Phil Rosenthal, being interviewed by Tom Power.
Phil Rosenthal, interviewed last year by Tom Power on Q at CBC talking about what it was like when he stepped into running Everybody Loves Raymond. It’s great interview, but I love the section that begins at 21 minutes. It was his first job as a show runner, and he learned from other bosses he had worked for. He was scared, and he was a rookie. But he established a clear vision and then took care of the connective tissue between his staff. He adopted a persona that was “nice” rather than dictatorial. He wanted people to love coming to work. He focused on the food that people ate, and hired a chef to delight the staff and give them something to connect over. Adopting the principles of “the army travels on its stomach” he knew that food would bring the cast and crew together in a way that abstract hand waving at values could not. The result was that the show created a feeling of family.
A family is not always the best generative image for an organization. Families are complicated, and full of tricky dynamics. But when they work well, they anchor loyalty to one another and create sustaining love and friendship. When people talk about their workplace as “my family” it’s usually because they experience the best of what a family can be. A chosen family. Rosenthal gets that and he gets what it takes to put his optimistic worldview into practice. He says “Food is the great connector and laughter is the cement.” To paraphrase Harrison Owen, who was a devoted observer of high performing teams. trust the people and notice when they are laughing because that is a sign that it’s working.
In the past few years I have seen so many workplaces and organizations that could benefit from this simple wisdom, this gentle approach. It is often the small things that make the difference, that build the connective tissue that keeps a team going through the inevitable ups and downs of organizational life. you have to work on the love part, because people don’t always like each other, or don’t always like the behaviours and actions. If that isn’t attended to, groups of people can reach a social impasse and sometimes the only move left is to leave or come apart. That entails tremendous cost to individuals and to the organization. It is sometimes the only fix, but it won’t always leave you stronger. And even if it does, the work is to repair, to take a new approach and build trust and friendship and commitment to one another back into the work. It’s a long and slow process, because once trust is diminished, it is requires deep commitment to change to re-establish it.
We’re in a world where trust seems very low and self-awareness, responsibility, and a willingness to grow together is at a premium. These are what Harold Jarche calls “permanent skills” and they need training and practice on the regular. They don’t go away and there is no place or time when they are not helpful.
My neighbour Alejandro Frid is an ecologist and works extensively with Coastal First Nations in British Columbia. I love his work as a scientist and as an author and I love the way he shares wheat he is doing such as in this story on Kitaspo/Xai’xais fisheries management. Last night he spoke at Speak the Spark, a n every-two-months storytelling even here on Bowen Island where local folks share stories around a theme. It’s a bit like The Moth. Last night the theme was Faux Pas’s and Unexpected Turns and we heard stories about giving up wealth for happiness, photographing New York on the morning of 9/11. accidentaly dressing up as a clown for a school carnival, making an innocent comment to a friend on a train that was taken the wrong way, and we heard Alejandro’s story about how a handwritten request for computer help led to a decades long collaboration with his dearest research partner.
Cory Doctorow is travelling around discussing the history of, and the antidote to, enshittification. Here a transcript of a recent talk which is a kind of call to arms for our participation in the current and ongoing trade wars by creating and selling tools that liberate the users of technology of all kinds, lower fees and prices, and secure some degree of tech sovereignty for Canada and others.
A short story from Thea Lim about a private investigator, his technique and his subject and how it is that we all fade into the totality of a city. The story takes place near where I grew up in Toronto so the setting is vivid to me. Anyone Could Be Anyone is published in The Walrus.
Life in the vast lane. Doc Searles reflects on how the internet has changed over the past 25 years for those of us who create and share our own stuff here.
Anything that, as Mark McKergow puts it “offloads cognitive strain” is valuable especially when a person needs to bring all of their cognitive abilities to the task at hand. Not surprisingly then, you find that the situations where there is likely to be chaos or catastrophic failure, tools like checklists are everywhere: in operating rooms, flight decks, factories, fire halls, kitchens. Mark shares some solid thoughts on these humble tools.
A little section of the Litany of Becoming by m. jade kaiser and pointed out to me by Tenneson this morning.
To say, for the first time,
“This is who I am.
This is the truth of my body.
This is what I know about myself.
This is my name and this is where my path is leading me.”
And to have it heard. Have it received. Have it affirmed.
And then,
to say it again,
and again,
as we change
and as the world changes,
and to have each proclamation greeted with an open-armed embrace
New books to read from The Tyee.
Plus ça change, plus les mêmes choses. The Seven O’ Clock News from August 6, 1966 alongside Silent Night. We are in a collective noche oscura del alma.
Rick Rubin asks us to pay attention: “Creative is something you are, not only something you do. It’s a way of moving through the world, every minute, every day. The artist is always on call.” inspiration happens at fine granularity. The new comes from outside of what we know, at the very edges of our awareness. Novelty, by definition, strikes us with surprise. The ordinary is the fodder for the extraordinary. How could it not be?
Want a practical example? I spent a delightful 90 minutes on Friday with Cynthia Kurtz and Ashley Cooper and some lovely folks who are using Participatory Narrative Inquiry in different ways in the work. And it reaffirmed to me how the work of PNI is so much about generating these oblique insights, these moments of clarity and novelty. Ron Donaldson continues to delight and inspire and share such valuable stuff in his year end reflective posts, and today’s is about insight. I’m so chuffed to have helped inspire these beautiful offerings.
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.
This is what our inlet looks like these days. Grey, wet, cold, and lovely.
Fridays are for me. Since I turned 55 a couple of years ago, I’ve set aside Fridays for – whatever. Since my ADHD diagnosis last year, I’ve called Friday my ADHD day where I can just let my mind carry me into an unplanned day. Sometimes that means reading, sometimes it means spending the day outside, doing errands, seeing friends, playing music…lots of options. And it’s important to give myself permission to do whatever and not feel guilty for not being “productive.”
So today, the cloud is starting to build as a 2800km long atmospheric river is set to deliver up to 90 mm of rain over the next 36 hours, then tapering off to a steady 2-4 mm of rain every day for the early part of the week. It is a good day to hang out at home, drink some lovely Guatemalan coffee from Moja and read through some interesting articles from my feed reader. Here’s a bunch of links for you to enjoy:
Last night I spent a couple of hours playing euchre up at the Bowen Island Legion where every Thursday night is games night. Euchre is not typically a BC game, but it’s played extensively in Ontario, Michigan and Alabama. Becasue our local euchre players mostly bring their variations of the rules from other places, we have to agree on the rules before playing. As a folk tradition, the evolution of card games in fascinating, and conversation last night sent me to checking out euchre’s history today on Wikipedia.
There is a cost to a lifetime of coerced performance, whether it is due to insecurity, the need to code switch or deeper concerns for safety and protection. And the good news is as you get older, you really have fewer fucks to give which, to my mind, makes you a more interesting person. Travelling through my mid-fifties, I stand in awe as many my peers find this freedom and just let the venneer slip. They become true, real and authentic. Sometimes that means they take off and find new purposes and friends and people that get them, and sometimes I get to be one of those friends and the more I see of them the more I fall for who they are.
Time for a little magic. I came across Dani DaOrtiz’s craft today for the first time and I’m impressed by how he so thoroughly and delightfully wow’d Penn and Teller. I’m less impressed by how he blew away Donny Osmond, as that seemed to be like hunting fish in a barrel.
My favourite Canadian band, Rheostatics, released a new album today called The Great Lakes Suite. It’s a meandering ode to the Canadian view of the Great Lakes, reminiscent of their album of Music Inspired by the Group of Seven. It’s like a soundtrack for static things. This album includes poetry (Anne Carson, Liz Howard, Chief Stacy Laforme), guest musicians (Tanya Tagaq, Gord Downie, Laurie Anderson) and audio snippets. I can’t help feel that somewhere deep behind this band’s approach to these uniquely Canadian icons was inspired originally by Glen Gould’s experimental sound composition, The Idea of North. Rheos are having an album launch party in Toronto tonight with Alex Lifeson accompanying them.
It’s one thing to look north and another to look west. The CCPA publishes a useful summary of the resource projects that our provincial government is pursuing in their “Look West” strategy. Some of these are potentially catastrophic, including the idea that we can ship oil by tanker across the north coast of BC, or the idea that exporting natural gas is a good thing to do in a world that is dying from fossil fuel consumption. And what about jobs? Marc Less covers that as well, as these kinds of projects tend to hire large numbers of workers from elsewhere to build them and rely on as few as possible to run them. And these companies just aren’t great neighbours, as our local LNG terminal owner is demonstrating against the Town of Squamish.
Resource development in BC has effects on salmon, which is one of our charsmatic fauna in this region. Salmon are very sensitive fish and their story is the story of the attitudes and effects that humans have on our environment, even when we can’t see it. Salmon make things visible to us. Getting a handle on the story of salmon and the story of humans and salmon is important for getting a handle on how we manage to screw things up by segmenting the management of our environment.
Segmenting our approach to things is a things we humans do. And then we develop tools that, in the words of Nicholas Carr, create “dissimilarity cascades.” this is good interview to watch or read.
I think I will go outside today in the rain to see if there are any transient orcas about. A pod was hunting seals off the west side of our island earlier this week. They might still be around. This time of year, going outside means thinking carefully about how you dress, and this podcast episode on cold weather layering is the absolutely best discussion of dressing oneself for the weather that I have ever come across. I’m a bit obsessed about this topic, and it’s both important, and hard, to get it right.
And when I come home? I’ll make myself some dinner and settle down to watch the Vancouver Goldeneyes begin their history as Vancouver’s new Professional Women’s Hockey League team. Led by Canadian hockey legend Sarah Nurse, is it possible that this team will bring another pro women’s sports championship to Vancouver this year? Let’s see!
I publish posts like this a few times a week, but I don’t send them out to my email subscribers. Every few months I send out posts like this to everyone so you can see what else has captured my attention. Every post on my blog always gets cross posted to Bluesky and Mastodon and sometimes LInkedIn, but the best way to get notified is with an RSS reader. With an RSS reader like NetNewsWire, you can subscribe to anyone who publishes an RSS feed through their blog, Substack, Medium, or other publishing platform. Facebook and LinkedIn don’t publish RSS feeds, so if your good writing is happening there, the rest of the world won’t see it and there’s not much point in folks outside those sites sharing. Several times I have seen things go through my LinkedIn feed that looked interesting and then the app refreshes and lost the content. It sucks. Also it’s algorithmically influenced meaning that these sites feed me what they want me to read and not the other way around. Imagine sitting down to read a newspaper and someone puts People Magazine in your hands. If you are writing there, I strongly encourage you to also publish on a blog somewhere. Use a free service like WordPress so that the whole world can read and share what you are offering. And when Meta or LinkedIn finally go dark, you will have a record of your thoughts, contributions and development for all time and we all will have benefitted from them.
Stay dry!