Tracking Coyote

This is a piece that Colleen and I are working on. Its a first cut at a larger piece. We are including it in the Work Book for the upcoming Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations Training we are delivering this October here on Vancouver Island. 

 Tracking Coyote: The Spirit of Play in the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter

- By David and Colleen Stevenson

“When we come together to play and be we are truly ourselves. When we are truly ourselves it is wonderful and when we act collectively in that wonder we do transformative work for our community and our world.”

- Brad Colby

In a recent conversation about our approach to the Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations, we stumbled upon the phrase ‘Cartographers of Conversation’ as a quick and fun way to say, “what we do is try to map and make visible the forces, energies, forms and structures imbedded in relationships, and conversations”. 

In the ancient maps there were often metaphoric images of forces acting on the world, for example, the wind as animated clouds blowing their breath across the world. The purpose of these images was to make visible the forces of nature that a traveler would need to understand in journeying in that landscape. Play is one of these primal forces shaping our personal and collective journeys as we travel together into the territory of our most important conversations.

It is not always intuitive to see play as such a elemental force in our personal and organizational lives, largely because of the culturally embedded dichotomy of work and play which assumes that work is meaningful while play is frivolous and not considered relevant to addressing critical issues of our times. But a look into the essence of play reveals a source of our humanity, wisdom and ability to lead and learn from our core. 

Our definition of play

Play is rooted in freedom and self-organization, the organizing principle in creative living systems. Here is a working definition of play by Peter Gray, play researcher and psychologist. It is 

(a) self-chosen, meaning players are free to leave

(b) self-directed

(c) intrinsically motivated

(d) produced in an active, alert, but not distressed frame of mind.

It is this state of play that we often seek to evoke through the practices of the Art of Hosting meaningful conversations. 

World Café, Graphic harvesting and Open Space, all have explicitly playful “philosophies” and practices. The playfulness of these conversational tools is not frivolous, but is a core force for evoking enthusiasm and spirit into our works and actions. The word Enthusiasm is rooted in the Greek word entheos (in spirit) and evoking enthusiasm, is to evoke spirited playfulness into our conversations, our relationships, our organizations and communities. Brian Sutton-Smith says, “The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression.” Without the vital force of enthusiasm and playfulness, work teams, communities, organizations suffer the loss of purpose and connection to spirit.

And this enspiritedness that comes through self-organizing, playful conversational modalities often brings with it the disruption of calcified power structures and agreements. The power of play in hosting important conversations often takes us to the edges of organizational power and design. One of the surprising results of Open Space and World Café are their underlying democratizing effects. Those who work with these processes realize that they can destabilize hierarchies while empowering and humanizing communities and organizations. The playful instinct in these processes is reflected in the insight of Patricia Ramsay, an educational psychologist working in the US.  “Play, while it cannot change the external realities of children’s lives, can be a vehicle for children to explore and enjoy their differences and similarities and to create, even for a brief time, a more just world where everyone is an equal and valued participant.” 

Play as an archetypical force in the structures of governance 

I have found that even in the most rigid environments, the spirit of play channelled through Open Space can move us out of the command and control mode and the reflexive drives for dominance and power found in hierarchical systems, into the self-organizing and living systems models of the circle and the network. And in that process, as Harrison Owen often says, magic happens. And it’s not the magic of entertainment, but of deep transformative shifts in the shape and meaning of our world, and the challenges and opportunities we face. 

In fact Peter Gray, a psychologist focusing on play, suggests that humans have two fundamentally different ways of governing ourselves, through either command and control or play. Like we have seen in Open Space, he says that “the spirit of play can suffuse all sorts of activities, including productive work, and when this happens the playful mode of governance can trump and defeat the hierarchical mode.”

Play as a Living System

In the Art of Hosting Meaningful conversations, one of the core patterns we work with is the distinction between living and mechanical systems. From a play perspective, we see playful organizational governance, built on free association and self-selection, as part of the pattern of a living system. This is in contrast to a mechanical system, where the structure of the system overrides the choice of activities and freedom of the individual. 

And so learning the Art of Hosting and practicing it, is to call upon a presence within our self and hosting mates that is a living core of our work and play. The Art of Hosting is not in its essence about learning the mechanics of conversational design and modalities, but is an evocation of living forces of spirit and re-creation. So it is important not to confuse the work of creating the environment, ie. designing the space or dialogue process, which is the work of the hosting team, with the deeper forces of playfulness, which, like wisdom, are emergent forces under no ones control.  Like a cast on a leg, setting structure to the environment of a broken leg is not healing the leg, it is hosting the healing forces in the body to do their magic. And like the cast on the leg, the work of hosting is often deeply connected with supporting the healing that organizations and communities need to go through. Playfulness taps into the spontaneous, innovative, adaptive, and re-creational capacities needed for this healing. 

Play as a Healing Force

Play is intuitive, built into our very brain circuitry: it is a natural evolutionary force that ensures the adaptability and flexibility necessary for us to sustain in an ever-changing world. Biologist Bob Fagan says of the playfulness of grizzlies in the wild that “in a world continuously presenting unique challenges and ambiguity, play prepares them for an evolving planet.” According to Dr. Stuart Brown, director of the National Institute for Play, when people are deprived of play, they become “fixed and rigid in response to complexity, they don’t have a broad repertoire of choices as broad as their intelligence should allow them to have and they don’t seek out novelty or newness.” It may be fair to say that play deprivation is not only a psychological issue; it is a leadership, organizational and community issue. 

And so the work of Hosting Meaning into our lives, communities and organizations is in a real way about leading with our authentic and playful selves, and inviting that same level of intimacy from others. As Brad Colby puts it so well:

“When we come together to play and be we are truly ourselves. When we are truly ourselves it is wonderful and when we act collectively in that wonder we do transformative work for our community and our world.”