What is the Art of Hosting? ... again!

It has been incredible over the last 15 years seeing the Art of Hosting community grow all over the world. The question keeps coming up on what it is ... so here is the second blog post on it. The first one you can find here by guest blogger Toke Moeller. This post is an email exchange with one of the team of a training I am involved in around participatory leadership in the field of social justice and equity. Check out the website if you want to know more about that. Here's an edited version of the email exchange for those who want to understand what the Art of Hosting is, from my perspective. The titles in orange are the questions I was asked and the text below is the responses ...

QUESTION #1:
​If the Art of Hosting is an approach to leadership consisting of a set of practices for facilitating conversations, then what is the purpose of the company itself? Is it a consulting company that works with organizations looking to effect change in a different, less "traditional" way? Is it a non-profit committed to changing the world, one community of practice at a time?

I was one of those early folks who co-founded the Art of Hosting with Toke - there was probably a group of about 10-15 of us. I helped run the first ever Art of Hosting training in Slovenia with Toke, Jan Hein, Alenka and Miljenka. The impetus came from a realization that many of us were working with all kinds of methods and ways of working that were increasingly participatory - but folks were getting attached to methodologies (open space technology, world cafe, appreciative inquiry, theatre of the oppressed, future search etc etc).

 In our conversations we felt like we were discovering a pattern / architecture that lay underneath all of the methods - a more fundamental pattern. We felt that if we could teach this it would better equip people to design and deliver more participatory approaches in their context - whatever they were … literally equip people to design there own processes, rather than just pick one from the shelf.

This meant training in a world view / way of thinking / way of turing up in the world, something more fundamental than learning a tool. Many of us felt this fundamental shift was part of a bigger picture of change needed in the world. The greatest challenge is not the issues we are faced with (hunger, inequality, economic systems, healthcare, environment, conflict …) but how are we are working together to deal with them. What we were discovering seemed to speak directly to that … a shift in worldview that invited greater participation from all of those impacted by decisions, so the decisions could be wiser - more effective in the short term and longer lasting for future generations.

The Art of Hosting is not a company. It is a global community of people on a shared inquiry on how we can build greater participation and therefore wiser decision making and action for the common good. The closest analogy is that it is like open source software. There is no central decision making body, set of rules or regulations that run it. In fact, I think the more people seek the locus of power in the Art of Hosting community, the more confused and frustrated they become! Not that there is not a differentiation among practitioners; there are some  who have been doing it longer, or have stronger experience in different types of sector or activity. There are people that consider Art of Hosting a spiritual path, some who consider it a community building tool, others that see it as a way to transform our organisations, others that apply it for large scale systems change. There is no simple way to define it - because so many people define it in so many different ways. For me, that is the beauty of it. It is what you make it and the global community is fed by what we share back from individual or group experiences. 

Photos from an early Art of Hosting training, this one in the Netherlands

​QUESTION #2:
​But really ... who is in charge? Where does decision making power and quality control lie? There must be some structure ...

There are a group of global stewards - though this massively expanded over the last few years to the point for me where I no longer completely understand the role. Initially it was set up to help steward the DNA of the Art of Hosting. There has been an agreement that no Art of Hosting training can take place without a steward, I am not completely sure where we are at with this as the stewards circle is now so large. There have been instances where people have been called into account for running trainings when they have no connection to the AoH community and this has just been dealt with on a local level each time. There is a group of folks called the “rock-sitters” - they meet sporadically but have no decision making power as such, their job is more to “hold space”. 

​One of the greatest things about the Art of Hosting for me is that no one can own it. It is not a brand that anyone can take as their own. It is platform for people to develop their own work and then find their own unique way of turning up in the world. I think that is why it has spread so organically - the network lives its rhetoric in that it creates the conditions for people to figure things out themselves, rather than giving them a set of tools to get certified in and go deliver. The learning never ends.

​QUESTION #3:
​What I think I'm really trying to do is figure out how to break the work of AoH down into more traditional, "corporate" terms that the leaders in my institution will understand and appreciate. My end goal is to garner support for my involvement in work about which I am instinctively and inherently passionate. Any clarity you can provide would be tremendously helpful.

​I think what you are pointing at here is the achilles heel in an otherwise incredible experiment in self organized social change. I have written about this a lot on my blog … check out these two blog series: Going Main Stream and Awakening To Normal. I have spent the last few years attempting to find language and approaches that bring this type of work into mainstream organisations and multistakeholder contexts. This has included coming up with own model and way of delivering the work that has departed from how many design and deliver Art of Hosting. The other area for learning / blindspot in the AoH community that I see is around power and privilege and that is why working with Tuesday Ryan Hart has been such a gift to my work and growth as a practitioner.

Even after all these years and the twists and turns of my understanding of my work, it still basically comes down to hosting conversations that matter. If we can't figure out how to get along across our differences it is highly unlikely we'll able to overcome the complexity of challenges we are being faced with. Time to get into training then ...

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Here's some stories from early days of Art of Hosting captured by Ria Beck:

The Art of Hosting Story.pdf
File Size:	129 kb
File Type:	pdf

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