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Category Archives "Collaboration"

The existential risk of our stolen focus

March 5, 2023 By Being, Collaboration, Community, Culture, Democracy, Featured, Flow, Football, Learning, Poetry, Uncategorized, Unschooling, Youth 13 Comments

In Those Years

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I

-- Adrienne Rich, 1992, hat tip to Jim

My favourite scene from the Life of Brian starts with Brian appearing at a window, trying to get his crowd of misinformed followers to leave him alone. He is, in fact, not the Messiah, and exasperated, he tries to tell them that they have it all wrong.

“You’re all individuals!” he cries, to which the crowd responds, in unison, “Yes! We’re all individuals!”

“You’re all different!” cries Brian. “Yes! We are all different!” the crowd replies again.

And then a single voice, with a slightly melancholy edge, quietly says, “I’m not.”

He is shushed.

This diabolical twisting of the Individual — Collective polarity has been on my mind over the past few years. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had the briefest moment of hope that the world would suddenly wake up to pulling together and looking after our public good. We created universal basic incomes, which made the most significant difference in poverty alleviation in my lifetime. We undertook mass public health campaigns to keep vulnerable people safe and not allow our medical and health systems to get too overwhelmed. We even briefly saw our planet’s health rebound as cars and airplanes, and industry generally slowed down or stopped, and the skies cleared.

But it wasn’t sustainable. It was a temporary fix to a global problem and didn’t address the underlying causes of poverty, public health crises and climate change. Within a year, we had splintered and fractured. “We lost track of the meaning of we,” as Adrienne Rich wrote in 1992, “we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible.”

I have been on holiday these past two weeks, on Maui, and I’ve had time to read and think and rest. One of the books I took with me is Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, a recent book that traces how our attention has been stolen by social media, schooling and the workplace. Deirdre, who recommended it to me at Jessica’s Book Store in Thornbury, Ontario, last month, said it made her quit social media.

The book isn’t entirely about social media – it’s much more extensive than that – but the history of social media’s colonization of our attention forms a big part of the book. Hari traces the rise of surveillance capitalism, delivered through the toxic and amoral algorithms that drive us into deeper and deeper echo chambers at a pace and a way that steals our attention before we are aware of it. The need to keep eyeballs on the app instead of the world around us drives us apart. At one point, he asks the provocative question about why Facebook can’t help us connect physically with friends and like-minded folks nearby so that we can make something together or enjoy an evening together. Why does it not recommend amazing projects and activities we could do with friends? It could easily do all of this. It could quickly help us build community, have a good time together, and make a lasting impact. But it doesn’t, and it won’t because the idea is to keep eyes on the app and keep people out of the physical world, which requires them to put down their phones and play.

Hari traces the origins of the psychology of social media back to the behaviouralist researchers and teachers who taught the cabal of engineer-capitalists that built this world in Silicon Valley. Nothing new there, perhaps, but what is different is that one can see how it works on one’s own mind. It is a chilling read because it lays bare capitalism’s unapologetic agenda that uses everything it can to generate wealth regardless of the impact.

Our attention is a battleground and a landscape that surveillance capitalists will exploit as readily as an oil company will exploit a shale play. The difference is that oil companies are subject to government regulation about what they can and cannot do, and surveillance capitalists are not. There is no environmental protection for the pristine nature of our creative minds. The predators have been given free rein to exploit it all.

The result is that we have become radically disconnected from each other. And the pandemic made it much worse as we retreated into our bubbles and became more reliant on social media for connection while at the same time being fed a steady stream of the stuff that is guaranteed to keep us engaged with apps and not each other. I think I first heard the term “doom scroll” in 2020. I recognize it in myself as the embarrassing desire to read one more stupid thread of misinformed comments. It makes me feel self-righteous. I can take on a few transphobes or racists from the safety of my own house. But that doesn’t make a change in the world. Half the time, I might even be arguing with robots.

But of course, this is precisely the cognitive-chemical loop that creates deep attractor basins that keeps us at home, on our devices, facing a massive barrier of inertia to get up and do something. Hari points out that this is not simply a problem that can be addressed by individual actions and habits, like putting away the phone at night in another room. While those are essential strategies for reclaiming attention, Hari clearly points out how attention-stealing is systemically enabled.

I can feel it in my work with TSS Rovers FC as we build this football club and enlist volunteers, spectators, and fans. To try to make a culture around something positive that requires people to come out and participate is to buck the forces of the entire world of surveillance capitalism that wants us on our phones and not in the stands singing and supporting young men and women, co-creating community, having fun together.

A couple of weeks ago, I was having dinner with a friend, and we discussed the crisis of belonging in our world. This has been an important concern in her research and advocacy work over several decades, which has led to all manner of crises, including mental health, development for young people, and our general tenor of social relations at the moment. I think it even contributes to the most significant issues like climate change, which arise from disconnection from each other, our natural world and the community of living things threatened by the actions of our species.

This affects all of us. Our phones and laptops have handy apps that can tell us how much time we spend on our screens, particularly on our social media apps. It is way more than you think. Thinking about places where you spend MORE time than on your social media apps is helpful. To which community do you really belong? WHOSE community do you really belong to? And, do you REALLY belong?

At the moment, I have a few activities outside of work that activates flow in my life: playing music, cooking, volunteering with both TSS Rovers FC and the Rivendell Retreat Centre, writing, gardening, and hanging out with my beloved and my kids. And altogether, I wonder if I STILL spend more time on my phone than doing these things, WHICH GIVE ME JOY. Even as I am typing this, my little tracker tells me that, on holiday, I averaged almost 4 hours of screen time daily.

These past two weeks, combined with Lent, have given me a welcome respite to reconsider my relationship with the thieves of attention who rule my life. Social media is an important part of my life and is probably how you and I are connected.

But Hari points out that the stealing of attention has existential impacts. It might be what prevents us from concentrating enough and spending the time we need together to address and move past existential crises like climate change, populism, and the threat of nuclear war. Suppose we cannot give more time to the collective problems of now because we are instead tilting at the AI-generated windmills of Facebook and Twitter. In that case, we will not be able to find one another, collaborate and perform out of our skins in the service of a viable future for this planet, its creatures, and its people.

End of year reflections

December 24, 2022 By Art of Hosting, Being, Bowen, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Football, Leadership, Learning, Music, Practice, Stories, Travel 10 Comments

Smelhmelhélch (Passage Island) at the mouth of Átl’ka7tsem (Howe Sound) before the snows came earlier this week.

Some notes on 2023 while I have a moment to review them.

The year began with the death of my father and is ending with worries about the serious and lingering health issues of other senior family members and so in a lot of ways this year has been split between personal grief during the first part of the year, and the waiting, supporting and attending in the second part of the year. Several times during the year, I haven’t found myself at my best. And that’s added on top of the persistent and low level background radiation that comes from the feeling that the world is slowly coming apart on this part of the planet and we are collectively ill-equipped to deal with it.

It hasn’t left me pessimistic, but I have noticed that I’m sad at what we have lost, which most of all appears to be the collective capacity to DO SOMETHING about the long term prospects for our planet and the community of living things that occupy it. as irrational as that thought is, because truthfully, it has been that way for my whole life, nevertheless, there is a feeling of loss. I’ve always described myself as an optimist because I believe that there is always something better we can do or embody, but the general prognosis needs power and wealth to radically change directions, and increasingly, I’m not confident that will happen. And so we push on.

Work

My work is changing, and has done throughout the pandemic. In the past I did much more face to face and one off facilitation work and delivered teaching through Art of Hosting workshops, for which I travelled the world. As I get older, I am more interested in teaching and supporting younger facilitators and so there is much more teaching now and one-to-one coaching and we are also taking work that is larger in scope than facilitating single meetings, in which we are focused on longer term support for leaders and organizations who want to be more participatory and more engaged with meaningful work. I like this as it means we develop longer term relationships with a few clients and are able to see the results of our work together over time. Additionally most of this work continues to be online, which suits me well as I have become more of a homebody and more introverted in the last three years. I do love face to face work, but as I get older I find it much more tiring, and I appreciate the ability to deliver quality content to folks and then turn off my computer and go to the garden or play guitar for an hour.

In 2023 I will turn 55 and I have a strong commitment that on my 55 birthday we will begin the process to scaling back and only working four days a week. We have been planning on this for a while, and I’m really looking forward to this shift. I feel like I need it for all kinds of reasons. In my calendar starting June 13, every Friday for the rest of my life has a recurring event that says “Fridays off for the rest of my life.”

This year Harvest Moon which consists of Caitlin Frost and myself along with our stellar assistant Laura O’Neil, had 27 clients. Many of these were larger projects working within large organizations and involving a lot of teaching and capacity building to support leadership and organizational change. We do this with a set of tools and practices that include participatory facilitation methods from Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development approaches, Participatory Narrative Inquiry, complexity work and personal practices for rigorous inquiry on limiting beliefs. This year we packaged these into bespoke programs in complexity focused participatory leadership for the Executive levels and senior leadership of a major university, a Crown corporation, an Indigenous government, a national labour union and one or two smaller organizations. We embedded several three day Art of Hosting/Art of Participatory Leadership workshops in these settings, and also used our course material we have been developing around complexity and personal leadership practices to complement the strategic conversations that we hosted. We have written four extensive workbooks for these programs and this might well turn into something more formal in the years ahead.

We amplified all of this work with story collections primarily using NarraFirma to gather stories and PNI to design sense-making and strategic interventions. This last capacity has become key to our work now and I have now run upwards of 30 story collection and sense-making projects through NarraFirma since the pandemic began. Although we have become really good at working with this material online, this work is most powerful in person, and it is one of the things I am looking forward to doing more face to face.

Partners

Over the past year we have worked with many partners and it is my usual practice to name them. They live in five different countries (Canada, USA, Netherlands, Moldova and Australia) and working with them makes it possible for all of us to do amazing work together. My gratitude to them all.

  • Harvest Moon partners Caitlin Frost and Laura O’Neil
  • Tatiana Glad
  • Meribeth Deen
  • Bhav Patel
  • Kris Archie
  • Kelly Foxcroft Poirier
  • Tiaré Jung
  • Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen at Beehive Productions
  • Phill Cass
  • Ciaran Camman
  • Amanda Fenton
  • Quin Buck
  • Corrina Keeling
  • Jodi Sanford
  • Kinwa Bluesky
  • Chad Foulks
  • Geoff Brown
  • Teresa Posakony.

Teaching

This year I offered several open enrolment courses with colleagues.

Learning

In addition to everything I learned from teaching these courses I also enrolled in two important programs myself to deepen my own practice.

  • Weaving It In: Making evaluation part of your work. This was an inaugural offering from my close colleague Ciaran Camman and combined their decades of evaluation experience with solid complexity and participatory practice. A nice combination of theory and practice and experiential learning.
  • Co-Resolve introduction to Deep Democracy with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson. After about 20 years of Sera challenging me to become friends with conflict, I finally came to study with her and this was a great course. The biggest shift in me is seeing how my conflict-averse tendencies have shifted from conflict resolution to what I’m calling “conflict preservation.”
  • This next year I have signed up for Cynthia Kurtz’s deep dive into Participatory Narrative Inquiry which is a 20 week long practicum during which my colleague Augusto Cuginotti and I will be running a PNI project with a client. I haven’t done any learning like this at this sort of scale since University. I’m looking forward to it.

Living on the web

My first website was a collaborative writing project with my old friend Chris Heald called Stereotype back in 1995. It was a proto-blog in the style of suck.com, which even 25 years later is a remarkable documentation of the shift of life from physical to online. So I’ve lived through a lot of iterations of web life. This past year I started a long wean away from the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter and began writing again on my blog with more frequency. I started a Mastodon account and have used that as an opportunity to rethink how I have compartmentalized my life online to suit various audiences. For the most part I have maintained a professional kind of look here and on my @chriscorrigan twitter account and I have devoted hours and hours of time to soccer life through my @salishsea86 twitter account. That is all changing slowly. I maintain some twitter accounts for the supporters group of the soccer team I co-own, but otherwise, I think everything will eventually be centralized back here with micro-posts on Mastodon. I will republish links to these posts through Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter as usual.

I’m slightly looking at LinkedIn again as there is some interesting professional content there that used to be published on blogs, but as much as possible I am integrating interesting content into my feeds at NetNewsWire. That is where I will be doing most of my reading, as the endless scroll of twitter and facebook are no long giving much value and Instagram is useless for my life, other than keeping up with our footballers who are half my age who only post there!

Avocations

This year has had three big commitments outside of family and work. As a founding member of the TSS Rovers Supporters’ Trust, I have spent the year selling shares to 351 co-owners of Canada’s first community-owned semi-pro soccer team. We have done some remarkable things this year including winning a League Cup on the men’s side and qualifying us for Canada’s national championship, the Voyageurs Cup, which is, mindbogglingly, the pathway to the FIFA Club World Cup. We will play a meaningful match in the first round of that competition in April against a Canadian Premier League professional team and the only thing better than actually getting this far would be effecting a giant killing in April. It has bee a remarkable journey all it’s own.

Another responsibility that I have devoted myself too is chairing the Board of the Rivendell retreat centre, a contemplative centre on Bowen Island. We have come through a pandemic and stayed afloat and are now beginning to engage in active fundraising for our longer term sustainability. This role is part of the way I live out my contemplative spiritual practice alongside a commitment to leading worship once a month at our little United Church on Bowen Island. I love that job. It helps us to afford our part time Minister and I get to dive deep into topics and scripture readings that are close to my heart. Perhaps I’ll post my sermon notes here in the new year if that’s of interest to you.

Music is my love and my third commitment. I have been singing with a renaissance choir doing medieval liturgical music and madrigals and studying jazz guitar on my own. My guitar teacher sadly died in April, and I miss him dearly. We had only a few lessons this year as he grew sicker. Learning jazz alone with only you tube videos and fake books is incredibly hard but incredibly rewarding and I’m hoping this year I might be able to study with another teacher and finally get a chance to play with folks.

Life on an island

I have lived on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) now for 21 years and seen many changes over that time. I have blogged about living here for most of that time. These days we are facing a huge population turnover and some rapid growth which has introduced lots of new folks to the place and radically changed the culture. Community events are returning which is essential if we are to repair the cohesion as a community that has been lost through the pandemic. I feel that we are fragmented in many ways, and we are being confronted with some very challenging situations including a ferry system that is crumbling under global staffing shortages, strains on our little island infrastructure, economic pressures from living in one of the most expensive places on earth with no level of government committed to radical change, tourism pressures and mindset that sees the places increasingly as an under served and under resourced suburb rather than a rural community. These changes have been steadily occurring over the past number of decades but social media and a lack of face to face contact has made them more pressing.

In the natural world, the big news is the tremendous numbers of humpback whales and orcas that have returned to our seas, and there are almost daily sightings of these mega-fauna. Ten years ago that was unimaginable. While that is happening, we have also witnessed some extreme weather, including long hot droughts in the summer which are the biggest threats to the place. Things change here and being grounded in place means that one can be a long-eyed witness of it all.

So that is the state of play on Christmas Eve 2023. At the end of a year in which I was not at my best, after three years of living in a strange new world, entering the half way point of my 50s. Thank you for sharing this year with me. Say hi. I hope we can cross paths next year.

The theology of the Art of Hosting

November 24, 2022 By Art of Hosting, Being, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Emergence, Featured, Flow, Learning, Podcast, Practice 2 Comments

In the Art of Hosting world we have a few shared core teachings that show up in nearly all the learning workshops that happen. At some point we talk about complexity – we usually explore the Chaordic Path as a simple introduction into complexity – and we always touch on the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting.

Back in 2014 I was doing a project with the United Church of Canada looking at the different levels of their structure in British Columbia and imagining what they could also be. If there is one thing that Churches have consistently done from the beginning it is that they adopt new forms. At the moment the United Church, and many other mainline progressive Christian denominations, are going through a massive shift, probably the biggest one since the Reformation. And it’s affecting everything.

So as I was doing this consulting work I started meeting communities of people who were asking how could they live through these transitions. Not survive them necessarily, but go with the transformation that was happening. As a part of the work I was doing I started offering talks and workshops based in the Art of Hosting, but wrapped in the theology of the United Church, becasue it turns out that having a way to understand complexity and to host life community is both necessary in struggling churches AND is pretty much the basis of Christian practice.

Now for those who don’t know, the United Church of Canada is a progressive, liberal Protestant denomination committed to radical inclusion and social justice. I was raised in that Church and at one point had my heart set on becoming a minister in that Church. My own spiritual practice is grounded in contemplative Christianity and I am an active member of the Bowen Island United Church where I help lead worship and preach one Sunday a month so we can give our paid minister a break.

That is just context to help you understand the theology behind this talk.

This talk was a keynote for the Northern Presbytery of British Columbia annual meeting from 2014. That year the churches of northern BC were gathering in Prince George to be together and practice being a bigger community. They invited me to come and speak on the work I was doing around community building and I chose to share the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice and I relished the chance to share these ideas using stories and teachings from scripture.

So if you work with Churches or Christian religious communities and you are interested in the way the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice basically help us use the teachings of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel in practice to build community, click here and have a listen.

What’s in the Parking Lot #2

May 27, 2022 By Being, Bowen, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Featured, First Nations, Flow, Learning, Links, Practice One Comment

“Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. The air is loaded with miasmas there. Other books breathe a livelier air; the bracing air of outdoors, the wind of high mountains, even the icy gust of the high crags buffeting the body; or in the morning, the cool scented air of southern paths through the pines. These books breathe. They are not overloaded, saturated, with dead, vain erudition.”

— from A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros

I love writing born of direct experience, born of the insight of a moment, or generated from the passing inspiration of the glint of sunlight on the sea seen through an open window. I love writing that arises from the quiet encounter with spirit or the contemplation of a mind that finally slows down and stretches out. That is writing of authentic voice or even the super-voice that all writers know, the voice we chase for its clarity and ease. It sometimes takes a long pounding away at the keyboard or days of scribbled lines before that voice arises somewhere below consciousness. In that moment you become merely a vehicle for it, in service to something. Your word choice become less ham-fisted, the cadence of the words more natural, like a jazz musician, you become open, trading fours with the muse, offering a lick of style or form and being rewarded with an image or a connection that you could never see before.

I’m enjoying A Philosophy of Walking. It is a testament to obliquity in the arts and philosophy, about the way a walk frees the mind and opens the heart. Today I’m heading out on y first work trip since February 15 2020 and I’m appreciating the way my thinking slows down even as my body is in the stop and go rhythm of ferry travel. There is spaciousness, time to kill, time to read or write or just peer out at the sea and look for whales or sea lions. Travelling on the coast means moving at the speed of the ferry, and the best way to do that is to travel on foot, at a human pace, free of the frustrations of being confined to a car, presented with options at every turn; a crossword, a book, an album, a blog post, a nap.

Have a read this weekend of some cool things I’ve found on the web. I’ll see what ideas and thoughts bubble up from this little trip to Vancouver Island.

  • The Limitations of “Performance.” With a great quote from Tim Galloway: “When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.”
  • The Sultans of String record “The Power of the Land,” a poem by Duke Redbird set to some great music and visuals of some pretty impressive landscapes, including, at 1:36, a view of Nexlelexwem/Bowen Island and the south end of At’lka7tsem/Howe Sound, which I live. 

Enjoy your weekend as we move towards midsummer. I heard my first Swainson’s Thrush today, which means the better part of the season has begun.

The Golden Rule: a principles setting exercise

May 2, 2022 By Collaboration, Complexity, Facilitation, Featured, Organization 13 Comments

A ferry worker in a safety vest is ready to open a gate and let cars of a ferry docking at horseshoe Bay

One of the quotes I keep rolling out all the time is this one from Christina Baldwin:

No group can prove itself safe by the definition of one member; it can only prove itself healthy and responsive to the the needs of different people over time

Christina Baldwin, Calling the Circle, p. 172

I sometimes reframe this quote as “No one person can be responsible for safety in a group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for its own safety.”

For a group to work well, especially if it is confronting challenges, uncertainty, complexity, or conflict, it needs to be safe enough for members to freely share and contribute, and also challenging enough that ideas that no longer serve can be questioned, stretched and broken to make space for the new. Rather than saying “we will create safe space” it’s useful to take some time to explore the polarity of safety and danger. We often talk about “safe enough” or “brave space” or similar terms that capture this space of leading and facilitating.

So the way to do this is to enlist the group itself in co-creating the conditions that create a creative, generative, challenging and supportive space. I usually do that by facilitating this process that I call The Golden Rule Principles Setting Exercise.

The Golden Rule, of course, is the principle that underlies the perennial tradition of many religious and spiritual traditions. In Christianity it is worded as “Love your neighbour as yourself.” It recognizes our interdependence with others and it invites us to practice offering to others the same things that we ourselves need.

The process is very simple.

  1. Invite people to reflect and discuss these two questions: During this meeting how do I want to be heard? During this meeting how do I want to be spoken to?”
  2. It’s good to do this in pairs and folks can record some of these needs and place them on stickies or a virtual whiteboard or chat log.
  3. Have the pairs share a few of their needs into the whole group.
  4. Next invite people to reflect on how to offer to others what they want for themselves. If I need to be allowed to ramble a bit uninterrupted because I think out loud, I can put this need in the centre and also commit to not interrupting others.
  5. Have people commit to a single practice that they will endeavour to live up to, one that they may even be willing to be accountable to, and place it on a sticky note.

That’s it. Except under very specific circumstances, I don’t ask the group to vote on these principles, or approve them in any other way. Rather, I trust the people to do their work. From time to time of course as a facilitator one needs to step in, but usually when this process is put into play, I need only offer a period of silence and reflection on the commitment for a group to restore its collective responsibility to care for the container.

As a way to begin a meeting, this is a first foray into co-creation of something that the group all needs and is therefore an excellent way to set the tone for collaborative work, creating a space that can hold the range of emotions that show up in complexity work