Tenneson, Caitlin and I are running a three day leadership course for MacEwan University here in Edmonton. It starts tomorrow and we are having a great conversation at Remedy chai cafe about why meetings matter for folks studying leadership. Here are some of the insights.
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Meetings are microcosms for leadership practice. They are places to encounter one’s own leadership gifts and leadership challenges. What you learn when you host a meeting is very much related to how you lead a team or and organization or a board. Meetings are a place to confront what’s real and meaningful. They contain all of the patterns the give life or deplete it in organizations. They are places of immediate practice because they can be places of both pain and healing and so they demand attention and consideration.
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We are after teaching how to host conversations that matter. “Matter” because they more things matter to people the more engaged people are in the work. The number one question I get asked about is “how to I get people to engage?” And the answer is “make the work meaningful to them.” If your work is less meaningful than what folks have going on in the rest of their lives they won’t engage. Sometimes you don’t get to work with everyone you want to. But start with those who see why the work matters.
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If you want good effort to be sustained you need to build connection between people and connection to the work. Sustainability requires connection. Stewardship (or good governance) requires a long term and generative relationship to what is being cared for: people, work, place…Once you know that your future and wellbeing is tied up in the sustainability and health of the people and work and places that sustain you, sustainability and stewardship becomes a way of being.
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What needs time in a meeting? Einstein’s famous quite about using 55 minutes of a hour to come up with the right question is good. But I might use that time to build resilient relationships instead. Because then if we don’t figure out the question, or the answer, we will at least have to commitment to keep looking.
(Pssst. You can build resilience while you are finding the question, by the way).
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One of my teachers Birgitt Williams teaches that there is always grief in the room. To which I would add “there is always trauma and always inequity in the room too.” And so hosting rooms is also a space to host restoration and repair and dignity. It’s not therapy. It’s not even healing, per se. It’s just leaving things better than you found them, as much as possible.
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Be thoughtful in how you host, even if it’s a short conversation. The absence of design is a kind of design choice. It often defaults to “the way we always do things” and that isn’t always a good thing. So be thoughtful. Add something slightly different. Take away something you don’t need.
Today, I was working with a client designing a one-day conference for their members. As always, my focus was on the chaordic stepping stones as a way to design, which defers decisions about structure, agenda and logistics until after we have focused the groundwork of the event.
Participatory events are not highly engaging without tapping into the group’s urgent necessity and a clear sense of purpose for the gathering. From that point, design becomes easier, and invitation becomes alive.
Today, we focused on necessity and purpose. I kicked us off by asking, “What is happening that makes this gathering important? What conversations are you expecting to have?” in this sense, the question places people at the centre of the participant experience. Immediately, they feel the emotions of the gathering and connect with the obvious sensations present in the current context. That helps them to find the language to invite others into a gathering that will address the energy of the current moment.
For the second exercise, I had them tightly constrain their purpose statements for the gathering. I asked them to give me one word describing the purpose of the gathering given the context conversation we just had. Each of the six people typed a single word into the chat and we went around and had each person describe what that word meant and how they saw us doing that at the conference.
This led to a set of really focused insights on what we should be doing and how, and it helped to flesh out some of the other stepping stones: the outputs, architecture of implementation and some of the preliminary structure.
As I considered this technique, I reflected on how I study jazz language. I love learning licks and phrases of melody that people use to express different things. On their own, licks are just the building blocks of bigger phrases of meaning (although some licks, like the Salt Peanuts lick, convey A LOT of information). But a lick opens up possibility. It suggests something else, it even recalls past experiences. It comes from what your fingers or voice has done before, what is natural, what is top of mind.
The point is that licks are small units of language that an improviser can use to expand upon. Starting small and simple is incredibly helpful. From a one or two-bar phrase, you can develop variations and different kinds of tension and release. Writers know this from the prompts that are used to stimulate creativity. No one gets activated staring at a blank page. But give me a prompt, and we’re off.
In our meeting today, starting from a one-word purpose helped develop a grounded rather than abstract purpose for the conference. After an hour and a half together, we had a lot of good material for an invitation, some ideas for how to be together and the stuff we would create together, and the beginnings of a structure. It was a lovely improv session.
A detail from the monastary at Mont St Michel in Normandy showing a person overwhelmed with ripening fruit. He’s probably rushing off to his next zoom meeting.
So much has changed since the pandemic began, and it is hard to notice what is happening now. I feel like my ability to perceive the major changes that have happened to us since March 2020 is diminished by the fact that there is very little art that has been made about our experience and very few public conversation about the bigger changes that have affected organizational and community life in places like North America and Europe. All I seem able to grasp are fragments of patterns. Because I work with all kinds of clients in all sorts of different sectors and locations and situations, I do find myself getting struck with similar patterns that seem to transcend these differences, and it makes me wonder a bit about what is creating these patterns.
One of those repeated patterns is “we don’t have time” or “I’m too busy.” The effect of this is that convening people together is becoming increasingly difficult. I used to do lots of three-day planning sessions or organizational retreats where folks would come together and relax in each other’s company and open up a space for dreaming and visioning and building relationships. It was not uncommon for three or four-day courses to take place. Between 2011 and 2019, When we ran the nine-month Leadership 2020 program for the BC Federation of Community Social Services, we began and ended with five-day residential retreats on Bowen Island. We had two-hour webinars every fortnight. While some organizations found it hard to give up that amount of time (10 days away from the office on professional development training in a year!), we nevertheless put nearly 400 people through that program. Nowadays, when we do similar programs, the most we can get are three-day in-person retreats, and usually only one throughout the time together.
This is costing us big time. I am working with organizations where folks are meeting constantly but only spending time together a couple of times a year. The pandemic threw us into an emergency stop-gap approach to remote work that served the purpose of the times: to keep things going while we remained isolated. However, much of what happened throughout 2020 and 2021 was just stabilizing and concretizing these emergency measures. There wasn’t much thoughtfulness to how to make remote work and schooling work well. As a result, I think that many organizations made an over-compensation to being back together in person, and we are seeing some of that backlash now. Some people are six and seven years into their working careers who have only ever really known remote work. Their engagement patterns are radically different from those of us who came up in the days of long off-sites, of days spent in offices and work sites developing relationships and figuring things out together. And that isn’t even to mention schooling. Before the pandemic, there were some excellent programs in BC to support distance education for elementary and high school students, thoughtfully prepared and designed. When the pandemic began, teachers and professors were thrown into a completely new pedagogical context, and very, very few had any practiced ability to work in these contexts.
Of course, what makes this even worse is that we did a terrible job of managing the pandemic. Had we been able to return to office in the summer of 2020, with the virus squashed by a good public health response, it would have been an interesting time. We would have been equipped with experiences of different ways of being, what it felt like to work from home or support communities with a universal basic income. We would have run an experiment without entrenching structural constraints that made it hard to un-run the experiment. Instead, as the pandemic dragged on, temporary structural changes took hold. People moved away from their homes near their offices into cheaper and more distant communities. Public transportation funding shifted as ridership disappeared, and office leases were let go as companies and organizations realized that they could save on overhead and facilities costs. It is now far too late to be thoughtful about integrating the lessons of a global three or four month experiement into an existing society.
It feels to me that the urgency hasn’t gone away. Every day is a slew of online meetings, stacked back to back and on top of each other without any rest between sessions. Work hours are extended beyond a reasonable day, and those of us who are neuro-divergent are tipped into a world of near-constant distraction and dysregulation from the various and persistent demands on our time and attention. My first wide open day on my calendar for which I have no work committments at all is November 27, two months away. Since I turned 55 I have started taking Fridays off which means that I occasionally book full day sessions for that day. And I can move calls around and make time and space when I need to, but in general, I think my calendar probably reflects yours.
Our time and attention has been divided into hour long units, largely dictated by the default setting on our videoconferencing software. A half hour meeting feels like a blessing, as does a three hour session when we can take breaks and slow down.
My relationship to time is changing. Our relationship is changing.
I’m lamenting the loss of deep long engagement. Pre-pandemic we used to even have great online meetings that were rich and deep. People saw them as special and treated them like face to face meetings, giving the work it’s full attention. Cameras were always on.
Nowadays I bet there are heardly any meetings where everyone is focused on the task at hand. There are browser tabs open, phones to play with, tasks to accomplish while the meeting is going on. In some cases when we are doing workshops in organizations, and people have simply accepted the calendar invitation without giving any thought to how participatory it is, folks will just ghost the whole meeting. We have presented to zoom rooms full of black boxes with names in them, every camera off, every mic muted. One meeting I was involved – with elected officials no less, on the subject of engagement – I simply cut it short. No one was paying attention, no one was participating. There was nothing to do. Clearly the work wasn’t important enough, and so I just said something like “Instead of pulling teeth, I’m just going to suggest we finish this session.” A couple of people took a moment to say goodbye, and most just blinked off. I billed them my full rate.
I reallize that my life history as a facilitator has left me ill equipped for these kinds of meetings where attention is splintered into shards and no one seems to have the time to prepare or follow up becasue the next task is coming right up. Instead what I end up doing is focusing deeply on the invitation to the gathering so that everyone who comes has placed the time we have together at the top of their list. Sometimes this means shortening the meeting from two days to one day, or a half day to an hour and a half. I always warn clients that we can’t do the same quality work in half the time, so we make do. If we need a large amount of time together, we will plan something for a few months out so folks can clear their schedules. It’s now all about invitation and preparation, even more so than it ever was.
So…how are you with time and attention? What adjustments are you making to deliver quality in the meetings in which you are participating?
PS. If you want to read a good literature review on this stuff, check out “Remote work burnout, professional job stress, and employee emotional exhaustion during the COVID-19 pandemic.” i need not remind you that we are still in the pandemic; we are just pretending we aren’t.
Sometimes a line runs right through people and communities, and sometimes that line is in the middle of road we are all travelling on.
…how to address the polarization that is currently plaguing our world.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I have some ideas, maybe only one idea. But I’m not sure that there is much work that can be done in facilitating conversations across political divides. Instead, I think we need to focus on shared work.
This isn’t a new idea to me. I first saw Tuesday Rivera (Ryan-Hart) grapple with this reality back in 2011 when we were working with a group of social justice activists in New York, in the early days of Occupy Wall Street, and back when the Obama Administration was starting to suffer from weird attacks of The Tea Party, the movement that eventually took the US Republican Party off of the edge of rationality and into outrage, delusion and violence. For most of this century, polarized conversations between populists and policy wonks have been a feature of North American politics. It’s happening in Canada right now, and of course, we are all aware of what’s going on in the USA.
But here’s the thing. I think that these weird ideas that have plagued the social discourse for the past 15 years in earnest are down to folks who are doing very little else with their lives other than amplifying propaganda, hatred and inciting violence. In other words trolling. I have recently, finally, left Twitter because their CEO is one of those guys now, and that place, like much of social media, including Facebook, is a cesspool of delusion and hatred and bots and algorithms. There are so many bad-faith actors, bots and algorithms at work in those places that the discourse is now useless for doing anything other than getting populist politicians elected or inciting genocides. We’ve known this since 2016 when it was revealed how much Cambridge Analytica was influencing elections and politics in dozens of countries, and we’ve seen the result in places like the USA, Burma, Trinidad and Tobago and the USA. Other countries are now actively influencing domestic elections by poisoning the discourse between citizens. Canada’s populist right-wing is thoroughly infected by Kremlin-based operations now. There is no polite dialogue that will compete with the misinformation and hormone-fueled rage-baiting of these operations. Facebook and Twitter have built a fortune for their owners on the rage induced by this discourse, and they have used that money to invest deeper and deeper in the kinds of tech tools that continue to fuck us over.
I’m not being polite about this. Facebook, Twitter, and the like have poisoned everything from global policy making about climate change to local politics. These aren’t good places, and they don’t make us into good people.
That’s the preamble. But if you know me, you know I’m a bit of an optimist, and I’m always looking for places where possibility can take root. Lately, I’ve seen it in the work I’ve been supporting in community health care in the USA and practical reconciliation with First Nations in Canada.
Basically, it all comes back to Tuesday’s idea that shared work is more powerful than an abstract purpose or a set of shared values. When there is real work to do and urgency is in play, my experience is that people are much more willing to work together despite their politics and rhetoric. This isn’t to say that hate isn’t an important force to combat in our society; I believe it is. But my experience says that when folks roll their sleeves up to work on something that no one has the faintest idea how to solve, we can create something that transcends the abstract nonsense that social media drives amongst us.
If you’re tired of the rhetoric, get to work on a local need that is stumping your community. You will need to pull together diverse folks. You will have disagreements and arguments. But if you are committed to doing work together, a centre might emerge between you all that holds your efforts together, even if those with nothing better to do try to yank you apart.
There is real suffering in the world right now, and there is a real need to address it. If polarization is getting to you, get out there and do some concrete work with people who also care to alleviate it. They will not be the same as you. You will have deep disagreements about some things and deep commitments about other things. You have to learn to work together. There are no perfect partners.
And a reminder: This is a blog. It’s just a place where I share half-formed thoughts and ideas. Sometimes, they work, and sometimes, they are naive. However you react to this idea, I’d love to hear your affirmation or your alternatives, as long as they don’t require me to go back to Twitter and engage there.
Dry Falls, Washington, which is where the Missoula Flood waters poured over the rim of the Grand Coulee and created lakes from the plunge pools at the bottom of the cliffs.
It’s feeling familiar. After four years of mostly working from home and staying fairly close to my home place, I’m travelling more. The difference is that I’m doing it more with Caitlin, as we are working together with groups and organizations on longer-term projects that we are holding together with others. Much of our work together is around building deeper capacity in hosting and participatory leadership with larger institutional organizations such as universities, human services networks, unions, quasi-government organizations and the like. On top of that, we have been doing some Art of Hosting workshops in Vancouver and Manitoba and I have two more coming up in Ontario this fall.
Last week we were in Central Washington State working with a group called Thriving Together which helps build networks of health care providers for whole person health and health equity. This is the second year we have worked with a cohort of folks from that network. We met in Soap Lake, Washington, which in September is quiet. The kids are back in school, the tourists have all left and the town has very little buzz. Soap Lake, which is known as Smokiam (Healing Waters) in the local nxa?amx?ín language is a small, muddy, and very alkaline lake at the southern end of the Grand Coulee. The mud and waters are said to have healing properties and many visitors, especially from northern Europe and Israel, flock to the tow in the summer to partake.
The town itself is not affluent. Soap Lake does not have the water resources or the connection to the interstate to make it rival the towns in the rest of the county. Quincy, about a half hour to the south, is on the Columbia River and is a hub for big agriculture food processing and data centres, both of which use the river to power and cool their operations. Computing “in the cloud” is a misnomer. The cloud needs to rain, and the rain needs to be captured, and the water needs to be swirled around hundreds of thousands of computers that have a real live footprint on the ground. Cloud computing makes it sound so ephemeral. The reality is much more material.
To the north, in the town of Grand Coulee, also on the Columbia River, stands the great dam built during the 1930s to contribute to the two systems change points everyone needed to haul themselves out of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl: water and cheap electricity. In a country where almost every public service is privatized, the Bonneville Power Authority remains a public utility and sells the electricity generated by the dozen or more dams on the Columbia. These dams did their jobs, immortalized in song by Woody Guthrie, (he wrote these songs in less than a month, keeping in line with massive events that happen in a short period of time in these parts) who placed a limited and naive optimism in the people’s power and water, but they also flooded out dozens of Indigenous communities of the Colville Tribes and destroyed the Columbia River salmon runs. The landscape is stunning and captivating and has been radically changed by human hands.
Those human hands worked upon a foundation that was laid down by catastrophic flooding at the end of the ice age, when somewhere between 40 and 100 megafloods cascaded across central Washington, carving deep canyons from the volcanic basalt that had coated the bedrock millions of years before in thousands of feet of lava. the sheer scale of geological processes in this region are mind-blowing, and I found myself absorbed by YouTube videos of the Missoula Floods that carved out features on the land in as little as 48 hours as hundreds of meters of water flowed across the plains and carved the Columbia River gorge on its way to the sea.
Central Washington is no stranger to catastrophic shifts in fortune in the human time scale either. While Quincy and Wenatchee have done well, the further you get away from the Columbia, the harder it is to make a living. Agriculture held a lot of promise in Woody Guthrie’s time and irrigation canals crisscross the whole landscape. But like most industries, agriculture has been largely concentrated in a few hands, and automation has eliminated the jobs Guthrie was so optimistic about. While we were in Soap Lake, except for a single bottle of local wine, none of the food we ate was locally grown. If it was, it was only because it was part of a Sysco order that threw it together with Florida oranges, California lettuce, and bananas from God knows where. Someone is making a killing in agriculture, but it wasn’t the local folks I saw around me.
Instead, what Soap Lake had in spades was community, although it wasn’t obvious to the visiting eye. After spending a week there, we started to meet folks like Simon, the window washer who was sent by the drinkers at the local pub across the street to come and find out what we were up to. Or Nels Borg, who is the defacto golf pro at the Lava Links golf course, which has to be seen to be believed. Nels was in our workshop and is an undaunted community booster, even long championing the funding and construction of the world’s largest lava lamp, something which has very much remained the concept of a plan for 25 years. Like all small towns, Soap Lake has a long story for every “why?”
It’s political season in America and Grant County is a pretty conservative place in general. While there were plenty of Trump signs up (and a bunch of Harris/Walz signs, too), my experience working in the US during these times is that there is just too much work to do for the large-scale silliness to be top of mind for folks. When you are working with people who are caring for folks with addictions, childcare issues, educational challenges, and access to health care and housing, politics and policy are very real. We aren’t in weird arguments about people eating cats. We’re trying to meet the needs of vulnerable people and build public support and collaboration for health and well-being.
The work is real. Caring for veterans, fair housing policies, providing resources for neurodivergent middle schoolers, inclusive economic development, and peer-based support for people in recovery and active addiction. All of it is real and requires collaboration and multiple approaches to meeting needs. The participatory approaches and practices we are called to teach in these settings help set people up to lead in more open and participatory ways, even in a world where public conversations are coming apart and being subjected to lies, intimidation and ideology.
This group is really drawn to the methods we teach – Open Space, World Cafe, Circle, LImiting Beliefs Inquiry – and the theories and tools that help us think about creating participatory work and responses to really complex challenges that overwhelm people and systems. Sometimes, when the questions are just too big, the answer is – at least in the beginning – community. In our rush to do SOMETHING to respond to urgency, it is very easy to create situations that disempower and degrade connections. Organizations like Thriving Together play an important role in supporting the social infrastructure that builds community resilience. They can convene conversations that help diverse groups of people share knowledge and make sense of their conditions, leading to collaborations and resources. Without organizations like that and practices rooted in participatory work, agencies and organizations become siloed, disconnected and lonely.
Soap Lake is really no different from thousands of other communities around the United States and Canada and the rest of the world. It is a small town looking around for help and not necessarily finding it from higher levels of government or the corporate world that has extracted so much of its wealth and talent. It has to rely on its own resources to keep going, and remember what is essential about being a community: connecting, knowing each other, devoting a bit of time and energy to something a bit bigger than yourself because you know that when some are suffering, all are inhibited from full wellbeing.
I love working with groups like this. I admire their work and their undaunted commitment to solving absolutely diabolical problems. I learn so much about the imperative of participatory work from places like this, and I’m grateful for the reciprocal relationships of learning and change-making that we create together.