In the previous blog I shared my experience and learnings from the first 2 days of the Art of Hosting Training, which I attended in Bengaluru (7-10 Dec’24). This blogs covers the last 2 days of the training.
While here, I would like to briefly mention about the diversity of the participants. We had participants from all over the India and from different age-groups. Their field of interests or work were social welfare, education, FPO, wildlife, sports, designers, public policy, corporate and of-course life. There was immense knowledge and experience with-in the itself group, that it felt like we can find solution of any problem thrown to us.
Day 3
Feed Forward & Check-IN
Our training started with the feed forward in which one of the participant summarised Day-2 training and we did our Check-IN activity to bring our full attention to the training. I do not recall the question of the activity but it was the most touching experience of my recent past, where everyone just took spoke from their heart and shared their very personal incidents openly with the smaller group. It was the power of the question that opened us all.
Harvest
The word “Harvesting” comes from the farming. Like a farmer, who first envisions the kind of harvest he/she is looking for and then work backwards to plant the seeds, setup water management, fertilisers etc; similar the AoH practitioner first tries to envision the kind of output and then work backwards to choose the right methods, tools and practices.
We can do the harvesting individually or collectively and look for the tangible and intangible harvests. Tangible harvests are the ones which we can see like charts, notes, visual etc and intangible are the ones which we can’t see like bond between people, change in attitude, affection etc. As a host, one would want to bring the intangible outcome to tangible ones. Harvesting is very vast topic and would like to cover it later blogs once I practice for few months.
Open Space Technology / Marketplace
Assuming we have a diverse set of people and some of them are very eager to discuss and seek opinions about their matter, which is of deep interest to them or currently they are working on; How would you host that?
One of the way to achieve it via Open Space Technology. In that we can create some open slots and let the people propose their topic of interest with a quick pitch; for a specific slot. Once all the slots are filled and rearranged(if required); we can open floor and let the discussion begin.
In Open Space, we can have different kind of participants like some who stick with the full conversation, some move between the conversations to cross-pollinate the ideas. All of those kinds are welcome.
Open Space is very useful when people/groups have their own agenda and want to co-create solutions together. During our training we got more than 15 topics of interest.
Open Spaces
For the Open Space I proposed the topic on “How can I start Circle Practice with my Family ?” And few folks showed up. We got around 30 mins to discuss about. For the one line summary of the discussion I think I mentioned : Start small, be regular and show your vulnerability.
I also got the chance to experience the Flow Game in the Open Space, hosted by two of the fellow certified game practitioners. As per creators of the Flow Game, any individual in always juggling 3 kind of Balls :-
- Personal Learning journey
- How to earn Honourable living ?
- How I can contribute to the community ?
To be honest if anyone can answer above questions then one has done the self discovery and this game enables us to do that. With just 90 minutes of experience I can say that and would be playing it for longer time soon.
8 Breaths of Design
In the previous blog I mentioned about the Breath Pattern and “8 Breaths of Design” is kind of extension of that. Over the years many hosts have identified different initiatives as different ‘breaths‘, which are
- The Call
- Calling the core question
- Clarify
- The caller and host work together to clarify the purpose
- Invite
- Design and invite different/diverse participants
- Meet
- Meeting for the conversation
- Harvest
- Making sense of the discussion to get the real meaning
- Act
- Implement the decided action plan
- Reflect and Learn
- What have we learned ? Have we attained our purpose ? Next steps …
- Breath that holds all above
- Outer breath, which holds above seven breaths together.
Above may not happen in sequence and for some few iterations may be required.
Check-OUT & Celebration
We also had a celebration team which planned different activities/performance but it all gone in vain. As soon as music started, everyone just started dancing like we were here just for that. Nothing else could happen and we danced for more than 2 hours.
So this was another fun-filled day with a lots of learning.
Day 4
Comparing to other days, Day 4 was the lightest day. We started the training with the feed-forward and check-INs.
Design for Wiser Action
The Design for Wiser Action process connects all that we have learned in all the last 3 days. This also gives opportunity to some of the participants to share their project they are working on or responsible for, with others to have them co-create the design of actions to bring it to life.
In this, all the callers stand in a circle and calls out the project he/she seeking the help. Then others who wants design with the caller, stand behind him/her. Post that they sit in a group and the caller gives the overview of the project, along with the calling question and desired harvest. Everyone then tries to design the action plan like what methods and processes needs to be followed when the actual discussion would take place with the stakeholders. The group may suggest like who should host/co-host the session, sequence of processes to be followed like Check-INs, Circle, World-Cafe, Open Space, Harvest etc.
After about 90 mins the group members moves to different groups and new set of participants joins the caller. Caller then summarises what happened in the previous discussion and turn back to NOT look at the participants . The participants then give unbiased opinion about the progress so far and the caller takes the notes. As caller is not facing the participants, participants do not see the reaction and can give suggestions freely. This is really an amazing experience. In the third round the participants joins back the original table and take the discussion forward after getting the update from the previous round.
I joined two callers. In the first one, the caller was trying to bring transparency in the FPOs (Farmers Producers Organisations) and the second in which the caller was trying to envision the future of a company after few years.
Final Check-OUT
After we finished our last activity, we sat down in a circle for the final Check-OUT to share our overall experience. It was the most emotional activity of the entire training. It was like leaving a family and going into the wild again to find our ways. I am pretty sure this is just a start for many of us and our roads would cross again soon.
My sincere thanks to the hosting team Maria Scordialos, Mansi Jasuja, Narayan Silva, Malinda Varfi, Joanna Pyres, Archana Tomar and the organising team consisting of Senthil Kumar G and Karthikeyan Gopinathan.
I am currently refining my calling question and would revert back with more details soon….
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