The Art of Hosting
It must have been somewhere mid 2003 when my good mate - and one of the co-founders of Engage! - Tim Merry (www.myrgan.com) started talking to me about the Art of Hosting: ths incredible newly emerging paradigm and understanding of the practice of hosting and harvesting strategic and meaningful conversations.
And it was May 2004 when I was co-hosting my first Art of Hosting with him and Toke Moller (www.interchange.dk).
The Art of Hosting is a practice, a community and a training ground for everyone who seeks to work with learning processes driven by questions and conversations to inquire into the collective intelligence and wisdom of an organisation, a team, a group or a community.
To develop strategies, take decisions, allow new patterns to emerge...to co-create...
To develop strategies, take decisions, allow new patterns to emerge...to co-create...My hosting experiences informed my thinking and supported my learning about the chaordic paradigm enormously. Having hosted deep-dives into collective intelligence with a great variety of clients and organisations, has stretched my understanding of the unhealthy, shadow sides of systems. Not only can the craving for predictability and manipulation cause (stifling) control. On the other side of the spectrum, an overwhelming experience of and surrender to chaos can lead into 'chamos' or destructive apathy.
As hosts of strategic processes that seek simple solutions to complex problems, we strongly rely on the deep passion of the conversation partners, and we need their non-attachment to prefixed or determined outcomes.
The quality of our interventions as hosts to support the emergence of creative and adaptive systems is strongly dependent on the interior of us as hosts. The more nonlinear, adaptive and self-organising we can become as hosts, the more can the systems we tend to serve. (Inspired by Bill O'Brien)
