What would the world look like if participatory practices became the way we governed ourselves and structured our world? Rosa Zubizaretta has been doing some thinking about that and some of her friends have written a utopian screenplay to imagine that future.
Rosa’s work in this field sits alongside many others who are continually thinking about how to bring more large scale participation into governance. Participedia is a website that collects information about all of these ways of working and is worth a long linger.
My local MP Patrick Weiler on the Canada-Alberta MOU. I have a lot of respect for Patrick,, even though I find myself increasingly disagreeing with him on substance of issues. But it’s very good to get in-depth interviews with local members of Parliament so we can get some insight into how they are thinking about and positioning themselves on these issues. I wish we could be more deliberative on these issues.
So many of the principles for work and community I use in my life have come through the people I met and who supported me back in the early 2000s when I started consulting (it’s the only job I’ve had this century!). One of those networks and collections of people were the folks associated with the Berkana Institute with whomI worked for many years. My buddy Tennesson, one of the OG Berkana guys and still one of my best friends, pulled up a set of principles that Berkana used back in the early days, and I’m grateful to notice how they continue to inform my practice today:
- We relay on human goodness.
- We depend on diversity.
- We treasure the power of community.
- We trust life’s capacity to create order without control.
- We nourish our relationships and ourselves.
A few others I gained from Berkana include, “no matter the question, the answer is community” and “proceed until apprehended.”
Your algorithm may be giving you a false sense of confidence about what you know. I find this anecdotally true. Stuff I learn about through facebook or LinkedIn seems to make me feel knowledgeable especially on quicker moving issues, like the North Coast tanker ban. But stuff that comes through Bluesky, Mastodon or my RSS feeds are much more nuanced because of who I choose to follow.
Football is a game played with principles, becasue it’s a complex game and requires players to react and respond to a constantly changing environment. It was a joy watching Tottenham today cover some sense of purpose after a series of poor results, especially at home. Visiting Brentfod was no match for Spurs, and we dominated possession and played incredible defence off the ball. Van der Ven and Romero are probably amongst the best centre back pairs in the world when they are on their game, which they were today. Xavi Simons finally got the start at the number 10 position and generated the first goal and scored the second. Spurs were positive and exciting to watch and won 2-0. More of that would be much welcomed.
Elsewhere in the football world, today the Vancouver Whitecaps will play Inter Miami for their first MLS trophy in the MLS Cup Final. I used to be a huge supporter of the Whitecaps and for all kinds of reasons I stepped back from supporting that organization. But many of my friends are core parts of the Whitecaps supporters movements and they are having the time of their lives. Vancouver has played their best season of football in their 41 year history and have made every final they have competed in, winning the Canadian Championship and losing in the CONCACAF Champions Cup down in Mexico. But today they have a chance to make it two from three. They beat Miami on the way to that continental cup final, and the likes of Messi and Suarez will be side-eyeing the ‘Caps today who are on a wonderful run of form. We will see what happens.
Start your day with some Karine Polwart, The News:
What if the news were nothing more
Than the secrets of seashells on the seashore
Whispering which way the wind will blow this night
And how everything’s gonna be alright?What if the very first sound you heard
At dawn was a wild and wonderful word?
And what if a smile was your first sight?
Wouldn’t everything have to be alright?
Polwart has an edge to her music, don’t let these lyrics fool you. She is a biting and incisive observer of the world as it is.
We don’t have to have hope to appreciate a better future for our planet and our species. We should, if we haven’t already, probably get better at holding the two ideas of hope and despair in mind at the same time. My friend Dave Pollard does that in his writing and signals today that he is embarking on a post-collapse series on his blog which I can tell you in advance will be worth reading. Not because you will agree with it, or because it will give you hope, or validation or solutions. Just because it will help you cultivate a more complex perspective on the world around you. That’s what Dave’s writing does for me, and that’s what Dave in person does for me too. And maybe that what’s Mylène Farmer – who he references in his post – is doing too in her joyful performance of Désenchantée, which seems so at odds with the lyrics.
Another fella who is writing a great series of posts is Ron Donaldson who is signing off from a career in complexity, participatory narrative inquiry, and facilitation with a series of retrospective posts about his journey. Today he has one up on his work with Participatory Narrative inquiry. the whole series is worth a read.
One of the reason why I think we get deluded into believing that the world can be saved is that we place a big emphasis on stories about how the small thing that happened has big implications. Well, on Taming Complexity, there is a great story about how one public participation design on a NASA program to literally save the plant went awry. This is important reading. We need to get good at public participation and deliberation around technical issues as well as complex ones.
I’ve had many conversations lately with friends and colleagues about the long term cost of isolation that is exacerbated by the ease of online connection. But, as folks who know my complexity work will know, connections and exchanges are two different things. I can engage in all kinds of people and bits and digital entities now. But why then are we more lonely than ever before? And why are we losing the ability to be in real life conversations? Harrison Moony. catches the moment in this article from The Tyee.
But how do you commit to a discourse when you can’t be sure that the person you’re talking to even exists? The tech libertarians don’t even want us. We’re too hard to manage, too human, and that’s why they’ve flooded their sites with fake people, more likely to say what they want, and much easier to reconfigure, like Grok, if they don’t.
Seeking human connection online today feels like being the last one who hasn’t been body-snatched.
That’s a good analogy.
Paul McCartney is also addressing this head on and trying to show that it’s not just an analogy. Actual bodies of work are being snatched up by AI and he has spearheaded an initiative to protest this with an album of the sounds of creativity when the artists have disappeared. The project is called “Is This What We Want?” and it’s a question worth asking. As usual, Ted Gioia, whose blog pointed me to the work, does a masterful job of unpacking the cultural implications of this moment. It’s one of the things I love about live sports to be honest. You need actual people to play it, it’s a form of creativity that is very somatic and body based and the outcomes are always unknown. That’s perhaps a post for a different day, but it’s certainly an overriding concern for me these days.
For what it’s worth, This blog is always hand written. If I ever use AI here I’ll let you know.
A different disappearance in the Canadian cultural milieu happened this week in the world of sport. Valour FC, the Canadian Premier League team in Winnipeg announced that it is wrapping up operations. They were part of probably the biggest sporting moment of my life in 2023, when our TSS Rovers became the first semi-pro team to eliminate a professional team from the Canadian Championship.. We’ve been rivals since then, playing them again in May in Winnipeg where they nicked a 1-0 win against us in the preliminary round. Nevertheless, it absolutely sucks for supporters to lose their club. It sucks for players and other workers to lose their jobs. Like the rest of the global economy, soccer is a billion dollar thing only at the very highest levels in the 0.01%. Everywhere else it’s about community and connection and hopes and dreams. People make it possible. Intangibles are essential. When it dies, a little bit more community dies with it. Support for your local clubs matters because it will keep it viable AND because you will experience connection and belonging and friendship and purpose. The billionaires want to sell those to you on their own terms. Resist and make community in spite of them.
Friday night professional women’s hockey arrived in Vancouver. The Vancouver Goldeneyes kicked off their history starting with a puck drop by Christine Sinclair and then a 4-3 come from behind overtime win. It was the third game in a row that a professional Vancouver women’s sports team has won from behind if you go back to the second leg of the NSL semi final and the final of the NSL. This win happened in front of a packed house at Pacific Colosseum and. Vancouver became the first PWHL team to have its own logo permanently marked at centre ice. It’s a very special time in women’s sports in this city. Both the Northern Super League and the PWHL strive to be top tier leagues in the world of professional women’s sport. The PWHL already is. NSL has made a strong start, based on the “state of the league” address that founder Diana Matheson gave prior to the Cup Final last week. It remains to be seen how profitable and sustainable the league can be over the long term, but it is walking and talking like a top five global league after just one season, and that’s probably well ahead of schedule.
Here comes community!
I’m on a flight home to Vancouver from Ontario. It has been a mix of family and business on this trip. This past weekend I joined my colleagues Jennifer Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle for our third Reimagining Education Art of Hosting. Thirty-one people in total gathered at the Queens University Biological Station in Elgin Ontario on the most beautiful fall weekend. The leaves were bright yellow and a little red – more muted this year from drought than usual, but still beautiful. The water and air was warm enough for swimming and canoeing. And the skies offered us moments of crystal clarity during the night. The land was – as it always is – the first and final host.
While we were teaching the chaordic stepping stones yesterday, a very powerful conversation broke open in the group about invitation. In my practice the whole point of using the chaordic stepping stones is to slow down the conversation about process design to really name the shared urges necessity and purpose of a meeting. It is from this place that a quality invitation arises. And when a person is deeply and sincerely invited to a meeting, it makes all the difference for how they show up.
The conversation yesterday contained a thread of grief. Participants were sharing how painful it is to have to go through meeting after meeting in their day without any genuine invitation. Many meetings aren’t even necessary and, like weekly staff meetings sometimes, just occupy a regular hour every week on the calendar help with minimal intention. Because so many of these gatherings are on line now it is becoming common practice for participants to divide their attention between what is “mandatory” and what is more interesting or more pressing. My heart breaks when a participant in a meeting says hello and then turns of their camera, mutes their audio and never appears again. What a waste of their time.
This bleeds into community life too, and I was especially moved by one of our participants, an Elder who cares very deeply about her community, who witnesses public meetings, community gatherings and politics as being hurtful, disenfranchising and a place where people come and work out their own pain and trauma often in laterally violent ways. There is no healing, no restoration, no creativity, no sense of shared purpose and no call for people to offer something. The meetings are corrosive and toxic. We talked about the kinds of room set ups in meetings like that – rows of chairs, no one looking at one another, exchanges only between “the people at the front” and “the audience” as if citizens were actually a mix of paying customers and school children.
When this Elder was speaking, she was expressing the grief of this state of affairs. It occurred to me that this grief is everywhere. Very few of us in any public or community setting feel invited to community work. We might go along to a public information session. Or we might go along to a Council meeting and make a presentation. We might take part in a shouting match over a controversial decision or course of action. But I think many people are mourning the fact that we are never invited into active, creative community with one another. Some don’t even believe that is possible. “Oh a community meeting,” they will often say, folding their arms. “That’ll be…interesting.”
(As an aside, “that’ll be…interesting” is one of the most Canadian ways I know of saying “that whole thing is going to be a complete disaster.”)
Communities are full of talent and resources. How many times have you been asked to serve your community with what you know or what you do? Where are the opportunities for people to participate in community work that also builds community? At the very least, can we do this work together without poison relationships and eroding the promise of democratic and community participation.
The erosion of democracies, the professionalization of decision making and the capture of legislative bodies by huge commercial interests has been going on for my whole life. But when I look around my own home community – which has seen its fair share of divisive conflicts – I can see initiatives that were citizen-led that built things that we need. We now have a health centre on our island, a credit union, a recycling depot and second hand store, and playing fields for fast pitch, soccer and ultimate. We have preserved forest and coastline with the Nature Conservancy. We have institutions like the Arts Council and the Fabrc Arts Guild and the Nature Club and community choirs and the Legion and the Food Bank that all bring us closer together and weave our connection to one another and the place.
In small communities the chance for that kind of thing is higher because we know each other a little better and we can put our finger on the folks that can contribute, and ask them to show up. And we can do it in a way that invites the community to come along and be a part of something. Not every small community is this lucky. Some are in terrible moments of division and conflict that are violent, harmful and probably irreconcilable.
Peace and reconciliation at any scale is not possible without people being genuinely invited into it. The dehumanization of our world in conflict, at work, and in governance leaves us mourning for something that we may not ever have experienced: a genuine invitation to form and join a field of belonging that gives our lives meaning and connection.
I think this is why dialogic work is so important. Anywhere people gather is a chance to correct that tyranny of dehumanization that sees persons as cogs in the machine, to be counted, corralled, manipulated, avoided, lied to or disposed of. As Christina Baldwin has said, you treat a person differently once you know their story. You invite them, you get curious with them, you wonder what they have to offer and you might even make something together.