There is a great moment in John Hunter’s TED talk where he describe how he saw his teachers coming through him as he was teaching. I constantly have moments like that in my hosting work and one of the biggest is when I talk about invitation as a process.
With conversations that matter, invitation isn’t the emailed meeting request. The meeting begins long before the invitation is issued, and the goal of invitation is to attract people fully to the meeting. I imagine people being invited so well they burst through the doors ready to sit down together to dig into the questions of the day.
Inviting well is an iterative process and it works great when you can send out more than one invitation. Phelim McDermott recently shared a great example of this with the Devoted and Disgruntled 7 event. They crowd sourced personal invitations to come to D&D, a process that revealed rich diversity in invitation. From the website:
Everyone is invited, and everyone is invited to make their own invitation.
Let us know, and let other people know:-
Why you come to D&D?
Why somebody else should come to D&D?
Why D&D is important to you and important for theatre?
Submit your invitation here to add it to the blog.
The invitations were archived here and a favourite one is Chris Goode’s, who shares a bit about D&D and a bit about the process, Open Space. Thanks for the inspiration, Phelim – I will be tucking this idea into my Mary Poppins bag.
What meeting or gathering are you hosting that could benefit from invitation as a process?
One reply on “Invitation is a Process”
Many thanks Amanda for the links to this interesting idea. I am especially interested that this took place in the UK, and that there was a charge (admittedly small) to attend. I have not come across this kind of process for a paid for event. It gives me inspiration for 3 events that I will be hosting this spring and summer.