Dear Dave: A letter on hosting, complexity and practice

A humpback whale called “Nova” that we saw the other day. She is about to dive deep. Over the past year I have been corralling my thinking on the Art of Hosting, complexity, dialogic containers and practice into a new shape. If you have been following along here since January, you have seen this thinking taking place in the open. At the heart of the matter is my desire to wrestle with questions of power, epistemic justice and humility, and a desire to become a better teacher and host/facilitator. It has been quite a year of reflection! A number of factors launched me into this work, and one in particular was an important set of blog posts from Dave Snowden that named the Art of Hosting along side other communities of practices and lineages who make a claim that they work with complexity. His posts sought to distinguish his approach to anthro-complexity from the systems thinking lineages out of which many of us come, knowingly or unknowingly. I think there is merit in this distinction…