Social Media is a Collaborative Network

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Kathy Jourdain

A decade ago social media as we know it today didn’t exist. There was email. There were some early versions of social networking tools and electronic sharing platforms making their way into the world. But they lacked the magic and general appeal that seemed to come with the advent of Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, and then the proliferation of ning sites attempting to promote and build community. Even technologically unsavvy folx like me could begin to find their way around these tools and step not just into an information exchange but into a sense of community.

Now we are witnessing the mass mobilization of people – interconnected communities of people – through the use of social media in delightful and profound ways. Social media is not just a means of communication anymore, it is a means of mobilizing and shifting the very foundations of societies and issues. In a way, social media is providing a vehicle for leadership in unprecedented ways.

Each individual social medium is a collaborative network and, because the media overlap and are connected to each other, with many individuals linked into more than one, the many forms of social media are also a collaborative network shifting the shape of our world and the patterns of our interactions. Deep personal connections have emanated out of relationships built through social media where the people involved have never actually physically met.

There is enormous power in the collaborative networks that have emerged through social media and amazing success stories. Social media itself and many of the success stories challenge our traditional notions of power, leadership and how stuff gets done.

Some of the characteristics of social media networks that contribute to its amazing power and success are:

self-organization – people join and participate out of their own sense of interest and passion, participating where and when they choose
basic framework or structure – the self-organization takes place within a basic structure that provides just enough form for the self-organization to flow well
freedom – freedom within the basic form to go where you want and engage in only that which catches your attention – the content is determined by the people in the network and anything that doesn’t have its own momentum will just naturally die out without anyone trying to prop it up or unnaturally prolong it; anything that has its own momentum can soar like wild fire around the globe
weaving of communities – people naturally gravitate to others through common interests; little communities emerge around those common interests
illumination – social media tools illuminate the connections so we can actually see the webs literally around the globe, discovering who is connected to who and finding new friends or interests through existing networks of friends
shared leadership – there is no central point of leadership in these collaborative networks – it is shared and rotating based on interest, passion and compelling story at the time – it is not dependent on any one individual, organization or cause to generate connection or action and usually those who contribute to this leadership are not getting paid to provide leadership – they are simply responding to their own sense of passion and direction

What can we learn from the collaborative social media networks that informs our understanding of collaborative leadership at its best? This is one of the questions we will be exploring in the Art of Collaborative Leadership March 16-18, 2011 in Halifax. What if we could harness this power to fundamentally shift how we organize and lead in our organizations and communities to become more resilient and focused while operating within a minimal framework that holds it altogether with enough structure for amazing things to routinely emerge?

Shifting the Shape of the Game

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Kathy Jourdain

On the weekend, my eight year old son and I played mini-golf. As I took the score card, he told me he didn’t want to keep score. I found myself a bit attached to keeping score – what’s the point if we don’t? But I agreed, grumbling a little in my mind.

It felt a bit strange starting, knowing we weren’t keeping score, feeling like my shots didn’t “count”.

On about the third hole, his first shot didn’t go very far. In fact, you could probably say it failed. He looked at me and asked if he could take it over.

Could he take it over? I realized his question was kind of pointless if we weren’t keeping score. It didn’t matter if he “took it over” or not – it wouldn’t be reflected anywhere. Of course, he could take another shot.

He asked the same question a couple more times and I told him it didn’t matter – of course he could. And that was about when I realized it did matter – but in a different way than through the traditional lenses through which we were both seeing the game – me through the lens of keeping score in order for the game to have meaning and him through the lens of continuing to ask permission to re-do a shot to keep his score low.

We had shifted the shape of our game, but we both still playing by the old rules. How often does this happen in the larger world? How often do we continue to play by the old rules even when we know we want something different, even when the field opens up for something different to emerge. It is only through awareness, reflection and mindfulness that we are able to fully embrace the shifting shape of the game and shape shift ourselves to flow well with the emergence that then becomes available.

In that moment of realization, the potential of the new “rules” opened up. Not only could my son re-do a shot, but he could now “safely” develop his skill at the game without feeling the need to “cheat” to try to keep his score low. So instead of sliding his ball into the hole, now he could “risk” hitting it to see what happened and learn how he could improve.

It was just a game of mini-golf — and it was so much more than a game of mini-golf. Grateful to this youngster who is such a teacher in my life.

Art of Hosting: Example of a Collaborative Network

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Kathy Jourdain

The Art of Hosting is an example of a collaborative network. It’s not the only one but it is the one I am most familiar with and it is the one I find myself speaking about most often when the topic of new models of organization or business comes up.

The Art of Hosting network emerged organically, even before it was called Art of Hosting (AoH) as practitioners of dialogic processes gathered to inquire into what it was they did that was different and what were the conditions that contributed to their successful consulting or process work. They created the conditions for relevant and meaningful conversations to occur in such a way that the conversations individuals, organizations and communities had were different and more impactful than the ones they traditionally had had and where wiser, more informed action often emerged.

As trainings were offered – always co-hosted by a team, they were a place of co-learning and open source sharing and such a meeting of mind, heart and spirit that people naturally wanted to stay in touch to continue sharing and learning. Teams of hosts were invited into the same work together and variations of these host teams emerged as people newly introduced to AoH who wanted to deepen their understanding and practice began to call AoH trainings and join host teams.

Somewhere along the way, the AoH listserve was born and, as is typical of listserves, there are sporadic bursts of activity around themes that catch fire among some list serve members and there is also silence for some periods of time.

There were always people who carried a deep curiousity about this work and what, for many of the AoH practitioners I know, is a sense of deep calling. They – we – work together often, deepening learning and often find each other at other gatherings like, for instance, ALIA.

From early on the notion of stewarding began to emerge and there have been many conversations along the way about what is stewarding, what is a steward, who is a steward, what is the AoH, how do we protect the integrity of this work, is there a brand, what do we do when someone calls an AoH training and no one in the network seems to know who they are. These kinds of questions are integral to gatherings of stewards – practitioners who do not just use the AoH in their work but tend to the larger field. A steward seems to be someone who understands deep within themselves what we call the DNA of the AoH – the formative field from which the AoH emerged.

Over the last decade, the number of AoH offerings has grown exponentially through public offerings and through client work that many of us are engaged in. These offerings have now occurred literally around the world, although not in every country yet. We have experimented with forms of AoH like the Art of Participatory Leadership, the Art of Collaborative Leadership, the Art of Social Innovation, the Art of Harvesting, the Art of Protection, the Art of Humans Being and I’m sure there are more.

The AoH network is not without its faults or its own shadow. It resists defined structure, hard and fast rules and continues to be organic despite calls from time to time for definitive answers. It resists responding in traditional ways and roles. Not everyone is happy with the way it works. And it works exceptionally well.

There is no central office and there are no staff. While not a perfect system, AoH host teams are invited to share a percentage of the revenue earned in trainings to help support the technology that is key to connecting this global community and to offer something to those in this network who host this on our behalf. And any of us can also contribute personally.

The AoH community is held together by a strong sense of purpose and principles in the work, a commonality of language and practice and core methodologies, processes, and world views. We understand that before we can host others, we must host ourselves and that we grow the body of knowledge and our own knowledge and practice through communities of practice.

It is easy to find people to work with on small and large projects and on systemic change work because there is such a strong alignment of principles and values. I’m a sole practitioner but I’m not a sole practitioner because at any given time I either draw on the body of knowledge of the AoH or the mates I have in this network. I have the privilege and benefit of often working on international hosting teams – here and elsewhere.

As the network grows, the sense of caring for the core of the AoH grows stronger amongst those of us who feel we are stewarding something here, recognizing that it is completely impossible to control how it spreads, nor would we want to. That is both the beauty and power of it – and the frustration. It is a chaordic organization.

When we come together as teams to work together there are no hard and fast rules but there is certainly a sense of honour and integrity in relationships and of patterns of hosting and relationship. We operate by agreement and we determine who and how host team members get paid by agreement achieved in conversation each time we gather. People who are not part of this network sometimes have a hard time understanding that we don’t necessarily need a written contract to work with each other (like when one of my good friends was trying to get into Halifax to co-host with me and others and the customs officials asked several times to see the non-existent contract).

We care deeply about this work, about this body of knowledge, about this community and about the relationships we have entered into that are enduring for many of us. We have a lot of conversation – purposeful conversation. We don’t have a lot of structure.

A lot of information on AoH can be found on the website and on the community ning. What I’m offering here is just one version of a very large story, the beginning of which I did not actually witness. I don’t think this form of organization is the right form for every organization but with the clients I work with who are in a question of what next and how to structure their organization, I offer it out as an example to take some learnings from. I also talk about World Cafe and Berkana, among others, as organizations experimenting with different organizational models. Built on trust. Built on relationship. Purpose. Principles.

And, it will be one of the collaborative networks used as an example during the Art of Collaborative Leadership next month in Halifax as we explore the conditions that foster good collaborative networks and what their role is in shifting the shape of the world.

Creating Conditions for Collaborative Conversations

Posted on February 6, 2011 by Kathy Jourdain

Collaboration is a process where two or more work together with deeply held collective intention and determination to reach a shared objective. As the planning for the Art of Collaborative Leadership (March 16-18 in Halifax) begins, we are becoming even more curious about what it really means to be collaborative, the leadership or relational skills that foster collaboration and the subtle changes that can shift the shape of a relationship from defensive, tentative, co-existing or cooperative to collaborative.

The opportunity for collaborative relationships begins to show up when we recognize there could be more power or strength in creating a collaborative space or action. It also begins to show up when we become curious about what more could happen if we could generate a space of shared understanding – although that usually starts from a place of “I wish they understood us and our point of view better.”

If we want to change the nature of our conversations with others, we first need to change the nature of the conversations we have with ourselves – personally and/or organizationally. What would need to shift in how you think about potential collaborators in order to open the space for a collaborative relationship to form and then deepen so it has the potential to create sustainable and fundamental shifts in the area/work/system you care about?

What are the different dimensions and depth of collaboration? What does it take to stay in a collaborative relationship, especially during the episodes of difficulty that often challenge our understanding of the relationships we are in?

These are some of the questions we will be inviting into the Art of Collaborative Leadership. What about you? What questions are you holding? Will you share them? Will you come?

If you want to come, you can register at this Berkana site. If you can’t come but want to contribute you can follow the conversation on Twitter using #a0cl or at the Art of Hosting Community Site.

Art of Collaborative Leadership March 16-18/11 Halifax

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Kathy Jourdain

Can a focus on collaboration, collaborative networks and collaborative leadership as strategies for shift and change create leverage for more sustainable results and the means for us to move beyond episodes of enthusiasm to fundamental shifts in our work, organizations and communities?

This is one of the questions we will be exploring at the Art of Collaborative Leadership, March 16-18, 2011 in Halifax. Related themes that will guide and focus our time together:

Growing our knowledge and ways of working with collaborative networks
Connecting people, ideas, initiatives in this city (and beyond) who are doing cool things and bumping up against similar challenges to co-learn and co-strategize how to move past those barriers
Furthering specific work that participants bring into the training ground so that they leave with clarity about what’s next in their work, project or big idea

An exciting and diverse host team has emerged for this AoCL – diverse in age, perspectives, background and experiences, linked together by our passion for hosting inspired spaces, co-creation and collaboration and for how much we care about what’s happening in the world right now, believing that Collaborative Leadership is one of the routes to shifting the shape of our world(s).

We will be using an on-line forum to begin before the training even starts and to continue to follow the questions and the group learning post the training. (Anyone can follow us and contribute on Twitter #aocl). We will be offering the opportunity for participants to join together in a group call or in a one-on-one conversation with someone from the host team (our hosts from New York and Minnesota are wanting to touch in with our community before they arrive for the training). And we will offer a follow up about 45 days later along with the ongoing online conversation. We are imagining we may spark a community of practice out of this training, linking to Envision grads and AoH people in this city.

What more will sprout out of this fertile ground? We have no way of knowing but we are preparing to be surprised! What about you? Will you join us? Will you contribute to the conversation?

The Wisdom of Failure

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Kathy Jourdain

This past weekend I was deeply inspired by youth leadership at Dalhousie University‘s student led Brains for Change event. Thirty or so community resource people (me being one of them) were invited to participate in conversations with well over 100 students about big ideas that could become projects over the next few months. Some amazing ideas to shift the shape of our city emerged – like get Halifax certified as a Fair Trade City.

I got to be in some cool conversations and one of them was about failure. One of the risks we seem afraid of is anything that might remotely become failure. And yet, failure is what we need in order to foster innovation, new ideas and new ways of doing things. We put up so many barriers – risk management, liability, public response – that we stifle creativity.

We also often respond to failure in very personal ways. We need to remember failure is an action, not an identity. It is not who we are or what we are; rather it is an event or situation, or it is related to a choice we have made – individually or collectively. Yet, most of us, at some point in our lives, have worn failure as an identity or have played the blame game around it.

In these situations, we have difficulty separating ourselves from the event or situation. It brings up all kinds of emotions: anger, guilt, regret, remorse, sadness, a sense of having let others – or ourselves – down. It can be overwhelming at times if we lose our sense of self in the failure. We might even be haunted by it, generating fear about participating in anything that might lead to another failure.

Personally or organizationally, in order to let it go, we need to be able to separate our sense of who we are, individually and collectively, from the actions or choices that led to the failure. We need to redefine success which then allows us to redefine failure. What if success was actually the learning process – what we learn from what happened – whether we see it as a success, partial success, not quite successful or dismal failure?

Let’s step back from the failure so we can get a different perspective of it. What happened? What led to what happened? What decisions were made? Based on what information? Did we pay attention to all the information – the analytical, intellectual and the intuitive or gut reactions? What could we do differently? What’s the next iteration or prototype of what we were trying to do?

Failures provide valuable information – personally and organizationally. They help us know when we’re off course or when we’re not paying attention to something in our environment. Sometimes they lead us in a direction we hadn’t previously anticipated. In both business and personal circumstances “failure” has led to big breakthroughs. The classic business example is 3M’s post-it notes, now an institution in both home and office. Someone recognized the opportunity in a product “failure” (a glue that didn’t stick things together) and created a new revenue stream for 3M and a new way of drawing attention to things. What did we do before post-it notes?

Personal experiences of failure are often those points we look back on with gratitude because they shift the shape of our lives in ways we couldn’t have otherwise imagined.

Innovative businesses and communities cultivate an environment where making mistakes is not only acceptable but recognized as a valuable part of the innovation process. Mistakes only become failure when they are not learned from.

We wouldn’t be who we are today without our failure experiences. They help define us; sometimes they show us exactly what we’re made of. Bottom line is, we make the best decisions we can, with the knowledge, resources and awareness we have available to us at the time. It’s easy to see, with 20/20 hindsight, we should have done something different. The question now becomes what to do with the 20/20 hindsight to change patterns or increase your knowledge going forward so that “failure” becomes the wisdom from which you grow, innovation emerges and success is created.

The best thing we could do for youth leaders is create environments where we grow our risk and failure muscles knowing that this is actually a route to success – sometimes beyond measure – one of the many topics we may end up exploring during the Art of Collaborative Leadership from March 16-18, 2011.

The Art of Collaborative Leadership

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Kathy Jourdain

What if we could grow our courage and resilience in working with the status quo that says it wants to change but doesn’t seem to know how? What if all we need to do is connect with others doing amazing work in our town who are facing similar challenges so we can grow and learn together how to move beyond episodes of enthusiasm to sustainable, visible and fundamental shifts?

The Art of Collaborative Leadership is an emerging way to meet a world that is increasingly complex and concerned. It is a training and, more importantly, a practice ground for people who want to discover how collaboration can shift the shape of the world as a new core leadership capacity. This gathering will contribute to the collective understanding of the Art of Hosting field around the world on how to do this better, more strategically and more meaningfully. It is to amplify the ways we are working now, partly thanks to social media, and illuminate the networks through which we currently achieve results so we can hone our skill at this and become even more strategic.

We build networks and collaboration through conversation that allows us to discover the cool things we are working on and the cool things there is to know about who we are, what we are passionate about and how we show up in the world.

Mark your calendar for March 16-18, 2011 and prepare to name, illuminate, connect and grow collaborative leadership and networks in this city and beyond. Registration details available soon. For an advance copy of the invitation send me a note.

The amazing hosting and calling team – myself, Martin Siesta, Nancy Eagan, Jerry Nagel, Sophia Horwitz, Ryan Deschamps, and Rachel Derrah – looks forward to meeting you where we all are and leveraging that to see what emerges.

2010 Enduring Impression – Deep Gratitude

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Kathy Jourdain

People who know me who are familiar with my life’s journey know that I have very few short stories. I have the most amazing, incredible and sometimes almost unbelievable stories of my life and 2010 was no exception. This year continued to bring some very big stories of experience into my life. 2010 has been a year of completion where I became aware that a five year deep transition period came to a close, opening up into a much gentler and no less transformative era of unfolding – one I hope endures into the rest of my life.

This year has brought the deepest sense of trust in this life journey that I have ever experienced, searing into my awareness how much I am supported in the world and in my journey. I have been aware of this over the years but there was some associated doubt, worry and fear. No longer. I have landed with exquisite delight and amazing joy in this place of trust. When I do notice doubt, fear or angst lurking around the edges I know now to inquire into it and to ask for support to navigate my way through it with far more grace than I could have imagined possible.

I have learned depth of relationship and the gift I have for creating the space for this by being open, vulnerable, curious, loving and open hearted. I have been gifted with depth and beauty of friendship by learning to be present and available for the relationship that is available to me, rather than wishing for relationship that is not.

Highlights for 2010 include the Art of Social Innovation at Windhorse Farm in NS in April, moving into my new house in Bedford in May, attending ALIA in Halifax in June, visiting my sister and her husband on vacation with my youngest son in July, Warrior of the Heart training and the Art of Hosting Stewards gathering on Bowen Island in BC in August, Brazil, beautiful, amazing Brazil in October and then the Berkana Weaving the Web gathering in New York also in October, an invitation into a beautiful spiritual women’s circle in November. Permeated throughout all of these events or gatherings is the people, the rich friendships, people I love dearly who I also often have the good fortune to work with, some of whom I just met in this last year and others I have known for a very long time, all of whom I feel deep connection with.

As this year draws to a close, my most enduring feeling is one of deep gratitude – for what has evolved and emerged in my life, for this new constant of joy and falling in love everyday, for my children who touch me deeply and from whom I learn lots, for my dad who loves me unconditionally, my mother who continues to show me the extent of soul journey on this earth, to my friends here and all over the world who have my back and I have theirs, to the shamanic journey that has characterized my path far more than I ever knew, for this deep sense of trust that is becoming ingrained in me, to sensing deeply into where I am supposed to go, what I am supposed to do and how I can best do that which is mine to do.

I love how the shape of my life has shifted in this last year and I surrender fully into how it will want to shift in the coming years. For the beginning of 2011, I feel expansiveness and readiness – ready to accept more into my life in every conceivable way, ready to be of service to that which is mine to do, ready to nourish relationships I care deeply about and ready to receive all that is wanting to flow into my life.

ShapeShift

The shape of the world is shifting… embracing and being intentional about it

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