Have you seen these doodle games from Vi Harte? Brilliant games to play with math. Or perhaps games to play that demonstrate how math works. This one is my favourite, but you might also enjoy Stars, Infinity Elephants or Binary Trees, among others.
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[18] NO, THERE IS NO PRECEDENT for what we are struggling to create. We have to make it up ourselves.
A great set of theses which ends with this one. And therefore the capacities to create what is unprecedented are also unprecedented. Best practices for what will be needed in the future are not available at any scale in the precedent. The call in the world now is to move to discover new ways of being at every scale. Some of this new ways will draw on old ways, some of it will draw on contemporary ways and some of it will draw on ways we haven’t yet discovered. But it will depend on “ways.”
Ways are roads. We travel some of these lineages now and we start new ones all the time. While I was in Los Angeles, I was struck by the evolution of the road system. Some of it is based on very old paths, such as Wilshire Boulevard, which began life as a path cleared through a barley field and gave rise to a fundamental archetype of automobile based commercial space, the Miracle Mile. Henry Wilshire had no idea that his cut through a field would create such a pattern. His pathway far pre-dated the technology that would find its highest expression there.
In creating the unprecedented ways of our future, we need to be attentive to what we are doing but not assume that any great stroke will create the roadway of the future. If a path through a field is needed, cut the path. And see what happens. Many paths die away, but the odd one or two becomes a powerful way when the time is right.
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I recently wrote a white paper for a First Nations organization on participatory community engagement. The paper outlines several models, principles and processes that I am mcurrently working with as I help groups design and implement longer term community engagement processes.
Here is the most recent version of the paper for your reading, in .pdf format. The paper talks about mental models and comes from a perspective of decolonization. I’d love to have your thoughts in the comments so I can refine it further.
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This week I am in Kuujjuaq, Quebec, a settlement which lies about 20 miles upriver from Ungava Bay. I am working with government agencies, Inuit claims organizations and Inuit polar bear hunters on a user-to-user meeting between hunters from Nunavut, Nunavik and Nunatsiavut. Nunavut is a Canadian territory, Nunavik and Nunatsiavut are sort of semi-autnomous Inuit regions of Quebce and labrador respectively. All three areas arose from the settlement of land claims with Inuit organizations.
It’s an interesting meeting. All of the hunters are Inuit and they all hunt polar bears in the Davis Strait area, but they have different ways of doing it, and different cultural practices and even their dialects are different. There are a few unilingual hunters who only speak Inuktitut and so we have simultaneous interpretation between Inuktitut and English. Most of the meeting is being conducted in Inuktitut. The reason for the meeting was for the hunters to meet each other and see if there is anything they would like to do together with respect to the polar bear populations in the Davis Strait area. I won’t comment on the content of the meeting as we aren’t finished yet and it’s not for public consumption anyway, but I will make a few observations on the design and the challenges I have had as a facilitator.
I worked with a number of colleagues in designing this meeting using a Theory U framework. We knew that the first day would be much downloading, with some presentations and declarations and political positions. Even though these guys spend a lot of time on the land they are all very active in conferences and planning meetings and several of them are canny politicians. Day two was designed to take us through the bottom of the U, into presencing the emerging future, that which is not yet known. That included getting us out of the meeting room and on to the land where we hoped new insights would be sparked and the hunters in particular would feel able to stretch themselves. And day three was envisioned as a day of relaizing some new plans and ideas for working together. It didn’t break down exactly by days, but that was the gist.
Yesterday we began with the room set up in a cafe style and it quickly became clear that that wasn’t going to work for the participants. I wrote about this a little yesterday in a post that distilled my lessons from the day, but the short for is that they weren’t ready to try something radically new. They wanted a familiar room set up, which meant a hollow square that seated 40 people and a chair for the meeting. My colleague and I were happy to accede to this request. The design of the meeting would otherwise have become a massive distraction for the participants.
Interestingly, even as we changed the room around, and changed our facilitation style, the basic architecture of the flow remained the same, and today the process shifted even more. We spent the morning on the land out of town, on an excursion to a hunting camp. We were perched high above the Koksoak River, away from the tree line on some very rich and abundant tundra. The day was bright and very warm and the land was teeming with berries: crowberries, blueberries, and cranberries mostly. We spread out in smaller groups, some walking, some sitting and talking, others on little solos. We didn’t give any context for the time on the land this morning, but I had said last night as we broke up that we would be out on the land tomorrow, thinking and being in a different way.
After an hour or so of milling around, and picking a few cups of berries, the hunters all headed into to the small hunting cabin. When I went in to get some tea, I found them sitting in a circle, in deep conversation in Inuktitut. They had begun the meeting again and we simply let them go for it. At lunch time, some stew was brought out and someone unveiled a large piece of bowhead whale muktuk which was sliced with an ulu and laid out on the floor on a cardboard box lid. We ate together and then the hunters decided that they wanted to go back to town, to the meeting room and continue meeting there in a caucus.
So we headed back into town and the users hid away in our meeting room for the rest of the day discussing proposals with each other. My colleague and I stayed outside the meeting room and waited for what needed to happen to happen. The participants facilitated their own meeting and the government reps went off and did some business together awaiting an outcome from the users. All afternoon the hunters met and worked on various agreements and resolutions together, sometimes in small groups and other times in a de facto plenary. They have adopted a more traditional Robert’s Rules way of working in order to plan together because that is what is known to them. They are doing their own work and even though I didn’t technically “facilitate” anything today, I held space. Sometimes to wisdom not to intervene is what is required to keep space open. We have kept tabs on what is going on and expect to play a role as facilitators tomorrow as the users present their recommendations to the government reps, but in this meeting, we’ll see how the flow goes. It is a dance between shallow form and deep form, between holding on to the right things and letting other things go, and all while working in a context I know next to nothing about in a language I can’t speak. What is serving to guide me is the deep architecture of the gathering, my constant private checking in with the flow of the U which I know will bring us to some emergent learning. So far, the meeting is going as we planned it – at a deep level. On the surface everything is changing all the time.
A very interesting meeting.
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I’m a sucker for principles, because principles help us to design and do what is needed and help us to avoid bringing pre-packaged ideas and one-size-fits-all solutions to every problem. And of course, I’m a sucker for my friend Meg Wheatley. Today, in our Art of Hosting workshop in central Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony brought some of Meg’s recent thinking on these principles to a group of 60 community developers working in education, child and family services, and restorative justice. We’re excited to be working nwith these principles in the work we’re doing with Berkana Institute. Here’s what I heard:
1. People support what they create. Where are you NOT co-creating? Even the most participatory process always have an edge of focused control or design. Sometimes that is wise, but more often than not we design, host and harvest without consciousness. Are we engaging with everyone who has a stake in this issue?
2. People act most responsibly when they care. Passion and responsibility is how work gets done. We know this from Open Space – as Peggy Holman is fond of saying, invite people to take responsibility for what they love. What is it you can’t NOT do? Sometime during this week I have heard someone describe an exercise where you strip away everything you are doing and you discover what it is you would ALWAYS do under any circumstances. Are we working on the issues that people really care about?
3. Conversation is the way that humans have always thought together. In conversation we discover shared meaning. It is the primal human organizing tool. Even in the corridors of power, very little real action happens in debate, but rather in the side rooms, the hallways, the lunches, the times away from the ritual spaces of authority and in the the relaxed spaces of being human. In all of our design of meetings, engagement, planning or whatever, if you aren’t building conversation into the process, you will not benefit from the collective power and wisdom of humans thinking together. These are not “soft” processes. This is how wars get started and how wars end. It’s how money is made, lives started, freedom realized. It is the core human organizing competency.
4. To change the conversation, change who is in the conversation. It is a really hard to see our own blind spots. Even with a good intention to shift the conversation, without bringing in new perspectives, new lived experiences and new voices, our shift can become abstract. If you are talking ABOUT youth with youth in the process, you are in the wrong conversation. If you are talking about ending a war and you can’t contemplate sitting down with the enemy, you will not end the war, no matter how much your policy has shifted. Once you shift the composition of the group, you can shift the status and power as well. What if your became the mentors to adults? What if clients directed our services?
5. Expect leadership to come from anywhere. If you expect leadership to come from the same places that it has always come from, you will likely get the same results you have always been getting. That is fine to stabilize what is working, but in communities, leadership can come from anywhere. Who is surprising you with their leadership?
6. Focus on what’s working, ask what’s possible, not what’s wrong. Energy for change in communities comes from working with what is working. When we accelerate and amplify what is working, we can apply those things to the issues in community that drain life and energy. Not everything we have in immediately useful for every issue in a community, but hardly anything truly has to be invented. Instead, find people who are doing things that are close to what you want to do and work with them and others to refine it and bring it to places that are needed. Who is already changing the way services are provided? Which youth organize naturally in community and how can we invite them to organize what is needed? What gives us energy in our work?
7. Wisdom resides within us. I often start Open Space meetings by saying that “no angels will parachute in here to save us. Rather, the angel is all of us together.” Experts can’t do it, folks. They can be helpful but the wisdom for implementation and acting is within us. It has to be.
8. Everything is a failure in the middle, change occurs in cycles. We’re doing new things, and as we try them, many things will “fail.” How do we act when that happens? Are we tyrannized by the belief that everything we do has to move us forward?
9. Learning is the only way we become smarter about what we do. Duh. But how many of us work in environments where we have to guard against failure? Are you allowed to have a project or a meeting go sideways, or is the demand for accountability and effectiveness so overwhelming that we have to scale back expectations or lie about what we are doing.
10. Meaningful work is a powerful human motivator. What is the deepest purpose that calls us to our work and how often do we remember this?
11. Humans can handle anything as long as we’re together. That doesn’t mean we can stop tsunamis, but it means that when we have tended to relationships, we can make it through what comes next. Without relationships our communities die, individuals give up, and possibility evaporates. The time for apologizing for relationship building is over. We need each other, and we need to be with each other well.
12. Generosity, forgiveness and love. These are the most important elements in a community. We need all of our energy to be devoted to our work. If we use our energy to blame, resent or hate, then we deplete our capacity, we give away our power and our effectiveness. This is NOT soft and cuddly work. Adam Kahane has recently written about the complimentarity of love and power, and this principle, more than any other is the one that should draw our attention to that fact. Love and power are connected. One is not possible without the other. Paying attention to this quality of being together is hard, and for many people it is frightening. Many people won’t even have this conversation because the work of the heart makes us vulnerable. But what do we really get for being guarded with one another, for hoarding, blaming and despising?
We could probably do a full three workshop on these principles (and in the circle just now we agreed to!). But as key organizing principles, these are brilliant points of reflection for communities to engage in conversations about what is really going on.