Warm Hosting Series: Roundtable on Storytelling as Worldmaking + Warm Data Lab

When: September 16, 2026, Wednesday (05:15 PM to 09:30 PM Hong Kong Time)
Where: 🌏 Online & 🇭🇰 In-Person: Dara (Address: Shop 3, 5-6, G/F, Soho 189, 189 Queen's Rd W, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong)
What: 1. Online Roundtable: Storytelling as Worldmaking (~01h10m), 2. Dinner (~00h40m), 3. Warm Data Lab (~01h40m)

Our Invitation

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Little Gidding, Four Quartets

We warmly welcome you to our Warm Hosting Series, an urgent call to gather and hold a practice space for relating, hosting, and mutual learning towards wiser actions.

As initiating hosts, we offer to engage in deliberate practice among us in many ways through this Warm Hosting Series:

• Roundtable Discussion: our session's featured guests introduce their perspectives on the topic of the day, mostly inquiring on and around (1) present human condition and relation with world, (2) different modes of seeing and being as world, and (3) everything else that turns seeing clearly and re-thinking the underlying stories are enlisted in acting.

In this session, we explore storytelling as worldmaking.

When infused with soul and grounded imagination, storytellers become responsible and ethical designers of beautiful worlds. These worlds are mirrors of our present reality and also doorways of transformative potential. Storytellers don't make their storyworlds in isolation; they engage deeply with the primeworld while inviting to hear, listen, participate, and co-create together, joining forces in turning faithfulness into meaningfulness. This implies worldmaking as dynamic process, created by the movement between the storyteller and the listener, and not a passively observed distant spectacle of entertainment. Likewise, it is inadequate to imagine our way to possible futures, but rather the future is being met now, by acting with it, however incomplete but whole.

We have invited our roundtable guests who with their lived experiences have been called to tell stories and find out what “story” is made of and made with, and how “storyworlds” create enchantedness, elegance and beauty.

• Warm Data Lab: practice sharing personal stories among each other with guidance of its Batesonian-informed praxis by practitioner-hosts. Notice what stories you negotiate to tell, how you tell them, and how you invoke and receive the stories of others.
• Hosting Guests & Guesting Hosts. practice the art of hosting other guests even as a guest yourself, throughout the event including dinner time. Consider this as a mutually symbiotic sharing of responsibility, not just between minimum pairs but also in relation among others.

Our invitation is to intentionally restore the creative, felt way of seeing the world and connecting deeply with one another. These human abilities have been weakened by outsourcing and pressuring, including:

• Our modern lifestyle: living with the conditions of modern society while facing growing environmental challenges and their insidious consequences,
• Over-reliance on technology: everything leads to increasingly depend on digital tools in ways that weaken our human capacities, tempting us to skip the essential and adequate process of development,
• Forgotten wisdom: ignoring the rich inheritance of ancestral knowledge—the kind of wisdom that teaches us to care for the whole interconnected system rather than just entertaining our individual lives in isolation.

Our hope is that we all leave the evening with a heightened sense of wonder, curiosity, humility, and goodwill.

With loving-kindness,
Brent Que & Ludovic Curtil

Poetry and Quotes

To negotiate the sharp edges of difference and division, we need to make spaces for finding the common ground that can lead to higher ground. Stories can help us to explore the edges and the heart of these conversations and can encourage us to stay together – in teams, groups, organizations, communities, and as a humanity – for long enough to find the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
— Mary Alice Arthur, Excerpt from To Transform The Community, Change The Story

∞

So there are two ways of using language. We can use it to word the world, which is to attempt to create a sort of descriptive layer above the world that tells us how things really are, or we can use words to world, the world, which is treating language as something that's part of, and acts within the world.
— Dougald Hine

∞

Stories tell us what we don't know we know. Our memories hold many insights, but they are not always easy to get at. When we tell and listen to stories, we often learn new things about ourselves.
— Cynthia Kurtz, Excerpt from Working with Stories

∞

To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.

The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention — a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched.

But perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one’s head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding — which is also the understanding of the novelist — to take this in.
— Susan Sontag, Excerpt from At the Same Time

Practicalities

Where: Dara (Address: Shop 3, 5-6, G/F, Soho 189, 189 Queen's Rd W, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong)

Planned Event Flow:

• 05:15 PM to 05:30 PM (00h15m): Doors Open
• 05:30 PM to 06:40 PM (01h10m): Roundtable (Hybrid)
• 06:40 PM to 07:20 PM (00h40m): Dinner
• 07:20 PM to 09:00 PM (01h40m): Warm Data Lab
• 09:00 PM to 09:30 PM (00h30m): After-party and Farewell

• Dinner will be prepared by Dara and served according to above schedule.
• Upon registration, the confirmation will contain the online access link for remote attendees to join us in the roundtable.

What to expect in this session's roundtable:

• We have invited guest-speakers from around the world with transdisciplinary backgrounds and share their latest thinking on a chosen topics and navigate tangents. 
• Opportunity to interact with guest-speakers will be open throughout the segment.

What to expect in a Warm Data Lab:

• The space will be setup in such a way that appears like an archipelago with each island having a number of seats in circles.
• There will be three distinct but intricately connected segments: (1) A host-storyteller shares a relevant personal story and then reveals a question that acts as the centerpiece of inquiry, (2) the participants engage by exchanging personal stories among each other but within the designated context of the island, with each island having a different context; the participants are free to move around and go to other islands unconditionally, and (3) the participants return to plenum where we process our learning together.

Financial Contribution:

• There are three (3) options for In-Person admission: Subsidized, Supportive and Sustainable. And one (1) option for Online admission for Roundtable only. Choose what's most appropriate given your situation.
• If none of the selection are accessible to you, we encourage you to reach out.
• Cancellation policy: given venue-related commitments, ticket types are not interchangeable, and tickets are non-refundable but transferable to another participant.

Our Roundtable Guests

Mary Alice Arthur is a Story Activist working with story in service of positive systemic shift and for focusing collective intelligence on critical issues. She guides people to find and activate the story that will take them into a larger and more authentic future. With story as an ally, people become the visionary leaders, changemakers and paradigm shifters they want to be. They know story is our lens on the world and determines our agency. They have the knowledge and tools to change it for the better. She is an internationally recognised process host, building capacity for people to bring their stories to life, and in practice for more than 30 years. She is inspired to work with large and small systemic stories holding keys for a more generative future. She is a steward of Art of Hosting and the Flow Game, teaches participatory practice around the world, and is co-creator of Collective Story Harvest methodology. Mary Alice is the author of 365 ALIVE! Find your voice. Claim your story. Live your brilliant life. She works with individuals, communities and organisations around the world.

Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he co-founded organisations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. He has collaborated with scientists, artists and activists, serving as a leader of artistic development at Riksteatern (Sweden’s national theatre) and as an associate of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University. His latest book is At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies (2023). He co-hosts The Great Humbling podcast and publishes a Substack called Writing Home.

Francis Laleman is a husband, father, former academic, permaculture gardener, painter, photographer, writer, designer, workshop facilitator, educationist, contact improvisation enthusiast, Scrum teacher, and Clean Language & Solutions Focus practitioner. A lifelong student and teacher of Sanskrit and Pāli, he considers himself as trying to make sense of life. Francis is a member of The Systemic Design Association and The Scrum Alliance. He is on the advisory board of People Before Patients (Montreal) and an associate at The London Scrum Academy. He is based in Dover, on the South Coast of Singapore, where he writes, paints and plays the cello and the gǔzhēng. His recent books are on Exformative Learning (2020) and Scrum as a framework for collaborative making (2026). He also just published a poetry and photography book: Before the Birth of the First Vowel (2026).

Joep de Jong is the founder of Learn Holding BV, a company he founded after a career in business with companies like Apple, Syntregra and British Telecom where he held senior positions. In 1995 he was introduced to Appreciative Inquiry and attended the Global Excellence in Management (GEM) program at Case Western Reserve University (USA). Since then he has been applying Appreciative Inquiry as a leader and lecturer in a variety of disciplines, like leadership, organizational development and change management. He is still a candidate PhD on the topic ‘In Search of the Soul of the Appreciative Leader’ on which he made a series of portraits. He is applying Appreciative Inquiry as a consultant for e.g. the UN WFP, as an accreditor for higher education in Europe and as a speaker and coach. He published numerous articles on Appreciative Inquiry and was co-author of the first book in Dutch on the topic.