• For those involved in Conference Theme Weaving, a helpful blog from my friend Amanda Fenton: http://bit.ly/OQH4l6 
• Article on systems change in Nova Scotia Public Health through participative leadership. From friend Tim Merry. http://bit.ly/Oci47r 

I’m returning now from two inspiring days with 80 leaders from rural Ontario. It was a leadership summit, courageously called by my friend Alicia Evans and others at the Rural Ontario Institute, themed to encourage bold leadership, and recharging the possibilities in rural communities through mobilizing participation. I say it is courageous in that I always appreciate it when people responsible for planning larger conferences invite a shift to more participative formats. When they invite people from their boards and staff to experiment beyond entrenched patterns. Along with my friends Jean Ogilvie and Erika Bailey, we co-designed and co-hosted a format inspired by the Art of Hosting tradition.

My friend Chris Corrigan often reminds me of key principles that get to the heart of harvesting.

Basic principles around harvesting from participatory processes include:

• Participatory processes should also have participatory harvests – what is co-created is co-owned.
• Meaning making should be shared.
• Harvests need both artifacts and feedback loops. Artifacts make learning visible and portable. Feedback loops making learning useful beyond events. Both need strategic conversations so that needs can be met. These conversations include what media the artifacts need to be in, and how to use our harvests with existing power structures and methods of enacting change in order to maximize impacts.
• Harvesting can be both intentional and emergent. Intentional harvests are the fruits we set out to gather – sometimes as reports that we know we will be writing.  Emergent harvests are the surprises we learn along the way. As these often require different eyes (focused vision for intentional harvests, “soft eyes” to see what is emerging) I often have people take on these distinct roles.

From the leadership summit there will be several intentional harvests. We had some wonderful videographers capturing much footage throughout the summit. Alicia was busy with her camera for still photographs catching important images of flip charts and harvest sheets.

When Jean and I were offering a teaching about harvesting, I encouraged attention to the principle of “offering,” what I find supports more of the emergent harvest that Chris references. The practice that I find often ignites a harvesting flame in others is to simply offer what they felt was helpful and interesting; this frees them from the common experience of paralysis and drudgery of needing to report on everything, a belief that can stall out even the best of efforts.

What follows are three of my offerings into the harvest of the whole. As they become available, I’ll add links to the harvests that I see from others. These also reflect some of my learnings of patterns that I see as a process host across many events like this.

Conference Video (8 minutes)

Circle of Gratitudes — A couple of our participants, Derek and Craig, hosted the closing circle that included invitations to speak gratitudes. I caught most of those through mad scribbling and pasted them into a Wordle image here. Its always good to catch these closing comments. Beautiful and succinct expressions of appreciation while they are fresh to be witnessed by the whole group in this case.

Learn In An Hour: Practice Over a Life Time — This is a reference point that a participant shared with me at a conference a couple of years ago. It was astutely named. The process methodologies and such are worth learning well. Many people understand inherently that the methods themselves are not that complex. However, stepping in to their own skin, or some of the anchoring stories, premises, and beliefs of the participative leadership paradigm is something that most of us are doing and improving over a life time. It involves some undoing. Some unlearning. Some experimenting. I yearn for this shared understanding in conferences like this. It’s fantastic when some come to more fully understand this relationship between the simple and the complex.

Welcome Improvements — I’ve seen many people that are learning participative formats despair at the perceived need to start over at the beginning with everything and everyone. It comes from the desire to be inclusive, I believe. Yet, the hyper attention to this is a bit misguided. In participative formats, I find often that I can start with an idea. A concept. An imagination. Though there are times when I might completely redesign what I’m doing based on a shared experience, more often, I’m simply welcoming improvements. I ask people how they might make an idea better, and then let the environment of interaction inform how those improvements will take place. I love the way that working with improvements frees people to build on the momentum of a given project or initiative. I love how this practice of welcoming and offering improvements (not elaborative debates of the miniscule) supports a vibrancy of interaction and co-learning.

As I shared in a video interview at the end of this summit, it is quite something to be involved in a process that enables human beings to come together with such care for each other and for their projects. It is quite a thing to work with others on the beginnings of such work, and in the evolution of these shifts.

The Irish poet John O’Donahue’s words on love inspire me as I reflect on these processes.  When I am at my best as a facilitator, I hold the work with this energy. “When love comes into your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and bloom and grow.”

So it is, I believe, with people in conference formats that engage in more authentic ways. People, and people in their projects, awaken to new possibility and to the deep memories of what they care about. They come to awaken to how they want to offer themselves in relation to one another. For some it is a single idea that invites enlivened experiments and leadership. For some, it is awakened and enflamed courage to lead with love and boldness across many projects — a different way of doing. For some, it changes the core of who they are. Marks a moment of memory and conviction that wakes the sleepy best inside of them into vibrant daily living.

Quite a thing, yes.

With gratitude to the organizers, participants, and co-hosting team.

This is some of the learning that my partner Teresa Posakony is exploring and practicing with deliberativeness.

Below is an excerpt from an article by Alice McCall (shared with me by Teresa) that clarifies some of the underlaying premises of this body of approaches.

These are beliefs and practices that ring very true for me. In my own practices and in the underlaying wholeness and systems views that I’ve long been exploring and applying in my work of facilitation with groups. I love how this helps to see more of the ever present yet invisible dynamics. And I love how this invites us individually and collectively into additional and needed levels of depth that these times call for.

“I [Alice McCall] am a Transformational Energy Healer and Spiritual Counselor, who successfully healed myself of breast cancer without medical intervention in 2007. It is my passion to help people heal, stay healthy, and prevent illness of any kind.

The basic premise of my healing practice is that the root cause of all health issues, emotional issues, disease, and unwanted life patterns is a negative thought or emotion buried in the cells of our bodies.

Thoughts and emotions are powerful. Anytime you hold onto a negative thought or emotion, it is automatically buried in the cells of your body. It is held there as dense heavy dark energy, versus the light bright energy that you were born with. Your body was not designed to carry this density and it can lead to a malfunction or health issue in the part of your body where it is primarily stored. If it is held in the kidneys, it can cause urination problems or kidney disease. If it is held in the colon, it can cause Crohn’s disease or IBS. The location of the stored density is determined by the type of negativity you are experiencing. Sadness, for instance, automatically becomes buried in the heart, and anger likes to find a home in the liver or lower back.

Simply stated, our mind, emotions, spirit, and body are all connected. Intuitively we know that there is a connection between having a nagging worry and feeling our heart racing or our stomach turning in knots. We have felt that mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical effect when we obsess with that worry. By using the principles of energy healing, we have an arsenal of tools to help us overcome these thoughts, and prevent them from becoming part of our being.”

I am often asked about video harvesting from Participative Leadership events, trainings, and conferences. How can you create a video of people in dialogue and other participative formats that conveys what is important? It is an important question. Particularly for those of us who are changing the culture of how meetings happen. A short, simple video with minimal production can become a very useful artifact for encouraging the continued use of the format, both as follow-up and as invitation to future events.

I’ve seen a number of these videos. And feel grateful in particular for the ones from events of which I have hosted. The best that I’ve seen include these qualities and aspects:

1. Short — 3-5 minutes is enough. It is not about capturing all of the content, nor even the process. It is just enough to invite people to get a taste and to be curious enough to ask a question about what happened there.

2. Set to Music — it just adds immensely to the appeal and welcome to experience the overarching spirit of the gathering.

3. Captures People in Interaction — sometimes this is dialogue. Sometimes it is play. Sometimes it is in the words that are being written on flipcharts and post-it notes. The principle I often reference to support a participative format is from living systems theory — If you want a system to be healthy, connect it to more of itself. The video shows some of the connecting.

4. Speaking of Purpose — this is just a bit of voice to help set the context of the gathering. Sometimes it is about the purpose of the event. And also, it is about the process of the event, how we will be turning to one another. Often spoken by the conference organizers and those that have designed and are hosting it.

5. Reflections from Participants — it’s helpful to splice together some of the participants responding to a questions. Often this is linked to the purpose of the event and what people learn while together. For example, if the conference is about collaborative leadership, ask participants, What is at the heart of collaborative leadership for you?

Since I’m asked often, I want to offer a compilation of a few that I’ve appreciated to inspire a few choices:

The New Mentality: Disable the Label — July 2012 (6 minutes)

The Art of Hosting Singapore — March 2012 (3 minutes)

Collective Story Harvest of the United Churches of Langley — March 2012 (5 minutes)

Day Two AoH Learning Event in St. Paul, MN — March 2012 (4 minutes)

The Finance Innovation Lab — February 2012 (9 minutes)

Me to We: Generosity Everyday — February 2012 (5 minutes)

Healthier Healthcare Systems — January 2012 (3 minutes — I don’t care for the first 30 seconds of this; it feels over dramatized and distracts from the fundamental essence of people turning to one another.)

The Art of Hosting Introduction, Egypt — June 2011 (4 minutes)

There is also a vast collection linked to the Art of Hosting website. It includes videos like the ones I describe above. It also includes longer, teaching videos.