Page 2 - The World Cafe

Special Report – Hosting Strategic Conversations 1
Leadership and Hosting
“Strategizing depends on creating a rich and complex web of conversations that cuts across previously isolated knowledge sets and creates new and unexpected combinations of insight.”
Gary Hamel, The Search for Strategy,
Fortune
We’ve talked a lot about the difference between management and leadership, and how these fast-changing times require the latter. However, because of the growing complexity of today’s world, the visionary leader who engages and enables his/her people is no longer enough as one person rarely has the answers.
The role of the leader today is to bring all the key players together and to host conversations that matter. As Suresh Srivastva and David Cooperrider say in Appreciative Management and Leadership,
“Talk is key to the executive’s work... the use of language to shape new possibilities, reframe old perspectives, and excite new commitments.”
In the ‘old days’, you would have a dialog and then move to action. Today, conversation is a central driving force from exploration through implementation.
Because of the power of strategic, meaningful conversations, the leader becomes more of a facilitator, or at a deeper level, the host of these powerful conversations.
For both hosting and facilitating, there is up front preparatory work that needs to be
done. You need to be clear on the purpose of the meeting, who is convening it and what the outcomes are. With facilitating, this often involves discussions with the client – the main contact and possibly others in the organization depending on the nature of the work. After these discussions and consultations though, the process design and flow is largely up to the facilitator. The facilitator can work completely on their own, often guiding the process in a more direct and hands on fashion, circulating among small group discussions to generally keep people to task. There are very good facilitation techniques and they meet very specific needs identified with the client. And there are facilitation techniques that bridge facilitation and hosting like Chrysalis’ Genesis Breakthrough Facilitation Process.
Hosting tends to be more collaborative and a greater amount of the work tends to be done up front, often with a committee that has been struck by the client for the specific purpose of this work. There are often multiple discussions that tend to evolve both the agenda and the flow of the process. The host is still responsible for ensuring good process and flow but the process to achieve this tends to be more iterative. There is a greater sense of community and shared leadership in hosting.
When we do hosting work with our clients, we are much more likely to actively involve them in the process of hosting than when we do facilitation work. It shares the responsibility and it creates an even greater sense of engagement and commitment amongst the people who must own the process and the outcomes. Once
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