The Central Garden

Defining the Central Garden 

The metaphor of a Central Garden comes from Juanita Brown, co-founder of the World Cafe dialogic practice, who describes the courtyard in the middle of her adopted grandmother’s home in Chiapas, Mexico - lush with vivid bougainvillea, vibrant flowers, and verdant trees in big clay pots surrounding a large fountain in the center. You enter the central garden, or jardín central as they call it in Latin America, by going through any one of the multiple arched doorways that surround this open space in the very heart of the home.

The innovations and practices that we introduced briefly earlier have largely emerged and grown up together in the last few decades; new growth nourished from the same ground of shared values and intentions for co-creating a better world. In our metaphor, these practices are the doorways that lead into the Central Garden, which is the focus of this article. 

This metaphor of a Central Garden works on multiple levels. In this article, the individual doorways leading into the Central Garden represent the many unique dialogic practices that make up the field of participatory practice. On another level, the doorways into the Central Garden can be seen as the larger circle of methodologies collected in the Change Handbook, with our shared commitment to work for positive change in the world. The metaphor can expand to include any circle of contributors or collaborators as doorways into the Central Garden, with our shared work holding the center.

However large we are imagining the circle of doorways that surround a Central Garden, what’s in the garden itself is always a little bit magical. Inevitably it’s a place where things are not entirely known; a place of emergence. It’s a practice field that draws on the strength of all of the doorways that lead into it, but is not limited to any of them. 

To be clear - maintaining the integrity and structure of the doorways is important; without strong doorways, it’s not possible to enter the Central Garden. Similarly, the integrity of the practices represented by the doorways need to be respected and acknowledged.

So the Central Garden we are describing isn’t about mashing people and practices together without regard for their unique identities, distinctions, purposes and values. Rather, it is about the creation of a practice field that goes beyond any one practice. It’s about working together in a way that respects and learns from difference, and creates something new out of what is being learned.

The Central Garden can be seen as what connects us, what eliminates fragmentation and supports connection. In some indigenous cultures it could be seen as the place of mending the Sacred Hoop of Life because what’s at the center of the Central Garden, that abundantly flowing fountain, represents whatever is Life-affirming.

Beehive Productions

One of the ways we are doing our part to live into this promised future is in the work we are doing together at Beehive Productions. By offering learning spaces that connect people, places and communities of practice, we are creating a Central Garden of both professional skill development and shared meaning-making.

As key practitioners in two strong participatory communities - the World Cafe and the Art of Hosting - we had already worked together for many years, successfully offering online trainings to the Art of Hosting community. As it turns out, the Art of Hosting was a perfect place to begin, as it already embodies so much of the Central Garden ethos.

We started Beehive Productions with the conscious intention to increase skill and build capacity within the larger Central Garden of participatory practitioners; to offer opportunities to come together in online courses that showcase and build upon our best collective thinking across practices and make them inclusive and accessible. 

We have focussed our work on deepening our collective practice within the following six areas that help guide our learning and strengthen the underlying capacities needed for creative collaboration and conversational leadership:

Creating the Conditions

How do we create the right conditions for successful collaboration and participatory processes?

Hosting Conversations

What tools, methodologies, and practices can we develop and cultivate to host conversations that matter?

Harvesting and Sense-Making

How do we collectively learn, make sense of, and share the results of our conversations and processes?

Personal Practice

What personal practices do we need to cultivate in order to lead and host ourselves and others?

Collaboration

How do we work together to create teams  and organizations that lead to more learning and meaningful results?

Understanding Systems

How do we understand and affect the systems we are part of and work within?

Our intention has been to reach beyond our “home” communities of Art of Hosting and World Café to create a learning space where everyone feels welcome; peer-learning environments where collective participation and cross-pollination are intrinsically designed into the experience. 

Although we each have facilitation practices that include face-to-face engagement, we chose to focus Beehive Productions on online interaction. One of the primary reasons for that is because the communities we serve are international. Working online enables us to connect diverse practitioners from all over the world in constellations that would rarely happen otherwise. Working online also makes this financially viable and offers us an array of innovative new ways of working together creatively. 

Beehive Productions is values-driven, built on principles that we believe in passionately and use to define the ways we choose to live and work.

The learning experiences we create at Beehive Productions are based on the idea that the knowledge we need belongs to us all. We are committed to making our offerings accessible to everyone who wants to participate - no one is ever turned away for lack of financial capital. We harvest what we are learning and make it available to the wider public. We feel that these choices, too, are part of Central Garden practice.  

By explicitly inviting a diversity of experience and perspective when we create new offerings and decide who to collaborate with, we bring people together who may not have had the chance to meet and learn from and with each other before. We’ve found that when we can invite participants to lay down some of the pre-judgements we all have about practices that differ from ours and listen more closely to what really matters, that there is is a kind of common “heart” to the work we are all engaged in. There is something in each practice that mirrors the “deeper work” at the core of each one. Focus on the deeper work reveals a harmonic resonance in the relationships between practices that are answering a similar “call” to step up and be of service in the world today.  

Our hope is to illuminate this harmonic relationship in order to create a “community of communities” and unleash the collective capacity we have to achieve much more together than any of us could do alone.

“Life, in all its evolutionary wisdom, manages ecosystems of unfathomable beauty, ever evolving toward more wholeness, complexity, and consciousness.” 

~ Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations