Menu

Lessons from Pasifika philosophy

August 21, 2025 By Chaordic design, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Containers, Culture, Design, Facilitation, Featured, First Nations One Comment

From an article that came through the UN Development Program: a group of development workers spent some time studying Pasifika philosophy at Pasifika Communities University which underlies their approach to human development in the region. Here were some of the lessons they learned:

1. Relationality, not transactionality — Pasifika philosophies emphasize relationships over transactions. In global policymaking, this presents us an opportunity to move toward genuine reciprocity, whether between nations, communities, or sectors. In the Pacific, time is not measured in moments but in seasons and relationships.

2. Nature as kin, not resource — Pacific cultures often see the ocean, land, and skies as family. In the face of climate breakdown, this worldview offers a profound shift: protecting ecosystems is not simply environmental policy, but an act of kinship and responsibility to our Vanua*. It aligns with the principles of deep ecology and the principle of integration, which recognise the intrinsic value of all life and call for a holistic relationship with the natural world, one where human wellbeing is inseparable from the wellbeing of the planet, and our consciousness embraces every dimension of life.

3. Progress as continuity, not growth — In many Pasifika contexts, progress is measured not just by growth, but by cycles of regeneration. This stands in stark contrast to the relentless growth-at-all-costs mindset driving much of the global economy. Pasifika philosophies teach us that the beauty of Vakatabu (restraint) is not merely about the end results, but about the self-discovery in the waiting.

4. Consensus and Collective Stewardship — Decision-making in the Pacific often flows from principles such as the Fijian Veivakamareqeti (sustainability), which literally means to treasure or to keep and protect as something beloved. This care is held as a collective responsibility, a shared duty to safeguard what sustains us. Governance rooted in dialogue and consensus may move more slowly than top-down directives, but it works at the speed of trust, anchoring decisions in relationships, nurtures legitimacy, and builds long-term stability — qualities the world urgently needs in this era of polarisation.

5. Leading with Loloma (love) — In Pasifika philosophies, leadership is not a title to be worn as an ornament, but an act of service to the land and its people. True leadership is guided by loloma — a deep, relational love — anchored in connection to land, community, and spirit. Although love is rarely part of mainstream development discourse, overlooking it risks creating interventions without guardianship, autonomy, respect, and intergenerational connection.

6. Honouring Many Truths — Recognising that different perspectives can coexist without cancelling each other out. Pasifika philosophies teach us that mutual contradiction is not a weakness, but a space where diverse truths can live side by side. In this space, respect deepens, creativity flourishes, and collective wisdom grows, reminding us that value lies not in uniformity, but in the richness of many voices.

I resonate strongly with these lessons. These are core practices of dialogue work in human community and especially important values to practice and embed in work done in socially and environmentally threatened communities. The recovery of Indigenous worldviews, philosophies and approaches to land and community is essential in places where communities and land are in vulnerable states. Managerialism and exploitative capitalism sounds the death knell for these communities, both in local work, ecological sustainability and in the ways in which place like small Pacific islands bear the brunt of climate change. The voices that come from the Pacific are voices that plead for the world to change the way it think about life itself.

I live on a Pacific Island myself, within Skwxwu7mesh territory which lies beneath the imposition of Canadian law, regulations and the ways of life that have historically been at odds with the Indigenous worldview of this part of the world and the health of the ecosystems in the land and the seas around here. The recovery of the health of the inlet in which I live, Átl’ka7tsem, parallels the recovery of the strength and jurisdiction of the Squamish Nation, as prophetically documented in the book The Whale In The Door by Pauline Le Bel and Tiná7 Cht Ti Temíxw, a collection of writing from Squamish Nation members about the history and worldview of the Skwxwu7mesh uxwumixw.

In the UNDP report Upolu Lum? Vaai is quoted and I had a read through some of his work yesterday. For more of his philosophy, here are a couple of recent pieces. In Climate Change in Pasifika Relational Itulagi he writes

“This chapter argues for an ‘unburial’ of this neglected dimension [Pasifika philosophy, ethics and spirituality] which not only holds the key to constructive and sustainable solutions to the climate crisis, it also holds the key to a so-called ‘corrective balance’ of the whole human and ecological system, a kind of balance that activates self-healing and regenerative growth.”

In “We Are Therefore We Live” Pacific Eco-Relational Spirituality and Changing the Climate Change Story he explores these ideas more deeply an in the context of Christian theology as well.

Air Canada’s week and why wages matter

August 20, 2025 By Democracy No Comments

Congrats to the Air Canada Components of CUPE who secured a contract between Air Canada and their flight attendants. This was a wild moment in Canadian labour relations. A ten year agreement expired, the union demanded pay for unpaid work and achieved a 99% strike vote. Air Canada preemptively locked out the workers last weekend and began cancelling flights. The federal government ordered the groups to binding arbitration and then ordered the flight attendants back to work. They refused and began an illegal strike. The public largely stayed onside becasue NO ONE LIKES DOING WORK FOR FREE. Then yesterday, the announcement came that the dispute was settled.

This whirlwind week was an important moment for labour in Canada. At the same time as the new agreement was announced, CBC reported last night on the increasing prices of things, especially food, and how the affordability crisis is going. We have heard all kinds of news about price inflation over the past few years, but hardly anyone has talked about wage stagnation. In the past, price would rise, and so would wages. But in the last 20 years, and the last ten years specifically, this difference has become truly unhinged. Nobody in politics with any power, least of all the federal Liberals and Conservatives, have discussed wage increases, but everyone seems to have solutions for inflation, which has largely returned to its “normal” levels.

We need to talk about wages. All the time. You are not getting paid enough. People need to be paid more. And if you are worried about prices increasing perhaps we shouldn’t be because very little of what we are paying in higher prices is going to the people that make things and provide us with the services we need. For things like food, living wages for workers are not the issue. It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together, but we’re still living the neoliberal dream, so at the very least, the lateral thinking needed to do it is wanting.

A farewell to Rob Paterson

August 19, 2025 By Being, Featured No Comments

Rob, from a recent Facebook of his which he captioned “The new me.”

My friend Rob Paterson is dying. I found out on Facebook today as he shared a remarkable thing that his daughter is doing.

Rob was one of those bloggers that you’d meet sometimes in the early 2000s who posted tons of interesting stuff, and thoughtful, place based and personal posts. At his blog you’d learn about PEI, and finance and management, British history (which was essentially his own personal history), and food and health and all the things that his brain and heart were driven to explore. And he was one of those bloggers from those early that, when I met him in person for the first time in about 2006 or something, I connected with instantly. It was like that with Johnnie Moore and Euan Semple and Lila Efimova and Harold Jarche and so many others. In 2009 we visited Rob and his family in PEI and we even made a little video about living systems together.

Rob was always really interested in my work and in 2005 he and Johnnie Moore and I had a conversation about some new idea we called “unconferencing.” We talked about Open Space Technology and ways that people really do want to meet if only people who think they know better would get out of the way. That is such an interesting conversation because Rob described what might be one solid thread of the origin story of podcasting which happened at a conference hosted by Peter Rukavina in 2003 at which Dave Winer and John Muir met and discussed how to use RSS to broadcast radio shows.

That was how it was blogging back in the day. I feel like those of us still doing this or returning to this are keepers of some arcane traditional knowledge. We know what it’s for, what it does, how it changes people. We know how it brings people into our lives in surprisingly deep ways. It is not social media. It is slower than that. More relational. More real.

Rob has left an incredible legacy of writing and musing and conversation and his daughter Hope has embarked on a project to upload all of this to an AI. It’s an intriguing proposition, and perfectly suited to Rob’s penchant for using technology to feed wisdom and connection.

So much love and fondness goes out to Rob and family. My hope for you, my friend, is that your transition is soft and beautiful and that you are carried away on the stories we all hold of you.

Thank you for being in my life, and thank you for inviting me into yours.

Update: Rob died on August 24.

Complexity, AI, and democratic deliberation

August 19, 2025 By Complexity, Democracy, Facilitation, Learning, Notes No Comments

Chris Mowles has a lovely post on the perils of an unquestioned commitment to directionality in complexity. Our work is never starting from scratch, and what does “going forward” even mean in a non-linear context?

…maybe there is more to uncover about complex experience than talking as if there is only one tense which is important, the future, and only the individual’s rationality and will to map it out. The future is important, and we are oriented towards it, but this shouldn’t prevent us from thinking about how we have become who we are, and what matters to us. What remains of the embers of the past from which we can still derive succour and find resource?

Rosa Zubazarreta has long been a curious “pracademic” – as she calls herself – about facilitation and deliberation. We have met a few times in the past, but I consider her a close colleague in the work of constantly trying to learn about how to host conversations and design group spaces in which dialogue and listening is maximized. She recently had a peer-reviewed article published called “Listening Across Differences” about deliberative “mini-publics” which are small democratic fora hosted in Austria. Her most recent blog post explores the role of AI in group facilitation, a topic about which she is deeply passionate, and about which I am very curious.

It’s happening and I’m certainly willing to explore it more in deliberative contexts. I have run a couple of small experiments using AI to summarize vast amounts of narrative information and advice submitted by citizens to create high level summaries of advice, high level articulations of dissenting opinions and so on. This becomes material for further deliberation. I have been toying with a design where members of a group all spend time feeding information to different GPTs, querying the data in different ways and bringing their insights to a conversation. It’s about how to make vast amounts of opinion accessible, and generate a learning conversation that everyone can participate in.

This is becoming an interesting field and I notice the twin poles of curiosity and resistance in myself. My friend Jeff Aitken sent along a link to Metarelational.ai which feels like a true TRIP to explore. There are several varieties of trained chatbot there. I have seen and explored some of these, each one cultivated like a garden, each one designed to do something a bit different. Honestly, after a hour or so in a session with these tools, it’s hard to know what terms like “relational” mean. I am firmly in the world of knowing and working with human-to-human relationality. The work at Metarelational seems to at times to evokes a kind of eschatology of human relationships stemming from our own design, and a sort of surrender to AI and machine intelligence that feels religious. It uses religious and spiritual terms and language like “agape” and “right relationship” and “interbeing.” I joked with Jeff the other day about when a new religion might sprout up around an AI chatbot. It’s a joke, but given the proclivity for human beings to seek a higher intelligence that has all the answers, and to be led in a course of action “forward” at any costs, I think there is a serious question here.

A few course offerings this fall

August 18, 2025 By Uncategorized No Comments

The rainy weather here has me thinking about the fall, and we have a few course offerings coming up in the next few months, including two in-person Art of Hosting trainings and a couple of online offerings on working with stories to make change, and facilitating large-group meeting methods.

The Art of Hosting continues to be my core work in terms of training and capacity building. From October 16-19, I will return to Ontario to join Jennifer Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle for our third annual Reimagining Education Art of Hosting. There are still a few space left for this gathering, which takes place at the Queen’s Biological Station near Elgin, Ontario, in the heart of autumn colours season. It’s a rustic location on a lake with a smaller group of fewer than 40 folks, many of whom are involved in public and Indigenous education systems. These folks are joined by others who are working in other sectors and that richness means that it isn’t just an education conference and that people working elsewhere will meet lots of folks who are skilled at creating learning environments.

Twice a year in Vancouver, Caitlin Frost, Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier, Kris Archie and I host an Art of Hosting open to any and all. From November 12-14, A group of around 40 people from all over the world gather in Heritage Hall in Vancouver for a three-day intensive. This is always an incredibly diverse group of people and the connections and ideas and encounters that happen are amazing. Still spots open for this one and we will repeat it in April as well.

Two shorter online offerings are open for registration as well. Along with my friend Donna Brown who does on-the-ground community organizing in Baltimore, we will be participating in a series of courses offered by the School of System Change. Donna and I will appear as provocateurs for a session on Uncovering Stories to Understand Systems on October 8. Registration is open for this session and the whole program now.

And finally, later in the winter, I will be returning again for my annual offering through Simon Fraser University’s Certificate Program in Dialogue and Civic Engagement. On February 13, I will be teaching my one-day Introduction to Powerful Conversations. Focused on World Cafe and Open Space Technology, this course also contextualizes those approaches with a little complexity theory, and an introduction to chaordic design. You can sign up for the session without being fully enrolled in the certificate program.

You can stay up to date on these offerings through our Harvest Moon Consultants newsletter, on my courses page, or by subscribing to my blog at the link below, using RSS, or on LinkedIn or Mastodon.