A handbook about process consulting – Concordia University, 2025

What is this? This is a handbook and also a harvest: a tangible trace of the final conversation that took place in a planning and consulting course I hosted with 18 students completing their first year in the MA in Human Systems Interventions, on May 3rd, 2025. In this day long conversation, students were invited …

A course outline on participatory leadership

This winter I’ll be teaching a course on Leadership for the first time. So, as any respectable Art of Hosting practitioner would do, I decided that I needed to break from the way this course has been taught in the past, and made the choice to go full on with participatory leadership. It’s not perfect, …

Walking on the resistance line – What if resistance was a pathway to wisdom? 

Art by Mohammed Hanchi Have you ever made a decision as a community, seemingly embraced by the whole only to be undermined in ways subtle and not so subtle? When that happens, we often talk about this as resistance. But what is resistance, really? The Cambridge Dictionary defines Resistance as « the act of fighting against …

Walking the chaordic path

Some reflections on the Art of Hosting and Reimagining Education « to innovate or understand  to work with human complexity with problems that are not clouds and not clocks we need people and inquiry creative diversity to act and respond with creative possibilities we need learning insights connections new ways of seeing and acting emerge.«  On …

L’art de l’invitation

Intervenir dans des contextes participatifs, c’est s’exposer à une certaine dose d’inconnu. C’est ouvrir des espaces et tenir des conversations où là où on arrive est souvent très différent de ce qu’on imaginait au départ. Dans ma pratique de facilitateur et de concepteur de processus participatifs, les personnes qui m’appellent font face à des questions …

Comment agir quand tout est incertain?

Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky on Unsplash Des voisins se regroupent dans un stationnement pour se préparer à agir devant une rivière qui monte et menace d’envahir des maisons jusque là protégées par les digues. Un groupe de citoyens, d’entrepreneurs et d’organisations rencontrent des fonctionnaires de la ville pour réfléchir ensemble à comment donner à tous les …

Living in between

Image by Michael Grab @ Gravity Glue “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time …” (TS Eliot,The Four Quartets) I come alive in hearing the flock of voices within myself. I enter a conversation with allies …

Le pouvoir des espaces

J’étais récemment avec un client pour concevoir ensemble un atelier participatif pour une quinzaine de personnes, dans le but de les amener à penser collectivement à un projet de centre qui sera un atout pour leur quartier. C’est un processus assez simple, où on alterne entre des moments de réflexion individuelle, des moments en petits …

Poems from me to We: harvesting Humanness

Nowadays I find myself living in two questions, both in my work and in my life: 1) What is hosting? and 2) How can we host from the rim of a circle? I recently happened to join a group that was gathered in Ottawa to design a new conversation model that can engage all Canadians — in …