Organizing Patterns

Over the millennia, human beings have developed many different ways of organizing together. One of the questions that the Art of Hosting community is continually asking itself is “What are the organizational concepts that we can develop together that are actually good for us, and are good for this time?”

Circle / Council - Nomadic Age		Hierarchy – Agricultural Age
Networks – Information Age		Bureaucracy – Industrial Age

Circle
The mother of all our organizational forms – humans started sitting in circle as soon as they invented fires to sit around. We told stories, held elder councils and solved problems in this way. This form is very useful for reflection, storytelling, being together. Purpose is in the centre – it is shared.

Triangle (hierarchy)
Then we stopped our nomadic wandering and settled in one place, we developed agriculture. Some people had more or better land than others, and we began to develop hierarchies where one person or group of people had power and every body else did not. And now we had belongings that we needed to protect. The triangular form of hierarchy is very useful for action, for getting things done. The boss says “this is what needs to happen”, and the others say “yes, sir!” and do it. Purpose is at the top.

Square (bureaucracy)
The more we got settled, the more we had to sustain. Our systems got very complicated, our population exploded, and the bureaucracy developed. It really is a development of the hierarchy, and becomes very complex, with lots of structures and processes involved. Bureaucracy is fantastic for stability and maintaining the status quo, and for managing complex situations. It typically moves slowly. Purpose in the bureaucracy is also at the top.

Networks
A more recent organizational form, networks are collections of individuals, circles or triangles – nodes that are connected together. We rarely find networked collections of bureaucracies, but networks can and often do spring up inside them. Networks are great for relationship and innovation, and for getting things done fast. The connection is guided by individual purpose. The different nodes are connected together because their respective purposes need each other. Once the need is no longer there, the network connection will most often lapse.

When a new organizational form emerges, the older ones do not disappear. Each form has both advantages and shortcomings – each is good for different things.

When we want to start an organisation ourselves or organize something in our lives, which one of these organizational forms do we choose? What we have seen in the Art of Hosting community is that we need to build structures that can use any of these forms at the right time. As need arises, how are we able to respond with the most useful organizational form?

When something needs to get done, then triangle is great. When we need to stop and reflect, circle is useful. When we need stability, it is good to have a bureaucracy. When we need to innovate, networks work best. So what is the next level of organizational form that can hold all of these? The Art of Hosting community is observing the emergence of a new pattern…

Introducing the fifth paradigm

At the centre, always, is our purpose. Typically, a core team will gather in a circle around a purpose, which will be based on meeting a need that is felt in our life contexts. As we gather around the core purpose, we begin to form relationships with others in the circle that, as we map the connections, start to show up as a network. But while these relationships can help us all with our individual work, they do not necessarily allow us to manifests our shared purpose in the world, which will typically involve making things happen. The first step might be to develop actions to sustain the core team. So individual members take responsibility for different aspects – like organizing meetings or raising funds - other members step up in a support role and this leads to the formation of triangles. The triangles will be dictated by the central purpose. Hierarchy forms in response to central purpose – not somebody’s ego!

Once the core team is sustainable, the next step is typically to open up the conversation to the wider community that feels the need that informs the purpose at the centre of our circle. A triangle from the core team might then get together to call a larger-scale assembly, which might become a circle of supporters for the larger project. The inner circle is reaching out to the next level, which will in turn reach out to a wider community, creating concentric circles rippling out into our society, each circle connected to the others by triangles animating action informed by the core purpose.


The pattern of core purpose, circles, triangles and networks repeats again and again. Another typical finding is that as the core team goes out into the community and the conversation expands, the core purpose is informed by a broader perspective and is adjusted accordingly, to accommodate the next level of scale and action.

It is important to understand that what we are describing here is not a deliberately designed model, but the description of a pattern that has emerged naturally and spontaneously throughout the global hosting community as we have collectively developed our work of hosting in ever-larger and more complex adaptive systems.

Example of the fifth paradigm: the Food And Society Conference organized by the Kellogg Foundation in the USA.