What is Art of Hosting?
Art of Hosting is a method of participatory leadership for facilitating group processes, used by a loose-knit community of practitioners, in which people are invited into structured conversation about matters they are concerned about while facilitators act as hosts. It is a highly effective way of harnessing the collective wisdom and self-organising capacity of groups of any size, based on the assumption that people give their energy and lend their resources to what matters most to them.
Art of Hosting is not a single method but a practice framework—often called the “art” because skillful facilitation requires contextual sensitivity, ongoing practice, and refinement. Practitioners understand “hosting” as a certain way of facilitation that is supposed to have the capacity of making emerge the collective intelligence that people possess. One focus is on the practice of constructing and holding dialogic “containers,” meetings or processes bounded in space and time, which support constructive group processes and enable new insights and decisions to emerge.
The practice is built around the Four-Fold Practice: hosting oneself (self-awareness and presence), participating (genuine engagement), hosting others (creating safe space for dialogue), and co-creating (collaborative action). The Art of Hosting offers a blend of some of the most powerful methods to create open and meaningful conversation that leads to commitment and good results, working with a range of collaborative methods—like Circle, World Café, Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space Technology, ProAction Café, storytelling and more.
Origins & Lineage
The Art of Hosting is a specific approach and methodology for group facilitation and systems change, developed and curated according to a commons or open-source model by an international community of facilitation practitioners, starting around the late 1990s, or early 2000s. In 2001, the Berkana Institute initiative From the Four Directions brought a number of practitioners together at Castle Borl in Slovenia, where, using Open Space as an organizing system for the gathering, they began to explore more deeply how all these practices might fit together—and The Art of Hosting & Harvesting Conversations That Matter was born.
The Art of Hosting, as a collective inquiry, was finding a home in influential networks including the Pioneers of Change, the Kaos Pilots, The Berkana Institute and the World Cafe community, all of whom were seeking to develop dialogue, conversation and participation as a key skill to make sense of the complexity of the world’s 21st-century problems. These networks were responsible for the rapid global spread of the Art of Hosting, especially amongst young leaders and social entrepreneurs.
There is no single founder. Many lines or streams of work and relationship have been flowing together to make Art of Hosting to what it is these days—it is and was an emerging phenomenon; so there are many ways of telling the story. Key early stewards include Chris Corrigan, Tim Merry, Toke Møller, and Ria Baeck, among others.
How It’s Practiced
Art of Hosting practitioners integrate multiple dialogue methods depending on context and purpose. The circle is the basic form underlying all other forms of participatory process. In the Art of Hosting practice, meetings often begin and end in a circle to support clarity, structure, and shared understanding, allowing participants to “check in” at the beginning and “check out” at the end.
World Café involves small table conversations (4-5 people) rotating in rounds; after the first conversation, someone stays at the table as ‘host’ while others move to a new table, taking their previous conversations with them, so the threads of various conversations are woven together.
Open Space Technology is used when groups need to harness diverse interests and skills to meet urgent challenges; participants self-organize around topics they feel passion and responsibility for.
ProAction Café is a newer innovation blending World Café and Open Space, designed for participants who bring projects or questions and need peer support to move them forward.
The Art of Hosting Conversations That Matter takes into account the whole process—all the preparations before the participants come together, what happens while they are working together, and how the results of their conversation—the ‘harvest’—support next steps that are coherent for their purpose and context.
The approach is rooted in a practice framework that helps facilitators attend to “conversations that matter,” referred to as The Four-Fold Practice, and gives attention to posing significant questions for group consideration, and documenting results from dialogue sessions, termed ‘harvesting.’
Art of Hosting Today
For over 25 years, the Art of Hosting (also known as the Art of Participatory Leadership) has offered simple yet powerful participatory practices to host generative conversations leading to collective action and long-lasting change. From that early, loose group of far-flung colleagues, an international network grew; people began to ask for training, the training developed into three days and now it has been offered all over the world.
The Art of Hosting network has no formal, legal structure, no appointed leader, no accreditation program and no controlling body. It is based on a practitioner network, with local communities of practice; it is committed to learning and generous with its sharing and support. These metaphors and methods are developed and applied by a self-organising learning community—there is no central institution deciding what belongs to the canon; it emerges from what the community uses and evolves through a process of informal peer review that focuses upon application.
The approach is used in diverse settings, including health care reform, the European Commission, higher education, sustainable development, as well as a methodology for evaluation participatory action research and community-based leadership development.
Practitioners connect through a global network via Facebook groups, email listservs, community calls, and regional stewards who maintain the integrity of the practice while adapting it to local contexts.
Common Misconceptions
It’s not an organization you can hire. The Art of Hosting is not a company you hire to work for you. It isn’t an organization or a certification scheme. It is a chaordic community that supports learning and practice worldwide.
It’s not a single method. Sometimes people confuse the Art of Hosting with a method like World Cafe. That’s understandable as many people are introduced to participatory methods in Art of Hosting workshops, but there is no Art of Hosting method per se. It’s a framework that integrates multiple methods.
It’s not only for spiritual or consciousness communities. While Art of Hosting aligns with values of presence and collective wisdom, it is widely used in corporate strategy, government policy-making, healthcare reform, and community organizing—anywhere groups face complex challenges requiring collaborative intelligence.
It’s not passive or unstructured. Though the language of “hosting” may sound gentle, the practice involves rigorous process design, strategic questioning, and intentional harvesting of outcomes. It applies dialogic techniques and complex systems analysis (e.g. the Cynefin framework and Chaordic organization), and is partly informed by social theories, including structuration, actor-network theory, and situated knowledges, with practitioners using a certain set of theories and metaphors to make group processes understandable, such as Theory U.
How to Begin
Your first step to becoming a practitioner is to follow a 3-day Art of Hosting training, organised somewhere near you in the world. An international group of stewards holds the deeper practice pattern and assures the quality of the trainings and the integrity of the global network.
Three-day trainings are offered worldwide and listed on artofhosting.org. These immersive experiences combine theory, practice, and personal reflection. Participants bring real challenges from their work and communities, learning by doing in a supportive environment.
For self-study, explore the Art of Hosting Vimeo channel for videos illustrating the practices in action, join the Art of Hosting Facebook group to connect with the global community, or read The Art of Hosting Field Guide (available online), which offers frameworks, case studies, and practical tools for facilitating participatory conversations.
Practitioners emphasize that Art of Hosting is not something you learn once but a lifelong practice of cultivating presence, listening, and the ability to hold space for collective intelligence to emerge.