What do we do when we don’t know what to do?

Part 1: The four-fold practice of the Art of Hosting

What do we do when we don’t know what to do? My friend Joshua Moses has this amazing question he always carries around with him and asks interesting people. Lately it has come up in several different areas of my life, kind of unexpectedly, and so I thought I should take the bait and share some reflections here. This might actually be a few different posts, who knows? But let’s start with one.

There are many different angles from which to meditate on this question. However, today I was asked in another context to think about leadership, and more particularly about the skills necessary to navigate these moments where we don’t what to do. Leadership is a tricky one for me. I have a complicated relationship with it – To me, leadership is a word that comes tainted with themes like ego, control, coercion, manipulation. Mainstream culture has taught me to think about the charismatic leader is the ideal: the hero that, if we leave the keys and let them do their thing, will get us out of whatever mess we are in. Someone smart, powerful who seduce their way out of anything. Someone who is not opposed to some degree of deception to get what they want.

But this type of leadership is useless in the context of the polycrisis we are in, where we truly, collectively don’t know and where no one person is going to hold the responses we need. We need a different type of leadership to move through the uncertainty in our organizations and our communities. This is what Meg Wheatley and others have called servant leadership, what others (including me!) like to call participatory leadership. Leadership in this context becomes about the ability to create and hold containers for good dialogue, to participate in good dialogue and to learn with and from others, as we try to co-create our way through the tricky practice of becoming good human ancestors. That is where the four fold practice of the Art of Hosting comes in.

The four fold practice is really the heart of the Art of Hosting. The Art of Hosting is both a community of practice and a set of approaches and tools for dialogue, that started in the late 90s and emerged out of a collective inquiry that could be summarized as : what makes good collaborative processes click? The Four Fold Practice was an early answer to this question, and since it has been around for a while now, I would say that it has stood the test of time. Legend has it that the Four Fold framework was drawn on the back of a napkin (like all good frameworks are). It helped summarize four basic patterns that lead to generative dialogue and collaboration. In many ways, all failed dialogues could be traced to a collapse in one of these patterns, and so they all point to the skills we need to develop to be good community members, good hosts and help communities better navigate the complexity of a world that relentlessly throws us curveballs.. Let us take some time here to briefly unfold these patterns, the skills they each involve, and how this will help us when we don’t know what to do.

• Hosting self.  Any good inquiry starts there. Be present. How can I cultivate the conditions for me to be fully present to what this moment is asking? What do I need and want? What is mine to hold, and what is not? Where is my ego getting in the way of good work? What is taking me out of being present, in the here and now? How am I getting in my own way? Furthermore, good collaborative and dialogue processes need participants to be fully present, and that is what this hosting self piece talks about: how do we create conditions so that people can show up fully in dialogue? How can we, as hosts (and facilitators), show up and be fully present to what is happening, in the moment?
• Being hosted. Participating in dialogue is a gift and it is also a skill in itself. The main question here is around our capacity to listen and practice our curiosity, and welcome perspectives and experiences that are different from our own. What is the quality of my own listening that I want to bring and practice as I show up in dialogue and in collaborative processes? How do I cultivate and develop that skill of curiosity? Christina Baldwin, author of The Circle Way, writes that « curiosity and judgment cannot coexist in the same mind ». How do I quiet the voice of judgment and cynicism that sometimes wants to take over? And further, how do I focus my attention on what matters and can often be below the threshold of what is being explicitely said in the conversation, to bring it to the surface and the awareness of the group? There is a complexity to the practice of listening and participating in dialogue.
• Hosting others. How do we build community around a common purpose? How do we learn to recognize the conversations that are needed, and step into a practice of inviting others into them? What is a generative question, and how do we craft them? How do we welcome diversity? How do we hold space for the emergence of new possibilities and imaginations? How do we flow between loosening constraints when a group needs to explore possibilities and tightening them when it is decision and action time? There is a pattern of hosting conversation, between managing constraints (for example the time that is assigned for a conversation, the space it will take place in), managing attractors in a conversation (ex: the questions that are asked), managing boundaries (for instance, deciding what is the framing of a conversation). This is also a practice that can be explicit (as when someone is clearly identified as the host of the conversation), or implicit, when there is no identified host but someone takes some leadership as a service to the group. This pattern of hosting others speaks to learning and practicing participatory leadership. And it is far from simple! 
• Co-creating. This points to the practice of harvesting what comes on the other side of dialogue. A harvest can take many forms: skills, relationships, decisions, stories, meaning. Learning to step in co-creation thus means tending to what is only possible with this group, that could not be known or done before gathering these particular people around this particular question, in this particular context. I have often heard that when we plan a meeting, a process, a conversation, we are really planning a harvest. How do we gather what needs to be cultivated? How do we create conditions so that it can be done collectively? How do we do this with intention and clarity, so that is can be shared in ways that are accessible and helpful?

So what? What do we do when we don’t know what to do? The answer to that elusive question we started with remains a resounding, assertively vague « it depends! ». But whether you are an educator trying to host conversations to collectively reimagine our education systems so that they help everyone be in their full potential, or an engaged citizen trying to organize your community around a common concern, or a leader trying to foster more autonomy and engagement in your team, we believe this Four Fold Practice to be at the heart of what is needed for everyone to learn and navigate complexity. The key word here is practice. Like playing the violin, these skills are not something we learn once and know forever. We only get to master them by practicing, in an ungoing unfolding process, in your team, in your organization, in your community or even in your family.

So what will you do to try some four-fold practice next time you are in a conversation?