By Ria Baeck and George Pór

[Word version]

 

Seeds for a collaborative inquiry

Scale of reach

Forms of training

Distinguishing domains of community practice

The meaning of scale and the scale of meaning

Sustaining with communities of practice

We are already a community of practice - what are we practicing?

Invitation

 

There's a forum topic of conversation dedicated to what is outlined in this report, here.

 

Seeds for a collaborative inquiry ^top

There are a few things we know and many we don't.

We do know that to reach the scope of collective intelligence and wise action that humankind needs to survive, we must discover/invent the practices that connect us across time and geography. What needs to be co-created at any level (e.g. team, organization or a whole culture) calls for us to keep our connections fresh, current, receptive and capable of acting together with precision, in an instant, when that's what is needed. It calls for us to stay connected with the ongoing processes of our co-creation, our mates, the spark of inspiration in the eyes, and our collective knowing field. Not just for the time of a meeting, training, or conference call, but as a permanent condition of daily life.

What we don't know is: what are the best ways to "sustain action arising from collective meaning and purpose?" This question - that came in an email from Tim Merry on 25 July 2008 - struck a resonant chord in most who received it.

Following that, 10 of us said Yes to a conference call on 1 September. There was a preliminary call on 1 August "to identify some constructs about scaling and sustainability that could be put on the table as raw material for a broader conversation with more folks drawn to these questions." The participants were: George Pór, Phil Cass, Ria Baeck, Tim Merry, and Toke Møller. This report is based on the transcript of that call. We (Ria and George) have attempted to identify key patterns of meaning that emerged from the conversation. All the quotes are from the transcript.

We asked ourselves what had the most heart and meaning for each of us, as we listened to, then read and re-read the transcript. Below is our joint effort to articulate it. We imagine that somebody else reading the transcript could have come up with a different report. The full record of 10 pages is also attached, in case you are tempted to read it. There's much richness in the details that cannot be reflected in this summary.

 

Scale of reach ^top

"The essence of personal transformation, the essence of collective transformation, and the essence of structural innovation that serves life, all have the same DNA. It is probably our consciousness and our practice of consciousness that are the seed stones or elements of that DNA."

"Each of these pieces is deeply integrated but they are also essential distinct elements of how systems change can happen."

The awareness of those different scales was very present throughout our conversation. Here is another expression of it:

"There is that step of commitment to be a practitioner... Then there is when a core group of people makes a collective decision to be in practices that allow them to be a community of practitioners as one thing... Then there is the whole thing around assemblies, stakeholder conversations also becoming ongoing."

 

Forms of training ^top

Those different scales of reach that also represent different levels of complexity to work with, call for different forms of training.

An Art of Hosting training event provides individuals with the experience of hosting themselves, and introduces hosting as a new leadership paradigm and competence. To deliver that value, the trainers need to operate as a collective, a hosting team that acts as a core group inviting others into the hosting experience.

If the objectives of a training event include facilitating collective transformation in leadership teams as core groups, then "classic" AoH training may not be enough. "The Art of Participatory Leadership is a step beyond that, which means training in a leadership paradigm over time, in an ongoing, specific context." To deliver that value, the trainers need to operate from a broader scope, where the community or the organization as whole is the system in focus.

Scaling up yet further, when the need is to host the transformation of a whole organization (maybe with the yet-to-develop "Art of Evolutionary Leadership"?), then the hosting team has to operate from the next higher-level social field, the global one.

In short, the pattern here is that the hosting team must host from the next level up from the field they are hosting.

 

Distinguishing domains of community practice ^top

With each level of training, there is a corresponding level of community of practitioners, distinguished by whatever domain of practice is their focus. Subsequent levels build on familiarity with the practices of the previous one. These communities, at each level, support the shared practice even when the training is over, and help practitioners apply the principles of their art to emerging situations.

The foundational community is the AoH community of practice. Given the global spread of AoH practitioners, it is not one community, more like a network of inter-linking local AoH communities. Their distinguishing domain is hosting conversations that matter.

Building and expanding on that, there can be an Art of Participatory Leadership (APL) community. Its distinguishing domain is hosting sustainable relationships within and across ongoing core groups that host transformation.

Finally, when the domain is the transformation of a whole organization or social system, the CoP focusing on that domain can be called an "evolutionary leadership community."

Like any model or map, this is only an approximation of the territory, and needs fleshing out and refining by the practitioners themselves. The vibrant ecosystem of AoH is constantly producing new communal life forms, such as reading circles, place-based learning centers, and the fellowship of those who are dedicated to nurture the AoH/APL field as whole.

The following diagram is an at-a-glance overview of the patterns described so far.

 

Forms of training	Hosted by	Scale of reach	Sustaining through CoP domains of:
Art of Hosting: introducing a new leadership paradigm; first experiences with being a hosting team	a hosting team	Individuals, and their impact on their organizations or communities	principles and practices of AoH
Art of Participatory Leadership: implementing a new leadership paradigm over time in a specific context	a hosting community, including and bigger than the actual hosting team	core groups or hosting teams, responsible for hosting change initiatives	organizational transformation
Art of Evolutionary Leadership (?): sustaining large-scale systemic change	a hosting community, including "eagles:" wise advisors	organisations, networks, social systems	world-centric, multi-sectoral change work

 

The meaning of scale and the scale of meaning ^top

We started exploring what we mean by "scaling," why scaling is important to us, and how it is already happening. What follows needs more exploration and unpacking; it provides rich starting points for the continuing inquiry.

"People are building connections across previously fragmented pieces. That is how scale works: pieces start being connected. People enter into a relationship with each other that includes and transcends the purpose of the individual pieces."

Everything is scaling up. "The problems in the world are going to scale. The needs in the world are going to scale. Trust is going to scale."

But "we are not talking about large systems alone; we are talking about scale that is inside us!" The larger the scale of action, the broader is its scope, the greater must be people's commitment to their own personal evolutionary practices (see diagram below) if they are to be reliable and trustworthy practitioners of hosting transformation in self, organizations and society. Inner and outer work is not separable.

"Coming together around specific content in these new ways is about commitment to a long term journey together, this collective purpose that includes, transcends and sustains my personal transformation and consciousness, that is the underpinning of the collective change we are going through."

"You cannot take these practices apart, you cannot choose one or the other. You have to choose all of them - in your own way and whatever is possible in the context - but it is a deep essence that taking it apart, it may not be possible to create sustainable change that we can be proud of and has dignity for all."

What connects the inner and outer dimensions of scaling up is its meaning as "expansion, wider space where more can happen that is good."

Grounded in being the change that we want to cause, hosts of transformation recognize the specific systemic interdependences that underly what needs to be changed. At that point, they start seeking and finding allies for changing the defining context. That's how the purpose, the meaning of their work is scaling up.

"What are the operating practices that will allow large scale change to happen?" That is a question that begets the collective self-reflection of all those who are engaged in scaling up organizational or social innovation. What we do know is that large-scale change will not happen - cannot be be sustainable - if it is not integral.

The evolution of individual consciousness does not have an answer to all our crises; neither do improvements in our health, culture or technologies, especially if we overemphasize any of them at the expense of others. Large-scale change must be approached with an integral lens, including all "four quadrants" (Ken Wilber), or it will collapse, causing more problems than it tries to solve.

 

 

 

Sustaining with communities of practice ^top

"We know how to create community and relationship that has meaning in very short periods of time now, where we can sink into that quality of relationship. The challenge is now: How to build long-term sustainability into these relationships so that they continue creating magnificent things over time?"

Holding the "four quadrants" as a lens to that question, we see:

1. individual authenticity, commitment to evolve and host oneself (upper left)

2. evolving practices in hosting conversations that matter (upper right)

3. cultivating a culture of networked learning communities (lower left)

4. creating the right mix of technological and economic enablers (lower right)

The "lower left" work is part of the iceberg that Tim Merry referred to on the call: "I saw the tip of the iceberg in terms of some new thinking about Communities of Practice and how it relates to what is cooking in the Art of Hosting / Participatory Leadership field."

"Communities of practice are groups of people who share a passion for something that they know how to do, and interact regularly to learn how to do it better." -- Etienne Wenger. Communities of practice (CoP) are central to the strategy of "Using Emergence to Take Social Innovations to Scale."[1]

Many of us reading this report, are members of one or more such communities, thus directly benefitting from and contributing to them. Communities of practice[2], like any other social life forms, grow through stages of development. We have found both Etienne Wenger's 5-stage model[3] and NASA's and David Sibbet's 7-stage[4] model useful to illuminate that journey.

An important developmental shift occurs when a community of learners becomes a community that learns. The purpose of the first is to enable the members to benefit from the fruits of the group's shared knowledge and experience. The purpose of the second is the same, plus to advance the whole field of practice and knowledge and create social value.

Communities that learn develop a shared memory and continually augment their collective intelligence, thus both the capacity to respond to emergent challenges and opportunities, and resilience. A key enabler of that is a well-tended community knowledge garden that can be accessed anytime from anywhere.

We are already a community of practice - what are we practicing? ^top

"Art of Hosting was born out of people stepping into learning relationships to advance the field. That feels to me as rooted in CoP."

"In this call we are in a CoP, we are practicing what we are talking about!"

Yes to both, and CoPs, like any other life forms, go through stages of development. In the coalescing phase, we recognize the value of learning/training together and engage in it. In the maturing stage, which the AoH community is now beginning to enter, we need to learn to pay shared and sustained attention to our community knowledge garden. That includes the AoH website, blogs that hosts write, the AoH lists, and the AoH community site at Evolutionary Nexus. How can the wiser uses of that garden increase its value to all members and their stakeholders? This is a central question in the life of all maturing CoPs.

"CoP yes, but what are we practicing?"

The first practice is the same as "a core element for going to scale (and to become sustainable over the long run): Hosting oneself within a hosting team that is committed to a purpose."

Another practice connects us with the social technology of Theory U. "The piece of AoH in the U-process is part of the envisioning innovative structural change, and then the requirements to be in that kind of relationship to oneself and to each other to sustain the consciousness that lives below the structural innovation that we bring into communities. " It is also a practice "to stay in this chaordic space and to go there again and again."

Yet another practice is to " intentionally sow the seeds for CoPs, with AoH and Art of Participatory Leadership trainings." That also means to make transformation stick, to be sustainable, when supported by communities of practice at any scale shown in the "Domains of CoP" table. The practice includes increasing our individual and collective capacity to assess the community-readiness of the situation and engage the process of hosting the community when that is called for.

Of course, these are only examples. The question "what are we practicing?" is a precious question to hold, not to give a definitive answer to. In fact, holding that question in the community's shared attention and meaning-making processes is a way in which CoPs evolve.

 

Invitation ^top

"I think what we are inviting here - and being invited into through the work we are involved in - deserves that we have a conversation, so something gets sharper that we invite others into. I am sensing an ongoing circle spiraling into more and more clarity. "

That conversation can take place by combining recorded conference calls and in-person dialogues, when we are lucky to in each other's company, in the AoH community blog and wiki at Evolutionary Nexus. If you feel called to participate, you are invited.

 

Contact: Ria.Baeck(at)community-intelligence.com

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[1] By Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, http://www.evolutionarynexus.org/node/620/

[2] An excellent introduction to the concept is here: http://www.ewenger.com/theory/communities_of_practice_intro.htm

[3] See diagram at http://www.elearningeuropa.info/extras/img/think.gif, from Wenger, E., R. McDermott, and W. Snyder, Cultivating Communities of Practice. 2002: Harvard Business School Press.

[4] See: http://wiki.nasa.gov/cm/wiki/?id=2698

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