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.

Posted via email from Amanda Fenton’s Posterous

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.

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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.

With conversations that matter, invitation isn’t the emailed meeting request. The meeting begins long before the invitation is issued, and the goal of invitation is to attract people fully to the meeting. I imagine people being invited so well they burst through the doors ready to sit down together to dig into the questions of the day.

Inviting well is an iterative process and it works great when you can send out more than one invitation. Phelim McDermott recently shared a great example of this with the Devoted and Disgruntled 7 event. They crowd sourced personal invitations to come to D&D, a process that revealed rich diversity in invitation. From the website:

Everyone is invited, and everyone is invited to make their own invitation.

Let us know, and let other people know:-

Why you come to D&D?
Why somebody else should come to D&D?
Why D&D is important to you and important for theatre?

Submit your invitation here to add it to the blog.

The invitations were archived here and a favourite one is Chris Goode’s, who shares a bit about D&D and a bit about the process, Open Space. Thanks for the inspiration, Phelim – I will be tucking this idea into my Mary Poppins bag.

What meeting or gathering are you hosting that could benefit from invitation as a process?