Playing Flow Game!

These days I had the opportunity to play twice the Flow Game, a "board" game co-created by 8 friends (one of them Jan from InterChange) in 1997-8 when in deep enquiry about entrepreneurship. Its purpose is to ground, strengthen and bring clarity and flow to human beings, their life, leadership and actions.

I have experienced it twice before really playing, both with Tatiana Glad from the Netherlands, but only a teaser for 20 or 30 minutes, one ocasion in Madrid and another one in Milan, both times related to the Hub Practice Academy project we were trying to co-create with other amazing ladies in the Hub Network.

So this time I experienced it twice in Berlin, at my own house so that made me co-host in a way, and with different people and purposes: one the Hub Berlin working group on the professional side and the other one with my partner and two guests, more related to actual partnership. The host was Mary-Alice Arthur, whom I thank her interventions to make the most of the game!

The most important part of the game (and it can be even half of the game or most of it for you) is to define the overarching questions with which you would like to play and explore during the game. When playing in a a group (not a team), it was surprising that the four people around the table had questions related to love and partnership.

My personal question started being "Where does the need of the world meet my own?" but ended up being "How to step into purpose and partnership in the next chapter of my life?" I do have homework to do now, among other, to do a life-mapping, that is to say, write my life in chapters, each year or period with a paragraph explaining it and mapping the patterns of experiences and learnings. A wonderful exercise indeed. Another homework is to do an appreciative enquiry with myself and the question: "When do you fell one with yourself?" That is to make it happen more often. ;-)

On the group side, the overarching question was "How can we work together to create the field for the magic of Hub Berlin to manifest?" but on the personal side I explored "How do I create a permeable boundary to not loose myself when doing what I love?" related to work and boundaries. A key message was to give myself some space between learnings in everyday life!

It was a generally great experience for the rest of the participants, many things became clear (the most important one is to develop the principles of working together before going further in any step) and we got good insight on what our own contribution to the project could be and what we needed to give the best of ourselves to it. Interesting conversation also about what innovative governance models look like.

Remember, you can "call" a host near you and see if you make a game happen at your own place!

Two little gifts

AoH training Berlin

Under the overarching question of "How do we want to lead and learn in changing cities?" the art of hosting workshop took place in Berlin on 18-20th November 2011. Here you can see the registration link and the invitation together with the Facebook Group.

The topics and the participants were just amazing, although we had some trouble with the "images". For some reason, for systemic, for historical reasons, people did not want to be photographs, recorded or taken images in any way. They did not want to share this with the global community of Art of Hosting or anybody at all. So all my photos are from the flipcharts. ;-). It is very interesting anyway! But even better, here you will find the Posterous blog with the whole harvest!

Being the second AoH training I participate in the team, I felt very well in service of the whole, holding space or delivering what was needed. Great experience and learning! In the closing conversation of the team we also had a good one about Spiral Dynamics as well.

Coworking Conference

During the first weekend of November I had the opportunity to take part in a couple of sessions of the international Coworking Conference in Berlin. Here are some photos.

I attended the panel where Michel Bachmann represented the Hub Network called: "Should you start a coworking space as part of a chain, brand or network?" together with Ramon Suares (BetaGroup), Christoph Fahle (betahaus), Karine Sabatier (La Cantine Rennes) and Massimo Carraro (Cowo).

This was verys interesting because there was still a lot to do to explain the difference between a franchising model and a real distributed network, which is what the Hubs around the world are trying to make, actually making it happen now.

The other session I attended was with Dermot Egan and Oliver Marlow from Tilt Studio, a design clinic where I supported them in a world cafe style session related to the space in a coworking space and its community. Importan indeed and I was surprised to see that many spaces are now trying to "host" their communities more actively as offering "just the space" is definitely not enough! Happy to see colleague from Hub Brussels Anis Bedda who was colaborating with the organization. The first coworking conference took place at that Hub the previous year!