A 4-fold way of hosting

First level of the 4-fold way: become a hosting practitioner

• Be Present -  host yourself first - discern between re-action and contribution to the whole - be willing to sit in the chaos - keep the space open -  sit in the fire of the present and the not-knowing

• Participate -  be willing to listen fully, respectfully, without judgement and thinking you already know all the answers - contribute your bit of wisdom

• Be courageous, inviting and willing to initiate conversations that matter - find and host powerful question with the stakeholders - then make sure you harvest the answers, the patterns, insights  and learnings into wise actions

• Be willing to co-create and co-host with others, blending your knowing, experience and practices with theirs, working partnership.

Second level of the 4-fold way: applying hosting in bigger contexts

High quality conversation arises when four characteristics are present:

* People in a group are present and grounded together and working with a common purpose.

* Conversation is hosted in a container that invites participation and self-organisation.

* People engage in participatory leadership, as opposed to top-down leadership, thus making the wisdom of the group more available to itself.

* Groups work together over time, they act and harvest their learning and through feedback loops support wise action.

The Art of Hosting is designing conversations that deliberately work from these principles.  We have been practicing in a way that scales these generative principles up to larger and larger settings, and we sometimes call that work the Art of Participatory Leadership.  The "Art" part refers to that fact that we don't work with pre-determined methods but rather approach each conversation from a design perspective, offering the best design for the context based on these simple principles.