I was recently reflecting on Vaclav Havel‘s essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Acts of living in truth are critical for recovering power from those that have stolen it and are using it for oppressive purposes. Havel’s work has long inspired me and underpins the basis of how I see good dialogic work and participatory leadership. Small democratic acts of participation,collaboration, co-creation, inclusion and relationship are critical. There is no scale at which these are not critical if one values a world in which we participate together in building a future that serves all.
I was quite startled to hear Mark Carney quote Havel yesterday in his speech in Davos. Carney told some truths for which he is rightly being lauded. But as a Prime Minister he has a lot of work to do to build a society here at home where the most vulnerable don’t get steamrolled for the expediency of his large scale power moves.
I believe a lot of things can and must happen simultaneously to act within a world which has had much uncertainty and unpredictability introduced to it so quickly.
I am not prepared to give up a hope for a world of participatory and relational power alliances, especially here in Canada and especially with First Nations (seek out Christi Belcourt’s writing on this on Facebook, if you dare) I understand the need for speed but I also caution us all not to set aside things like justice, sustainability, and inclusion of the otherwise marginalized at the table lest we build the new system based on emergency measures and forget to be a society that stays committed to human rights, justice and environmental care, even if we don’t always get that right. I don’t believe one negates the other.
Doubling down on AI, defense, and fossil fuel energy production takes us towards a future where the wealth will be generated for the few who currently have the power with resources that are non renewable. Communities and ecosystems will be devastated as the costs are externalized for more generations. What assurances are there that these moves will build better and more resilient societies? Who will be asked to sacrifice for this future? Will we both defend ourselves from larger powers so that we can build a long term and effective education and health care system? Where we support and build up our natural ecosystems.
I don’t have answers. But I ask, what other ways can we align middle power nations that is built on the strength of relationship and long term care for people and planet? If the global system of power and economics needs to be realigned, what is the range of choices we have? How might we expand that range?
Carney has achieved what the entrepreneurs coveted “first mover’s advantage.” As a Canadian, based on the policy decisions he has made domestically, I am unsure how he will use it. In his speech his lauds his domestic accomplishments:
Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, on capital gains and business investment. We have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade. We are fast-tracking a trillion dollars of investment in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond
And yet. Every provincial health care system in Canada is currently in a crisis. Affordability continues to price an entire generation out of their start in the world. Our post-secondary education systems are failing because we underfunded them, forced them to rely on high paying international students, and then stopped that immigration program. Wealth inequality is the biggest threat to our survival as a democracy. And yet we still cut taxes.
I can envisage a dystopian world where AI, oil and weapons are the currency that just gets spent in a hyperscaled and hegemonic battle for supremacy among the few. What can the rest of us expect from this?
Yesterday Carney said “You cannot “live within the lie” of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.” That is true. And yet does he not see to see how his latest moves to fast track projects like an oil pipeline to the west coast reflect exactly this approach via a vis First Nations?
Carney also said “if you are not at the table you are on the menu.” That is a chilling statement to me because, despite the outpouring of pride and excitement about how he named the current global order, what he is proposing puts most of us on the menu. Carney’s commitment to a doubling down of neoliberal principles as the basis of his invitation to fight does nothing to address the pressing challenges faced by most of the victims of the global experiment of the last 45 years. I hope he changes that stance but I don’t think he will.
It is no surprise to most of us in Canada that Carney has become a fairly traditional “progressive conservative.” Most of us voted for him because he was preferable to the current conservative party’s populism which was based on outrage baiting and very little cogent policy. Things have become so bad in the world that we missed Brian Mulroney.
As for Havel, his wisdom is perennial. Carney’s speech is good but I encourage you all to read Havel. Just because the Prime Minister quoted him does not mean that the rest of us don’t need his strategy and tactics. We – most of us – are on the menu, remember. And Carney is not the green grocer.
We have a big job ahead of us. If we are to defend ourselves against threats of the global superpowers we need to do a much better job of talking about what makes us different. If our sovereignty matters, we need to say a lot more about why. And if someone whatever Carney is proposing “wins,” then what are building with the peace that follows?
This is the first of a series on facilitation, dialogic containers and context. In it I want to develop a theory of context for facilitators on that explains not only how dialogic work succeeds, but why it sometimes cannot.
My whole career has been a conversation between my facilitation practice and what I am learning about self-organization and complex adaptive systems. Like many people I started in facilitation because I like the way that techniques for group work could help people be better together. Good dialogue enables learning, understanding, innovation, problem-solving and community building. Doing it in a way that also builds relationships ensures that we “leave more community than we’ve found.” Understanding complexity theory helps me to situate my practice in what is possible and understand why things work or don’t work. If you have read my professional reflections on this blog over the past 22 years, you will have been with me on my journey as I’ve tried to understand all that.
My facilitation journey began with tools, probably nominal group technique. This is such a standard part of brainstorming and idea generation, that I doubt many facilitators even know the name for this technique. I can’t remember where I learned about brainstorming – it was probably word of mouth, because my facilitation craft has been honed in a traditional artisanal way, through knowledge transfer from mentors and masters and through many iterations of practice. NGT is a good tool, in the same way that a screwdriver is a good tool. It does a good job in situations for which it was designed. It doesn’t take long as a facilitator to realize that not every processes is fit for every challenge. The idea that “context matters” was something that I learned very early on in my career, and was probably something I was exposed to even in my academic training in Indigenous Studies, organizational studies, community development and cultural anthropology.
Every facilitator at some point collects tools in a tool box. In the pre-world wide web world, we acquired these tools through conversations with others, through the occasional book that was passed around and on facilitation courses where we were introduced to ways that groups worked. If you were serious about the work you might have come across materials from the National Training Labs or other places in the arcane world of organizational development. Every facilitator I knew back then had a binder full of tools and processes to use with groups. I still have a page of these resources which I use to inspire my own practice.
From a practitioners standpoint, most of us learned our craft through these tools. We found out what worked and what didn’t. We got a sense of who we were in facilitation work. We learned the hard lessons that no one in a group is “neutral” – even the facilitator – and we learned that reflection on practice is helpful. Reflection means asking the question “Why?” Why did that work? Why did that fail? Why did I make that choice? Why did the group dynamic shift this way or that?
Those early reflections led me to understand group work as complex, and from there it was about diving into the arcane world of complexity theory, group dynamics, organizational psychology and everything else. I found the theory world interesting but it rarely descended to the level of practical choice creating fro groups. It rarely connected to action. That became my work, and it was always validating to find someone like Kurt Lewin in Problems of Research in Social Psychology saying things like “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.” For me this continually learning about theory was informed by the philosophical approaches I was introduced to in my post-secondary education, informed by several years of practice in the field within organizations and social change work.
The first most important learning for facilitators is that your tools don’t work the same with every group. The second most important learning I think is the idea that the facilitator matters to group work far more than we are led to believe. The role and position and choices of the facilitator has immense effects on what happens in a group of people. That realization set me off on a journey of trying to understand the nature of different contexts. What makes one group different than another? Why can we never standardize performance or assure quality outcomes and results from facilitation practice? This seems so clear and obvious, but the state of the facilitation world continues to treat tools and methods as context-free silver bullets for every problem. We speak frequently of our tool boxes, and the language of group work is filled with the mechanistic metaphors of technical language: fixing problems, smooth meetings, efficiency, productive dialogue, outputs and outcomes. Agenda designs follow linear logics; start here, do this, progress to this stage, get a good outcome, and do it all in six hours. And in all the 1\”10 must listicles that promise life changing methods for group work, we rarely see informed discussion about the positionally of the facilitator.
I use this kind of language all the time. Even the term “facilitator” implies a mechanistic solution to a problem space. “To make things easier” is the etymology of the word. Actual facilitation practice doesn’t do this, in my experience. It makes something easier, and some things harder. Facilitators need to be clear about what is made easier and what is made more difficult and we MUST, ethically and morally, be clear and transparent about what we are doing to ensure that meetings end on time, or that they meet pre-determined goals. We have to be honest with ourselves about how much emergence we allow in the containers in which we work, and how we influence action in those containers.
We also have to be honest about what process can accomplish and what conditions need to be in place in order for things to “work.” And what “working” even means. There is a strong cultural tendency to believe that if we can just get the right people in the room, if we can just get all the issues out on the table, then we can make progress. Such a belief tends to ignore power and it tends to treat the dialogic container as the most important place for action, ignoring the bigger contexts that determine what is possible and what is not. If there is any doubt that this approach is wrong headed, the failures of the CoP conferences to adequately address climate change are exhibit A.
Context for action matters. Many times as a facilitator I have found myself at a loss about why a group process has gone in a surprising direction. There is so much hidden in the social field, and often times an intervention can open things up, bring surprising issues to the fore, or trigger dynamics that folks were unaware of. Facilitated dialogue oftentimes helps solve some problems but also opens up others.
As skilled dialogic practitioners we know that we need to pay attention to the dynamics of the context as we are designing a meeting. I don;t think our clients usually give us enough credit for taking the time to do that. I will always insist that something like two thirds or three quarters, or more of my work for a session goes into understanding the context so that what we do is useful to a specific group of people, in a specific place and in a specific moment in time. It is tempting to believe that a facilitator or consultant can come into any situation and work some miracle in a short amount of time. The truth is that we are the LEAST well equipped to work with your team. Even when I do take a long time to work with a team and craft good questions and a design of activities that will help address realistic process goals, many times participants will see me on the day and say “all he does is ask questions and then the people do all the work. What are we paying him for?” It’s the classic conundrum of knowing where to tap.
Because this work is largely invisible to the process it seems like a dark art. But there is good theory that supports the work of consultants and facilitators who work primarily with the context so that they can take an educated guess about the kinds of process tools that might help a group in any given situation. In this series of blog posts I want to address this aspect of facilitation practice, why it matters, and how complexity theory helps us to understand both the nature of dialogic containers and the importance of the contexts in which they are embedded.
I think facilitators need to develop these skills and practices becasue the “magic” that happens in good dialogue is not random and it is not down to just using the right tool in the right context. Doing so helps us to
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.
A mural at St. Andrews-Wesley United Church in Vancouver showing the ending of the Noah’s Ark story as if it happened on a BC Ferry.
The word “religion” does a a lot of heavy lifting. But actually finding a way to define it in a way that is useful turns out to be surprisingly tricky.
The scholar and minister Wilfred Cantwell Smith, whose book The Meaning and End of Religion (1962) had meticulously detailed the belated emergence of the ‘religion’ concept in Europe, long maintained that talk of ‘religion’ conflated too many things not to cause mischief, and urged that we give up such talk altogether; we should, instead, speak of faith and ‘cumulative tradition’. The anthropologist and historian Daniel Dubuisson, who anathematised ‘religion’ as a 19th-century Western imposition on non-Western worlds, urged that it be replaced with ‘cosmographic formation’. These evasive manoeuvres, in turn, have met with scepticism. As the social theorist Martin Riesebrodt drily observed, neologisms like Dubuisson’s could doubtless be shown to ‘have also been “constructed” through historically specific discourses’ and revealed as ‘instruments in the linguistic battle between classes or cultures.’ Besides, he pointed out, those who would eliminate the term ‘religion’ seldom manage long without it.
So how has ‘religion’, as a concept and category, endured in the absence of a stable definition? To answer that question, it may help to think about how referring expressions do their referring. Some terms keep their grip on the world even as our understanding of what they denote changes radically; others, once central to serious thought, fall away when their supposed referents are deemed illusions. What distinguishes the survivors from the casualties?
The interesting question here is seeing it as a space of meaning making, and therefore as a kind of container. From that perspective we might look at the constraints that give rise to the idea…the attractors, boundaries, connections and exchanges that create the unique identity that defines the emergent phenomenon of a religion.
If ‘religion’ endures, it’s because the word still does work, practical and theoretical. It orders law and policy, directs research, and shapes the inner lives of those who use it. Sociologists can enquire into its relation to charity or suicide; psychologists can study its connection to prejudice or wellbeing. In the United States, legislators and judges must have a sufficient grasp of the category that they can balance the [American] Constitutional dos and don’ts of ‘accommodation’ and ‘non-establishment’. For the religionist, meanwhile, it continues to name a space where meaning is made, defended or denied. Whatever else it may be, ‘religion’ remains a category with too many stakeholders to be fired by fiat. When it comes to what the word means, no one gets to say, and everyone gets a say.
This is such an interesting article, because I think emergent containers are very important in human experience and, as noted above, those we call “religions” play a more important role than others such as, like allegiances to a sports team, professional associations or, in some cases, citizenship. Like all dialogic containers. I think religions are emergent phenomena, which is why “no one gets to say, and everyone gets a say.” They are evolving spaces of meaning-making, and they are dynamic. The kinds of exchange for example, the rituals and liturgies of practice, are always changing. What happens in my little rural church on Bowen Island is very different to what happened in the volcanic tuft caves in Cappadocia, but there is a line of continuity between the two. Complex systems have path dependency, that is, they evolve and develop based on what has come before, which limits the ways in which they will likely change in the future.
Understanding containers of meaning through the constraints that give them rise helps us to understand how they change and why. Religions change, both in the object of their focus and in the ways in which they practice. Simply saying things like “religion is the problem” actually doesn’t bring useful tools to the conversation about the role of religion in civic life. Religions that are deeply exclusionary in practice, and place rigid boundaries about what is right and what is wrong, may nevertheless internally be places of deep community practice. Indeed, public social services, health care and education systems emerged out of religious institutions and in secular societies, the state took over these roles partly as a program of secularization.
I think there is a place for the containers that we call religions in our world. I think they can be places inside of which people polish their goodness and practice the full range of capacities that are needed to build a world of peace. And I think they can also be harmful cults, which do untold damage through violence, abuse, coercion and exclusion. Like all containers. Religion is nothing special, except that it is accorded a special place in our civic life, even in self-described “secular” states.
If the problem is that civic life in a place is dominated by the separations promoted by some religions, the answer may involve looking elsewhere within the container for the kinds of practices that help to build a civil society. A society that is evolving, growing and changing is doing so in complex ways. Those of us that are helping to make change (and helping to stabilize continuity) need to be careful not to take entire containers of human experience and throw them out. That is a form of colonization and erases and negates some of the ways in which human beings draw sustenance.
We can instead talk about what it means to create and build a society based on principles and practices of human dignity and peace and care and seek multiple sources of inspiration and expertise in designing these while at the same time collectively addressing places where people are dehumanized, killed, hated and excluded. Thinking about the ways we make meaning together from a constraints-based perspective helps me to see that the resources for doing so can be everywhere.
Some very cool places I’ve only just visited for the first time at YVR. #FirstNations #Musqueam #Autusm #Neurodiversity #YVR