Jane Siberry last night
There were things I saw last night that I may never see again. The first was the stunning conclusion to the World Series, in which the situation arose at the end of the game where any one pitch would win or lose an entire season. A base hit and the Blue Jays win. A double play and the Dodgers win. I think I awoke in the timeline where the Dodgers won, but it did indeed have the feeling of one of those situations in which a timeline splits into two. Somewhere in a parallel universe, the Blue Jays won and the baseball gods took a shine to this particular Cinderella and granted her an inch or two of leeway, for a ball stuck under a wall, a bounce off an outfielders glove in a collision at the warning track, a zephyr to deflect a line drive an inch or two further away from a third baseman who happened to be in the way, the ever so slightest dip on a pitch that would have sunk a fastball in the strike zone and resulted in a ground out instead of a towering home run.
I have never seen a sporting contest come down to minuscule twists of fate in such strange ways.
When the game was over I took advantage of the extra hour of time change to watch all the post game interviews with the Blue Jays players. All they could talk about was the love they held for one another. Professional athletes don’t always have the broadest emotional vocabulary and you could see every single one of them struggling to find words to describe the depth of relationship they have with their colleagues, and their families and the staff of the organization. They were pleading with the cynical corps of sports reporters to have them truly understand the depth of love that they all experienced. It was a once in a lifetime experience. It was transformational. They didn’t win the World Series, but they can never forget the love – the utter agapé of it all – that flows between them. It is love that transformed them from a last place team to a team that missed their destiny by a whisper. It is love that left them changed as people. It is, I might say, the love that we should all have a chance to experience once in our lives. We are built for it. It does something to us. I’m not shy in saying there is a theology about it.
And that brings me to the second thing that happened to me last night, which I may never see again, and that was going to see Jane Siberry perform live and solo at the Motel Chelsea up in the Gatineau. It is a surprising and lovely little venue, a place of vision, stuck on a side road by an off ramp from the Highway 5 that winds its way from the city of Gatineau across the river from Ottawa up into the Gatineau hills and beyond in the wilderness of southwestern Quebec and the Kitigan Zibi homelands.
Jane Siberry is one of the people I count among the pantheon of psalmists in my life, along with Bruce Cockburn, Dougie McLean, Martyn Joseph and Ani DiFranco. She opens me up and can make me cry at the drop of a hat. Her performance last night was a ceremony of liberation, a woven story where lyrics and images flowed and churned like a river, coming back around in back eddies of meaning and imagery. A consistent tone centre, an entire first half hour played on guitar in a diatonic scale of open E voicings, the words “light” and “love” and “mother” coming back again and again, deepening each time.
I turned to the friends we were with at the end and said “this is a liturgy.”
She finished with “Love is Everything” and if you didn’t know the truth of these lyrics before, then you might have had a chance to witness them in much more stifled words from the mouths of the Blue Jay players in the locker room last night. And so, here they are. Because I hope that everyone who witnessed that journey – who witness the deep journey of being human, in fact – at some point comes to the realization that Jane Siberry and Ernie Clement et. al. have come to. May you live this.
maybe it was to learn how to love
maybe it was to learn how to leave
maybe it was for the games we played
maybe it was to learn how to choose
maybe it was to learn how to lose
maybe it was for the love we madelove is everything they said it would be
love made sweet and sad the same
but love forgot to make me too blind to see
you’re chickening out aren’t you?
you’re bangin’ on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait ’til you make
the whole kingdom come
so I’m leavingmaybe it was to learn how to fight
maybe it was for the lesson in pride
maybe it was the cowboys’ ways
maybe it was to learn not to lie
maybe it was to learn how to cry
maybe it was for the love we madelove is everything they said it would be
love did not hold back the reins
but love forgot to make me too blind to see
you’re chickening out aren’t you?
you’re bangin’ on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait ’til you make
the whole kingdom come
so I’m leavingfirst he turns to you
then he turns to her
so you try to hurt him back
but it breaks your body down
so you try to love bigger
bigger still
but it… it’s too lateso take a lesson from the strangeness you feel
and know you’ll never be the same
and find it in your heart to kneel down and say
I gave my love didn’t I?
and I gave it big… sometimes
and I gave it in my own sweet time
I’m just leavinglove is everything…
Cedric Jamet and I together at the Art of Hosting Reimagining Education gathering a couple of weeks ago.
The other week we were sitting in the Queen’s University Biological Station in Elgin Ontario, opening our third annual Art of Hosting on Reimagining Education. Cedric Jamet was teaching about the chaordic path, the term we use for the leadership path that works with a dance of chaos and order. The chaordic space is the space of self-organization, where structure and form creates the conditions for otherwise chaotic spaces to produce direction, coherence, energy and engagement without top down control. It is a way of conceptualizing self-organization in groups, which is the kind of facilitation practice I specialize in.
The idea of self-organization, what it is, how it arises, what practices support it is been the single most important organizing question of my professional career. As Cedric put it in Elgin, this is what the world needs, to be hosted so that people can self-organize to improve their conditions, make beautiful and sustainable things and sustain good work with strong relationships. When we create the conditions that enable self-organization, we are creating places of “safe uncertainty” and relational connectivity. We create what I call “dialogic containers” which become places of meaning and sustainable connection. Strong dialogic containers can hold difference and conflict without rendering the relational field. They can provide spaces for meaning and depth and purpose. Sustained over time they can become “life-giving contexts.” As a facilitator and in my work leading and supporting leaders, everything we do points in this direction.
Over the past 20 years this inquiry has led me into two major areas of practice. I have studied and worked deeply with the Art of Hosting and the field of participatory process design and facilitation. Based around the “Four Fold Practice” – presence, participation, hosting contribution, and co-creation – the Art of Hosting is a simple framework for a practice that, as Cedric said, helps us enable self-organization. This is a well-established field of facilitation practice and I work with facilitation methods that are found in the fields of dialogic organizational development, collaborative change management, and anthro-complexity including those contained in the seminal collection of large groups methods, and small scale Liberating Structures, as well as the suite of methods from Participatory Narrative Inquiry.
The other area of practice I have explored is complexity, in an effort to understand the conditions by which self-organization arises. This has led me through the various threads of complexity in human and living systems initially through the work of Senge, Wheatley, Scharmer who came out of the system thinking world with new metaphors, models and understandings about how things worked. From there I dove deep into anthro-complexity, championed primarily by Dave Snowden who work on ontologies is a significant contribution to this field as it helps leaders, facilitators and process designers make good choices about the way they participate and intervene in different situations. I also read deeply and learned with other complexity-focused theorists and process designers like Cynthia Kurtz, whose work on story is especially important, and Glenda Eoyang, whose work on complexity and whose suite of methods and approaches called Human Systems Dynamics is accessible, simple, and extremely effective for the most part in seeing and working with complexity.
The two most significant academic works I’ve published reflected these two streams as I have written about and explored the ideas of dialogic containers as the key structures which enable self-organization and meaning-making. In Hosting and Holding Containers, I talk about the concept of a dialogic container and use the four-fold practice to describe how to work with these phenomena. In “Hosting Dialogic Containers: a key to working in complexity” I talk about containers from a more complexity-informed perspective and discuss the role of constraints in designing and hosting containers. A subsequent paper, published only in Japanese is actually closer to my current thinking on the constraints framework that I use.
This morning I am sitting in an Open Space meeting while all around this place a small team of folks are busy engaging in conversations that are necessary for creating their future. These people are interested in pedagogy and learning design, and I was struck by the fact that Open Space was a new experience for almost every single one of them. But I can hear the snippets of conversation and see the energy and attention in the work that is happening, and I continue to be astonished at how powerful self-organization is, given the right kind of container for it. We have an urgent question that is a deep attractor. We have connections and exchanges that are already strong in the team and made stronger by the visioning conversations we had yesterday. And we have important boundaries, including a threshold that was crossed with a new Director, a beautiful space that is full or opportunity and a timeline for the work that is both bounded and generous. There is urgency but not emergency, still room for excitement creativity and energy.
I have done many hundreds of Open Space events, large and small, and each one has delighted me as I watch groups of people self-organize and take responsibility for the issues that matter to them. I remained astonished by the powerful and generative nature of a life-giving dialogic container that emerges from a few enabling constraints thoughtfully applied and held. And I remain grateful for the immense body of work that underlies this approach to human organizations and communities and all those friends and teachers who guided and taught me along the way.
The above is a photo of a great campfire that happened on Saturday night in the forest by a lake in Eastern Ontario. You had to be there. But if you want to do an interesting exercise, take a moment before reading on and make a list of things that you should do to create a great campfire experience.
I’m working away writing a book on dialogic containers and reflecting on the remarkable phenomenon of stability in the midst of change. I remember years ago Dave Snowden sharing a pithy description of the the difference between robust and resilient structures. Using the examples of a sea wall and a salt marsh, he says, essentially, that a robust system is one that survives by not being changed and a resilient system is one that survives by being changed. That description has always stuck with me and as I look at the nature of dialogic containers, ephemeral spaces which produce meaning between people, it’s interesting to me to think about what contributes to their relative stability in the face of change.
This was brought home to me again today while listening to a talk by Gil Fronsdel on the Buddhist practice of “Right View,” (he calls is “Wholesome View”) the first discipline of the Noble Eightfold Path. Fronsdel uses the example of standing in a rive to discuss what mental and spiritual stability looks like, even as a current flow all around you, carry the river over a waterfall. The way to address your fear of floating over a waterfall is to stand up and take a stable stance:
I’ve been in somewhat shallow rivers, maybe that the river was up to my mid?thigh, and I could lay down flat on the surface of the river, and it had a nice current that carried me beautifully down the river.And it was kind of fun and nice to be floating along. It feels really nice until you realize that the river is going right over a waterfall, a big waterfall. So then it’s not so nice anymore.
And so… you turn around, try to swim upstream, but…the river is pulling you down the stream faster than you can swim up. The waterfall is coming, you can hear the roar. And so all you have to do, though, is stand up in the river. Because it’s shallow… it’s just courage, it’s only up to your mid?thigh. And if you stand there, then the current of the river continues. It flows right by you. But you’re still.
You’re not separated from the current, but now you’re free of the current because you have the stability, the strength of standing there, and you’re far from any danger of going over the waterfall. It’s relatively easy now to walk to the shore or walk up river. And so we get swept away sometimes by our thoughts, swept away by our emotions, swept away by the world and concerns that are going on. And we don’t realize how much we’re being carried along, swept away by the current of this momentum of thoughts, momentum of desires, momentum of aversion. We don’t even see the waterfalls that’s going to take us over sometimes. But what mindfulness teaches us is that we could always have the ability to stand up in the current and kind of wake up and kind of be stable and strong.
In dialogue, containers offer a kind of stability to hold emotions and thoughts. Human beings thrive when there is a container in which we can fully participate, be fully human, and be. And they require us to have that overview of process and context, to see that we are in something that is meaningful, or not, and to notice what is contributing to that state of affairs. From there, we might even be able to catch ourselves and offering a slight shift, a slight move, a slight contribution that might catalyze more or less stability. It is a subtle art.
The way a conversation unfolds around a table and deepens and becomes sticky – you don;t want to leave it – is a kind of stability. When it breaks it’s hard to get it back again, and nif you weren’t a part of it “you had to be there” to understand what it is like. Other forms of stability for dialogue are held through rigid physical or protocol constraints so that deliberative chambers like court rooms and legislatures are designed for rational, non-emotional discourse. When feelings erupt in those chambers, the integrity of container fails, and chaos ensues, because those who are responsible for this spaces have no way to cope with the events of the moment but to shut it all down (don’t perform a haka in the New Zealand Parliament!). That can be a form of liberation, but in the end some form of stable container needs to arise in order for human relationships and conversations to unfold. Places like Parliaments and court rooms are structured to assert a particular kind of power relationship, so the physical and procedural stability of those containers is designed to re-establish that state of affairs “once every one has calmed down” and the dour business at hand can be considered again in the desired modality of the system, in these cases, predicated on notions of reason and civility.
But even in highly structured and constrained places, dialogic containers are emergent. You cannot force meaningful dialogue. You can only set some initial conditions and monitor what unfolds. Even though a room may have robust physical restrictions, adjustments to the constraints of the container can still offer a chance at something meaningful happening. I bristle from the idea that a dialogue facilitator’s role is “to create and hold the container.” I prefer instead to think of that role as one of using constraints to increase the probability that a a dialogic container will emerge. The way I have learned to practice facilitation is to be a witness to the capacity of a group to self-organize and manage itself with minimal intervention from a “facilitator.” Instead we work hard to design initial conditions, and pay attention to threshold practices like beginnings and endings to invite human beings into a place in which meaningful work gets done.
For my whole career I’ve been consumed with the mystery of the emergence and stability of dialogic containers, how something so ephemeral can create deeply meaningful experiences, and how we might find the ways to work with containers – through constraints of connection, exchange, attractors and boundaries – to increase the chances for powerful dialogue and meaning making. Everywhere I look, there are examples and lessons to be learned about this.
So, back to that campfire that is pictured above. If you took the time to make the list, think about whether that list will guarantee a great campfire every single time, from the get go. If not, what do you think you will have to do to make that more likely to happen? The answer to that question might be a good way to think about your approach to facilitation.
Here comes community!
I’m on a flight home to Vancouver from Ontario. It has been a mix of family and business on this trip. This past weekend I joined my colleagues Jennifer Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle for our third Reimagining Education Art of Hosting. Thirty-one people in total gathered at the Queens University Biological Station in Elgin Ontario on the most beautiful fall weekend. The leaves were bright yellow and a little red – more muted this year from drought than usual, but still beautiful. The water and air was warm enough for swimming and canoeing. And the skies offered us moments of crystal clarity during the night. The land was – as it always is – the first and final host.
While we were teaching the chaordic stepping stones yesterday, a very powerful conversation broke open in the group about invitation. In my practice the whole point of using the chaordic stepping stones is to slow down the conversation about process design to really name the shared urges necessity and purpose of a meeting. It is from this place that a quality invitation arises. And when a person is deeply and sincerely invited to a meeting, it makes all the difference for how they show up.
The conversation yesterday contained a thread of grief. Participants were sharing how painful it is to have to go through meeting after meeting in their day without any genuine invitation. Many meetings aren’t even necessary and, like weekly staff meetings sometimes, just occupy a regular hour every week on the calendar help with minimal intention. Because so many of these gatherings are on line now it is becoming common practice for participants to divide their attention between what is “mandatory” and what is more interesting or more pressing. My heart breaks when a participant in a meeting says hello and then turns of their camera, mutes their audio and never appears again. What a waste of their time.
This bleeds into community life too, and I was especially moved by one of our participants, an Elder who cares very deeply about her community, who witnesses public meetings, community gatherings and politics as being hurtful, disenfranchising and a place where people come and work out their own pain and trauma often in laterally violent ways. There is no healing, no restoration, no creativity, no sense of shared purpose and no call for people to offer something. The meetings are corrosive and toxic. We talked about the kinds of room set ups in meetings like that – rows of chairs, no one looking at one another, exchanges only between “the people at the front” and “the audience” as if citizens were actually a mix of paying customers and school children.
When this Elder was speaking, she was expressing the grief of this state of affairs. It occurred to me that this grief is everywhere. Very few of us in any public or community setting feel invited to community work. We might go along to a public information session. Or we might go along to a Council meeting and make a presentation. We might take part in a shouting match over a controversial decision or course of action. But I think many people are mourning the fact that we are never invited into active, creative community with one another. Some don’t even believe that is possible. “Oh a community meeting,” they will often say, folding their arms. “That’ll be…interesting.”
(As an aside, “that’ll be…interesting” is one of the most Canadian ways I know of saying “that whole thing is going to be a complete disaster.”)
Communities are full of talent and resources. How many times have you been asked to serve your community with what you know or what you do? Where are the opportunities for people to participate in community work that also builds community? At the very least, can we do this work together without poison relationships and eroding the promise of democratic and community participation.
The erosion of democracies, the professionalization of decision making and the capture of legislative bodies by huge commercial interests has been going on for my whole life. But when I look around my own home community – which has seen its fair share of divisive conflicts – I can see initiatives that were citizen-led that built things that we need. We now have a health centre on our island, a credit union, a recycling depot and second hand store, and playing fields for fast pitch, soccer and ultimate. We have preserved forest and coastline with the Nature Conservancy. We have institutions like the Arts Council and the Fabrc Arts Guild and the Nature Club and community choirs and the Legion and the Food Bank that all bring us closer together and weave our connection to one another and the place.
In small communities the chance for that kind of thing is higher because we know each other a little better and we can put our finger on the folks that can contribute, and ask them to show up. And we can do it in a way that invites the community to come along and be a part of something. Not every small community is this lucky. Some are in terrible moments of division and conflict that are violent, harmful and probably irreconcilable.
Peace and reconciliation at any scale is not possible without people being genuinely invited into it. The dehumanization of our world in conflict, at work, and in governance leaves us mourning for something that we may not ever have experienced: a genuine invitation to form and join a field of belonging that gives our lives meaning and connection.
I think this is why dialogic work is so important. Anywhere people gather is a chance to correct that tyranny of dehumanization that sees persons as cogs in the machine, to be counted, corralled, manipulated, avoided, lied to or disposed of. As Christina Baldwin has said, you treat a person differently once you know their story. You invite them, you get curious with them, you wonder what they have to offer and you might even make something together.
Our TSS Rovers League 1 BC men’s team, boys academy and supporters celebrating together this summer, photo courtesy of Tom Ewasiuk at AFTN Canada.
When I’m back in Ontario, as I am now, I spend a lot of time with my family watching sports. We’re all Toronto Maple Leafs fans, so when the hockey is on, we don our Leafs jerseys and watch together. At the moment this part of the world is also consumed by the deep playoff run of the Toronto Blue Jays, who have, against the odds, advanced to the American League Championship Series of Major League Baseball. I don’t follow baseball, but it’s impossible not to be caught up in the energy of the moment.
Both the Leafs and the Jays had bad weekends. The Leafs lost two games to Detroit back to back, with dire performances in which their offence sputtered. A leafs legend, Mitch Marner was traded away in the off season and his replacement on the top line last night is an enthusiastic young talent called Easton Cowan. He has big shoes to fill and it’s fun watching young players begin their journey. Cowan was probably the pick of litter last night as nothing else seemed to get going. Both games against Detroit had the feeling of pre-season warm ups. The hunger and energy and resilience isn’t there yet.
Meanwhile, across the tracks at SkyDome, the Jays dropped game two of their playoff series to Seattle. They too seemed to be truly sapped of enthusiasm and energy. Despite an early flurry of runs, the Jays had some poor pitching and defensive errors that Seattle pounced upon and they were sluggish with the bats. They are under the cosh now as they head to Seattle for games 3 and 4, and the mood in this city is far from ebullient.
In soccer news, while the Canadian Men’s team struggled against Australia and gets ready for Colombia tonight, there are machinations afoot at the governance level of the sport. I can hardly stand to engage in the arcane minutiae of how soccer is run in Canada – and I have a far from complete picture – but at the moment there is a concerning trend happening. In Canada, the Canadian Soccer Association has a deal with a company called Canadian Soccer Business. The deal gives all of Canada’s marketing and broadcast rights to CSB for a flat rate. CSB can then sell these rights and make a profit which it largely channels into the Canadian Premier League, the division 1 professional league for men’s soccer in Canada. The owners of the CPL teams, are also the directors of CSB.
Back when the deal was signed, it was a practical solution for Canada Soccer. The Association was having a terrible time getting funding for the national teams and getting them covered, marketed and recognized. Since then however, CSB has moved towards an ownership stake in the game. Last year they bought the second division semi-pro leagues which are organized under League 1 Canada. In BC, our league was set up by BC Soccer initially to provide a pathway to professional opportunities for BC based players, a vision we champion at TSS Rovers, the only community-owned team in the League 1 structure. It still exists for that purpose, but it is now owned by a marketing company who profits from the selling sponsorship rights to our league and so far hasn’t returned much into our level to assure it’s sustainability.
And lost in the mix of all of this is the women’s professional game, which has finally hit the ground running with the launch of the Northern Super League. The NSL is the brainchild of Diana Matheson and other former national team players who had to do it on their own, because Canada Soccer has made no effort to create a professional women’s league despite hoisting the women’s World Cup in 2015. Meanwhile CSB has profited from selling the images and broadcast rights of the national women’s team who were defending Olympic Champions and have maintained a top 10 global ranking for years. CSB has not at all invested in the NSL, nor have they been invited to. Their involvement in Canadian Soccer has largely NOT enabled the professional environment for women, and has been highly problematic for the national team, which is why Matheson and her partners started their initiative own their own.
This is a direct example of the forty five year project of privatization and commercialization of community resources that was started in the Western world in the 1980s and has spread around the world. This month Canada Soccer Business released a vision for soccer in Canada and it is deeply at odds with the idea of grassroots based, publicly-owned clubs and leagues who are building the game in the broader public interest. Instead it fits the privatization agenda to a T, and promises results based on growth. It is a financialization vision for soccer in Canada that primarily and ultimately benefits the Canadian Premier League. It doesn’t address the women’s professional game at all, because CSB has no involvement in that game. It is by definition not a unifying vision.
It is also profoundly at odds with the vision that is championed by the federal government’s Future of Sport in Canada Commission who released their preliminary report back in the summer. Their vision is very different and seeks to develop elite athletes in the context of a safe, vibrant and participatory national sport strategy that puts the welfare of the athletes first and roots sport in the community and national interest.
My buddy Will Cromack shared his thoughts on these competing visions today and I deeply appreciate his perspective and connection to the issues and his thoughtful, slow deliberation on what is laying before us and the possible pathways to the future.
Developing sport in Canada is a long slow road, because developing athletes is a long slow road. Our culture is changing in many different ways, and sometimes in directions that run counter to each other. We fetishize the professional at the expense of community. We create structures and enclaves which create opaque places where people and communities can be hurt. We demand results, but wring our hands over funding and investment. We laud accessibility but demand elitism. We eschew public involvement but fear the market’s rapacious rush into the vacuum. And at the end of the day, we often take a narrow self-centred view towards sport, making sure our kid or our team or our agenda is the one that succeeds with no awareness of the broader ecosystem for our sports, or the bigger role of sport in general.
As Will writes, a bigger conversation is afoot, as it has been for many years. We need to feel our way through all of this, while also taking bold steps to set the container for sport development on the right footing. And the context is changing all around us.