Are you looking for innovative ways to engage in meaningful, impactful conversations in your workplace, community or family? Are you interested in new forms of leadership that generate fresh thinking and create a shared commitment to solving critical challenges in sustainable and inclusive ways? We invite you to elevate your ability to facilitate small or large groups in participative ways and really discovering the power of collective intelligence.
Apply what you are learning in our course directly to the projects that are important to you, your community or organization!

Introduction and Aims
Many of the problems and issues we face in our organizations and communities can only find creative and wise solutions in collaborations with others. No matter what sector we work in, what community we live in, or what family we were born into, we are all faced with situations that demand people working together across their differences.

Why attend the Art of Hosting?

Build Stronger Teams and Partnerships. Broaden the skill set within your group, work more effectively and enjoyably together, engage teams, organizations, and community stakeholders in meaningful conversations that promote resilience, belonging, innovation, and collective impact.

Enhance our skills and abilities to work with complexity, uncertainty & change. Develop leadership confidence for facing challenges that don’t have solutions, learn practices to engage skillfully with fear, conflict and stuck patterns, use wise process planning architectures for small and large scale initiatives, and host strategic conversation

Context
Today’s world offers huge potential for communication, mobility, better health andknowledge acquisition. Digital media allow us to connect with anyone, anywhere, at anytime. Everything seems possible, and everything is in flux. Humanity seems to besearching for new coherence that embraces both complexity and well-being, bothindividual and collective.

Leadership is becoming both a capacity and a skill. It is no longer (only) connected to a hierarchical position. It is the capacity and skill of working in and with networks, in and with complexity. This is a new kind of leadership that consciously transcends silos and sectors to achieve true co-creation.

Our traditional organisational forms and culture are no longer enough – not in businesses, not in civil society, not in government, and certainly not where any kind of innovation is needed! This raises some burning questions:

• How do I breathe life into a start-up or new network?

• How do I overcome the inertia of old, ingrained structures and habits?

• How can I reinvent myself - how can we reinvent ourselves - as we go, on the job?

While there are no easy answers to these questions, principles and daily practices for participatory leadership do exist, that really allow us to have a different kind of conversation and take action in a different way. These are principles and practices that we can learn and that can support us in our evolution.

The Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter – the focus of days of learningtogether – is an approach which scales leadership out from the individual to the whole system. You will discover innovative personal practices, dialogue formats, ways of hosting/facilitating teams, groups and networks, and co-creation of innovation for tackling the complex challenges facing us.

The ‘art’ in the Art of Hosting consists in eliciting and harnessing the collective intelligence of any group of people - a community, a network, an organisation or business – with a view to finding better, more sustainable solutions to complex challenges.

Methods
The Art of Hosting is a participatory approach used worldwide for leading, convening and engaging in a depth of conversation and leadership that transforms our relationships and gets the necessary work done. Drawing on centuries of human wisdom as well as some new ways of thinking about how we work well together, the Art of Hosting is accessible and engaging in a wide range of contexts. An Art of Hosting learning event includes some of the following methodologies: World Cafe, Open Space Technology, PeerSpirit Circle, Pro-Action Cafe, and Collective Story Harvest

In addition, participants bring their real questions and challenges and we select from a variety of additional tools and methodologies so you can develop your own hosting practice. We may explore any of the following: Participatory Decision Making, Appreciative Inquiry, Theory U, Chaordic Design, Living systems theory 

Target groups
Experienced and young emerging leaders, managers, facilitators, teachers, community builders, public officials, social innovators, educators and anyone attracted to the call!
All experience levels welcome!

Preparation / What to bring
This very interactive training will throw you directly in the deep end of participatory leadership. We bring the theory into practice from the outset, going to work with the questions, ideas and projects of the participants.
So, bring the questions with you!

Trainers
Martina Stažnik has extensive experience in designing, hosting and facilitating learning and self-organizing processes, deep dialogues, large group participatory processes and numerous strategic conversations in all types of communities and organizations as well as various conferences using Art of Hosting practices for non- profits and corporate actors in Western Balkan and a broader international region for facilitating group conversations of all sizes.

Jasenka Gojšić is a facilitator of transformational learning. She has 23 years of experience in leadership and management, always focused on the growth of people involved in an endeavor. As a mentor, teacher and trainer, she supports transformation by experiential learning. Jasenka has master of telecommunication and informatics earned at Faculty of electrical Engineering and Computing of University of Zagreb, Croatia, and MBA and Master of Science in Management achieved at IEDC School of Management, Bled, Slovenia.

Venue
The training course will take place in Restaurant Maksimir that is situated in beautifull Park-Wood Maksimir in Zagreb, capital of Croatia.
During afternoons and evenings we will “swarm” out across the whole city of Zagreb to the most attractive and suitable pockets and places to work and learn.

Finances
Participation fee: 500,00 EUR per person
Fee includes VAT, course materials, breakfasts, refreshments and lunches. Accommodation is not included 

This course can be supported by Erasmus + Mobility Program
KA1 – Learning Mobility of Individuals– Mobility of staff in adult education.

Draft Programme

Breakfast: 8:30 / Lunch: 13:00 / Dinner: 19:00
Please note that the program might be a subject to changes.

What you will learn and practise:

Day 1
How to host meaningful conversations and harvest new insights and innovative action from collective wisdom? Improve how you approach complex questions?

Day2
How to design collaborative processes that result in co-creation and collective wisdom? How  to grow in co-creation and collaboration with others? How to find ways to make co-creation and collaboration more efficient and effective

Day 3
Which methods and techniques to use for your projects and the specific challenges of each? What participatory leadership looks like in practice?

Day 4
How to approach leadership in this complex and unpredictable world? How to apply participatory leadership to best advantage in your own context?

Day5
Better understanding of complexity in group processes and how to navigate it. How to clarify your own intentions so that you can be more effective in working with others, both inside and outside organisations?

Day 6
How to lead your organisation towards greater self-direction and self-organisation? What skills and capacities could help you in the transition from hierarchy to self-management and self-organisation?