If you think about it, good harvesting makes good community and business sense too. After all, why have a meeting if you have no intention to produce something in the end? It might be something tangible, like an action plan or a strategy, or it might be intangible in the form of relationships, trust, or simply the goodwill to explore together and see what happens.
For me, the overall purposes of working like this are:
To capture and illuminate collective achievements and results;
To make collective knowledge visible, accessible, and useful;
To give back energy to the group to continue working and to support keeping people together and resourceful in the face/space of complexity for the life of the project.3
A focus on harvesting also helps to:
Maja Rotbøll works on a picture book to accompany the story of Denmark going bankrupt in 1813
Mary Alice Arthur • The Secret to Long-Term Impact in Your Engagements
Create the foundation for the work of the group. What results do we want from this event, initiative, or meeting, both on the tangible and intangible levels? Our focus helps to indicate what group processes are needed to create the results we seek. Another way to think about this is: our harvesting intention helps to create the way we focus the group’s attention. I’ve seen things dramatically shift when participants realized we were moving away from keynote speakers to keynote listeners, and they were being asked to become sensemakers themselves. The group paid attention in a different way, and showed greater ownership and commitment.
Remind those who participated what happened and what was achieved. The harvest reflects both the process and results of the process. It makes the invisible visible. Sometimes people leave a meeting feeling really engaged and on fire, but quickly the fire dies down. When harvest comes in the form of videos or graphics or photos or the plan they created, they remember how they felt and the fire comes back. We need the emotion to help move us into action. I’ve especially noticed that when we uncover an important story or metaphor for a group, it keeps working for them and begins to uncover a more promising potential.
Help those who are important to us, but were not in the room, to support and come with us. If we’ve been thoughtful and strategic about how we’ve included those who couldn’t be there, they will be more likely to be able to come with us in the journey ahead. Many harvests I’ve been part of were intended to help important others to understand what happened and how we came to conclusions we did. We want to show them how they can be involved in the future.
First page of the “Pixie Book” created for the Denmark 1813 story
Leave a trail for those who come after. Engagement and motivation depend on “line of sight”—being able to see how my work supports and enables our goals. Understanding the work that came before and the story you are part of builds a solid foundation for continued motivation. In one merger process I was part of, we had a summit with a representative group from the larger system. A graphic facilitator captured the story of the gathering. It was printed as an accordion card for each of the participants, who then went out and told the story of the meeting to all their colleagues. Enthusiasm spread like wildfire.
What form should a harvest take? That depends on what will serve the results you want to create and what is most meaningful to the group you are working with.
The harvesting cycle
Using the metaphor of gardening is a great way to understand the nature of harvesting. Every serious gardener is focused on a harvest. Whether it is food for the table, beauty for the eyes, profit for the pocket, or the regeneration of a place, the work a gardener does has a tangible goal—a gardener is planting for results.
Once a gardener has a result in mind, then he or she turns to preparation. The ground needs to be prepared, the seeds need to be planted in the right timing, and the garden needs to be tended during the growing season. The gardener works alongside the land they are tending, making an intervention when needed and responding to what emerges. Once the growing cycle is over, the results are picked and then the second phase of harvesting begins. Will the apples be eaten fresh or will they be turned into a pie, or applesauce, or apple juice? Will we keep the harvest for ourselves or share with a wider community? It all depends on what results we want to create.
The harvesting cycle has these steps:4
Designing for harvest: Begin with the end in mind
There are some main coordinates that offer focus and foundation for a good harvest:
Mary Alice Arthur • The Secret to Long-Term Impact in Your Engagements
Need: What is the real need and how compelling is it?
Context: What is the context we are working in (e.g. a school, a company, an NGO, a municipality, etc.)? Context determines tools, methods, and applications.
Purpose: What is the purpose of the event, process, or meeting?
Deliverables: What are the tangible and intangible results5 needed to be able to move forward?
Focus: What harvest is needed by whom and when? Often there are multiple end users and they may need a different form of harvest in different timings. How will they be catered for?
Once these have been defined they become the sounding board for planning the harvesting process. A clear focus makes it easier to create a solid interface between process and harvesting.
Steps:
Get a clear picture of the purpose of the event, the participants, and what results are intended.
Work with the caller6 of the event to brainstorm a list of tangible and intangible harvest goals.
In what form do the target audiences for this event—both participants and others—need to receive information before, during, and after for greatest impact?
Results from a Collective Story Harvest for a children’s initiative in Queensland, Australia—this was one of the listening arcs a team prepared
What input needs to be gathered prior to the event? How
do participants need to be invited so they arrive ready to participate?
In what ways can the expertise/creativity of the group be focused during the event for sensemaking and further action?
What audiences do you need to cater to? In what form will they need to receive the harvest?
What is the timeline for delivering the harvest? What needs to be delivered when?
What resources—in terms of people, skills/talents, materials, technology, etc.—are available for this project?
Before the event: Set your strategy
Next comes the focus on creating the team and planning the elements of the harvest. Develop your harvesting strategy. Make sure harvesting is built into the process and that hosting and harvesting support each other well. Test your inquiry questions with your target audience. Think about how the team will work with the group and in the event space.
Steps:
Create a plan that includes a strategy around each harvest goal. What focus is needed to create the results you are after? What resources are needed? Who might take responsibility for each part?
Part of the graphic harvest of a storytelling process
Mary Alice Arthur • The Secret to Long-Term Impact in Your Engagements
Build the Harvesting Team and begin aligning the overall harvest plan and specific elements. Brief the team on the purpose of the event, the harvesting goals, and the participants.
Work with the Hosting Team to create the process design and align how the group—and the harvesting team—will work to create the harvest. Is the Harvesting team part of the Hosting Team or working in the background of the event?
What mediums will you use to deliver the harvest? What physical results are needed (report, document, newsletter)? What digital results are nee
ded (website, photos, videos, Prezi/PowerPoint, SMS harvest, etc)? What graphic results are needed (visual recording, images, illustrations)?
Create templates and source other materials needed. If
you are supporting a new group, create a glossary so the
team can smoothly harvest concepts and terms unique to
this group or industry.
During the event: Host the harvest
Harvesting as a team gives you more ability both to capture the intended harvest and to be aware of emergent harvest. Create a clear harvest around each process (clustering, synthesizing, prioritizing, visuals) and wherever possible work with these to help inform the next stage of conversation. Where content matters, use templates or computer capture. Support the Harvesting Team to work seamlessly alongside the event and do as much harvesting work as possible during real time.
Visual or graphic recording can bring strategies to life and make it easier to stay focused as an initiative unfolds. It can be key in helping to flesh out the unfolding story of an event or initiative, making it easier for those who were there to share what happened with their colleagues or community members. Digital harvesting, in the form of interviews or event video, can help to give a feeling of what happened and reinforce key points. Harvest websites make it easy for geographically scattered groups to participate as an event is unfolding. Choose your media wisely.
Talk about how you will act on what emerges in the moment. Not everything can be planned for, so being present, awake and curious is the best strategy.
Steps:
Set up your harvesting space.
Support the Harvesting Team to work with the plan you developed around harvesting. If this is a multi-day event, when and how often will you meet to check in with each other?
At the same time, be open to what might emerge as a group goes to work and begins a conversation that will unfold over the course of the initiative.
Find points in the event to bring the harvesting back in, demonstrating to participants their contributions have been heard and incorporated. Point out underlying patterns that are surfacing as the work continues.
Find the balance of harvesting the content and the spirit of the event, as well as the amount of harvest.
Continue to stay alongside the Hosting Team as the event continues, making sure the process and harvesting goals and plans are in alignment.
Where possible, engage the stakeholders in making sense of their own harvest and invite them to help surface patterns.
After the event: Momentum for next steps
As soon as possible once the event is finished, complete any outstanding harvest and distribute the results. Gather whoever will be involved in the next level of harvest and take a look at deeper patterns. Create the next level of sensemaking and action planning together. Implementing concrete results leads to the change that can impact a system or organization.
Steps:
Finish off the harvest artifacts and distribute to the target audiences.
Once the event is over, bring a selected group together to sort through the harvest and look for deeper patterns and next steps.
Feed forward what you’ve found out and see what next steps and next harvest opportunities arise.
Mary Alice Arthur • The Secret to Long-Term Impact in Your Engagements
Many years ago I worked with the Information & Knowledge Management (IKM) Team at the Inland Revenue Department in New Zealand. The leadership team wanted both to be able to work well together and to establish their identity within the organization and within the much larger IT group. We decided to harvest a metaphor that could help both to orient their work as a team and to position them in the wider organization.
We began by looking at the organization itself—what did it remind us of? In listening to our stories, we realized it was like a city made of islands connected by bridges—like Stockholm—where the bridges were the conduits for the flow of information. When the bridges broke down, or got jammed, areas of the city were effectively cut off from each other. We looked at all the parts that made up the system. The group agreed that they were not the bridges and didn’t want to be the controller of the flow. Nor could the group expect that everyone wanted the burden of being forced to contribute. They needed to find a way to encourage all the little bits of information held by individuals to flow in continually, rather than depending on the slow flow of information through reports and the usual channels.
In the end, the group realized that the IKM team needed to be a guiding hand. We began to see that it was like the editorial board of the Lonely Planet Guide (or in our case the “Plan-IT Guide”. Notice how we got IT into the picture?), and everyone in the entire organization was, in fact, a reporter for the Lonely Plan-IT guide. And what was the potential for IKM? Just as you can either order the entire Lonely Planet guide for an area, or just the piece you are most interested in, data within the department needed to work the same way—just in time and just as you need it. The focus of our harvesting together enabled us to see a whole new way to position the IKM group.
The harvesting mindset
So how do you bring harvesting into a process where no one has ever heard about it? Harvesting is both a skill and a practice, so I take on many roles during an engagement1,6. At the outset, I act as a consultant, helping to set the foundation for the fusion of hosting and harvesting that will bring the best results. Next I am a strategist, helping people to see that what and how we choose to harvest are important strategic choices. I can also be the host of the harvesting process, tending the team of harvesters and the engagement of the wider participant field. And finally, of course I am a harvester too, helping to capture data and supporting the sensemaking process.
To build your practice, focus on some core capacities
One of the foundation stones is listening. To be a good harvester you have to be able to stay present and to listen on more than one level. Of course you have to be able to catch what is being spoken. But you also have to be attuned to the energy around what you’re hearing and be alert to the deeper context underneath what you’re hearing. Then there is the ability for synthesis—to be able to take in a variety of inputs and see how they fit together, offering it back to the group—”Is it like this?” A third element lies in pattern recognition—can you look over all that is being offered and see patterns showing up now in the group, those from the past, and those of the future?
Over the years I’ve really learned that harvesting is both the foundation for, and the fruition of, collective intelligence at work. It is the bridge between the conversation or inquiry we are in and the wiser action we want to create. If you want to make the most of your event—and create long-term results—make harvesting part of your plan from the start.
Ten questions to a great harvest
What is the purpose of the event or initiative?
What do you want to harvest and why? What are the tangible and intangible harvests you hope to create?
What resources do you have to create a harvest? What else do you need?
What processes might be most helpful to the harvest(s) you want?
Who is on the team? Who will harvest the hosting? Who will host the harvest? What other support is needed?
Who are the stakeholders?
Mary Alice Arthur • The Secret to Long-Term Impact in Your Engagements
What invitation will help people show up ready to participate?
How and when will the harvest be shared? What needs to be shared during the event? After?
What is the next level of harvest? Who will take part in the deeper sensemaking?
How will you stay together as a harvesting team to create the next level of meaningmaking and action?
MARY ALICE ARTHUR is a Story Activ
ist, using Story to help make positive systemic shift and for applying collective intelligence to the critical issues of our times. Her art is in creating spaces where people can find the stories that take them to their most flourishing future. Building the capacity for participatory practice supports people to take back the power of their stories so they can make wiser choices. She is a sought after process consultant and event host, and an engaging speaker. As an international steward of the Art of Hosting she teaches participatory practice around the world. Through The Story Dojo, she is spreading the meme of Story Activism, supporting people to develop their skills and practice and engaging in leading edge conversations about the power and potential in our world. Contact her through www.getsoaring.com, also The Story Dojo Facebook page or The Story Dojo Vimeo channel.
References
From “Applied Practice Harvesting”, Monica Nissén, 2015
And appreciation to the Art of Hosting community, which continues to explore, develop and promote the joy and the art of harvesting. Thank you to all you practitioners out there continually moving the edge!
Properly “The Art of Hosting & Harvesting conversations and work that matter.” www.artofhosting.org
From “Applied Practice Harvesting,” Monica Nissén, 2015
Adapted from “Applied Practice Harvesting,” Monica Nissén, 2015
Examples of tangible harvest:
• Model an engaging way for people to work on their projects together and come up with an implementation plan
Drawn Together Through Visual Practice Page 10
