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Category Archives "Learning"

Principles for difficult conversations

August 12, 2025 By Art of Hosting, Being, Chaordic design, Collaboration, Community, Conversation, Democracy, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Learning, Practice 8 Comments

Peter Levine shared a video today of a panel he was on back in June, discussing practical ways to have difficult conversations. We could all do with a little more practice in this these days. I know I certainly could.

I found the audio hard to hear, but Peter’s post helpfully summarizes what each presenter practices, and I have gathered these principles here in a list for future reference. Each person is working in a different context, but the gathering was about teaching civics in schools in the United States. I think there is some useful transferrance of these principles, so I’m going to slightly rephrase them to be more general.

Sarah Stitzlein:

  • Ground discussions in shared principles, such as living well together or a desire to find common ground
  • Explore tensions (such as between equality and liberty(
  • Use historical rather than current examples.
  • Let the other lead.

Winston C. Thompson:

  • Set norms for addressing identities
  • Allow a person to opt-out of “representing” a group
  • Take responsibility for imbalances in credibility

Janna Mohr Lone:

  • Give full attention to the other
  • Practice receptivity, curiosity and open-heartedness
  • Allow long pauses to allow quieter voices to emerge
  • Make the conversation multi-centred, in other words allow it to become a real conversation rather than a mediated exchange of ideas through one person with power in the situation.

Alison Cohen:

  • Ask “What are you concerned about?” to uncover core values
  • Legitimate concerns without needing to agree with them.
  • Ground the discussion in a shared moral foundation
  • Understanding your own philosophical, moral or ethical principles can help you generate good questions.
  • Listen for understanding, not debate or attack.

Peter Levine (my summary , because he doesn’t cover his own talk in his post!)

  • Name your own biases and make them visible
  • Find a share ground of values
  • Ask questions that are neither too abstract but also not settled.
  • Explore unresolvable tensions

I recently found myself in a difficult conversation and I handled it really badly. It stemmed from a poor comment I made on a social media post during an election campaign where I accused my interlocutor of posting a hoax becasue a meme he shared did not reflect the data that was contained in the report it referenced. I know this person in real life, and the conversation did not go well online. When I saw him in real life, I apologized. A few days later we found ourselves together in the community and we started discussing the point of the post he made. It became a dogfight. I was triggered and upset, feeling some shame and guilt that I had kicked this whole thing off with what he perceived as a personal attack online. For his part, he is a lawyer, so the conversation became a debate, both of us convinced we were right. I was without any kind of skillfulness in creating a good curiosity based conversation. It wasn’t a proud moment.

Practicing these kinds of conversations is incredibly hard. None of us are saints. Principles like the ones above are just basic good sense for anyone hosting or participating in a difficult conversation, but they are incredibly difficult to remember and practice when we are in an emotional state and when the conversations we are having may ultimately have existential implications for the folks in the discussion.

I think at the end of the day one of the key principles that is my own personal responsibility to take is “I want this to go well, for me and the person I’m talking too.” I don’t mean that we should avoid conflict and just be civil to each other, or that we should deny any part of our emotional response to a situation. What I mean is that we should embrace a relationship, even if only for a few minutes, that can hold different experiences, different points of view and different aspiration side by side. For that we need a practice ground and before we step out onto that mat, we need some principles to guide us.

Here are some. What are yours?

Searching for searching

June 17, 2025 By Collaboration, Complexity, Containers, Conversation, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured, Leadership, Learning 2 Comments

I parked my car this morning in the village and walked down to my favourite coffee place for an espresso. Every one of the three conversations I overheard was about people discussing the pros and cons of ChatGPT. Pros seem to be that “it helped me to know what to ask for when I talked to my car insurance company” and cons are mostly “how do we know that any of this is real?” More seriously I’m sitting near folks who work in the arts and the looks on their faces are of the deepest concern. They use it. For ideas, for a writing prompt, but the times they have used it to write dialogue, they can spot how crappy it is. At the moment.

My earliest post about was Google was from 2002 when it was an insanely useful tool for searching the web. “Google cooking” was a simple game where one entered in a list of ingredients and it returned a list recipes. It was novel at the time. Great for weeknight dinners. Another game was called “Googlewhack” whereby one would try to construct a two word search term that resulted in only one result. You can’t play that one anymore.

The complete enshittification of search engines, combined with web content that has been generated by robots in order to sell stuff is increasing turning web-search an absolutely useless activity. I just use my search engine (DuckDuckGo) as a collection of bookmarks now. It is hard to do any meaningful research anymore, and so we turn to ChatGPT for answers. And ChatGPT is out there learning the questions we ask. Something sits weird with me when I think about how while Google learned the answers we like, and AI is learning the questions we ask.

The questions are important, as is the way we ask them and to whom we ask them. Sonja today writes about the questions that help us discern a direction, which is different from finding a way. Sometimes we don’t even know what the direction is although we can discern that wherever we are right now, somewhere else is better. Thinking about that and talking about it together is an essential human capacity and it’s a pretty fundamental part of how we work with teams facing complexity. There is an art to asking to right kinds of questions and thinking about them together that reveals a deeper level at which affordances and opportunities might exist. Sometimes getting unstuck means drilling down and not reaching out.

Collaborative outcomes are emergent properties of discrete human systems of encounter and meaning-making – “dialogic containers” I call them. If you are a leader seeking a course of action, you might get some good ideas by submitting notes and documents and harvests into a large language model to suggest possibilities. In fact, you could even have your team members do that on their own and bring the output to a meeting to talk about what they have found. My hypothesis is if you continue to do that without involving humans you will end up with an endless set of ideas and possibilities, but you will miss the co-creationi and co-ownership that makes sustained effort possible in a particular direction. I can’t yet see how large language models can surface a consensus that will inspire collaborative action. Deep meaning and commitment to one another is produced by the people within the container who discover something between them that is worth trying, worth pursuing together. Calls to action are far less sustainable than co-creation of a direction. Even if, and perhaps especially if, such a direction is deeply flawed to begin with. There is nothing better than failing together and then finding a way forward to build cohesion.

I might be wrong in the future but in this moment, systems-complexity and anthro-complexity are different and humans experience emergence differently from mechanical systems, even those that are capable of learning. Dialogue practitioners base their practice on this idea; that no matter how great the ideas are, nothing gets sustained in human systems without the intangibles of co-ownership, meaningful engagement, and dare I say, at some level, love.

Although, who knows.

A few little lessons about “changing culture”

March 8, 2025 By Complexity, Culture, Emergence, Evaluation, Facilitation, Featured, Learning, Organization, Power One Comment

I think it was 1986-87 academic year that I truly fell in love with the idea of culture. That was the year I began my BA in Indigenous Studies at Trent University and it was during a time when Indigenous cultures in Canada were going through a generational resurgence after recovering from 100 years of state-sponsored cultural, physical and intellectual extinction. I was able to be a witness to communities and organizations recovering by growing deep into traditional practices, and younger generations receiving the teaching of Elders and using them to create new political movements, organizations, economies, governments, and health and well being in their communities. I loved the idea of culture as the ground for this work and loved watching people work with it, and indeed being a part of cultural shifts and and catalysis. Culture was like magic. It appeared bigger than all of us, it shifted and changed and it enabled things to happen. Or not.

I so fell in love with culture that I did an honours thesis in my fifth year that compared two national Indigenous organizations in their attempts to root their operations and structures in traditional cultures. One did it by using artifacts and trappings and firm structures that ended in arguments about orthodoxies and heartbreak, and the other did it by creating a relational, caring, and connected context in which a unique but thoroughly Indigenous way of being emerged.

So early on I learned that culture is emergent, that it transcends individuals and specific artifacts and practices, that it is a context that shapes relationships and behaviours and that it is the product of relationships and interactions over time. Norms of behaviour can’t be dictated, they can only arise.

Since then I would say that the heart of my work with organizations and communities has been working with culture. The sources of joy and the sources of pain are the multiples contexts in which we live our lives. I’ve worked in one-off settings and multi-year large scale systemic settings. I’ve worked with large teams and with little groups of change-makers. And we’ve tried it all, from magic methods to the “this will finally solve it” conference, to multi-year narrative sense-making projects. I’ve spent decades surfing the rise and fall of supporter culture around the soccer teams I’ve been a part of. I’ve spent nearly 25 years living on an island with its own unique slant on the world, creating social enterprises, supporting community economic development and making community through music and play.

About a year ago on the Art of Hosting Facebook group someone asked about changing culture in a very large organization and which methods are best. For some reason that post appeared in the feed that I rarely check, and I responded to it. But because I’m never going to send you to Facebook, I thought I would catch this sketchy set of insights and share them here. This is a back of the napkin kind of list, but these are truths that I will no longer doubt in my work with organizations and communities. So here’s what I’ve learned about “culture change.”

  1. It takes years.
  2. Your work will be non-linear and unpredictable.
  3. All states are temporary.
  4. If it is necessary for senior leaders champion and support change work, it will only be sustained as long as they don’t succumb to their anxiety and fear of uncertainty and unpredictability.
  5. You cannot change culture directly, but you can work to change the way people interact with one another and see what kind of culture emerges as a result.
  6. Learning together is often a good way to approach many different strategic and cultural issues in an oblique and open way.
  7. If change of any kind in the organization or sector is predicated on the people needing to transform and be different then you are colonizing people. Don’t do that.
  8. Whatever you think is happening is only ever a part of the full picture.
  9. Whatever you think you have accomplished is only ever a piece of what you have actually done.
  10. It will never go according to plan.

To think, to write, to learn, to empathize

March 8, 2025 By Being, Featured, Learning 2 Comments

A participant from a 2018 complexity workshop I ran in The Hague, reflecting on an experience.

From a piece in The Walrus by Troy Jollimore, a philosophy professor, on his evolving relationship to students, AI and education:

The use of AI already seems so natural to so many of them, so much an inevitability and an accepted feature of the educational landscape, that any prohibition strikes them as nonsensical. Don’t we instructors understand that today’s students will be able, will indeed be expected, to use AI when they enter the workforce? Writing is no longer something people will have to do in order to get a job.

Or so, at any rate, a number of them have told me. Which is why, they argue, forcing them to write in college makes no sense. That mystified look does not vanish—indeed, it sometimes intensifies—when I respond by saying: Look, even if that were true, you have to understand that I don’t equate education with job training.

What do you mean? they might then ask. 

And I say: I’m not really concerned with your future job. I want to prepare you for life.

It turns out that if there is anything more implausible than the idea that they might need to write as part of their jobs, it is the idea that they might have to write, or want to write, in some part of their lives other than their jobs. Or, more generally, the idea that education might be valuable not because it gets you a bigger paycheque but because, in a fundamental way, it gives you access to a more rewarding life.

Last night I was sitting with my dear friend and colleague Phil Cass and we were drinking a little bourbon and discussing our week of work together and our lives and interests. Our conversations always wander over all manner of territory. Last night, before we retired to sleep, it rested on David Foster Wallace’s well known Kenyon College commencement address called “This is Water.” it compliments Jollimore’s piece beautifully, even though it precedes it by 20 years.

If you have a half an hour, dive into these two links. In response I’m curious to know what are you thinking about? What are you writing about, even if you aren’t publishing your writing? Whose perspectives are you trying to understand?

From the Parking Lot

February 3, 2025 By Culture, Democracy, Featured, First Nations, Learning, Links, Music, Poetry, Power No Comments

The light is returning to the northern hemisphere and we’ve had clear skies for the last 10 days. This is a photo of the twilight with Venus seen from my house looking southwest over Apodaca Ridge. Cloud has since rolled in and a little blast of coastal winter is coming.

Republished. The post I sent out last week had broken links.

My monthly round up of interesting links. These are posted nearly daily at my Mastodon feed.

Democracy & Politics

It has been a full month of politics here in Canada and in the US that has shaken a lot of things up.

Climate & Environment

Economics & Social Systems

Arts & Culture

Technology & Innovation

  • I Love a Bushfix. But What’s the Future of ‘Right to Repair’?
    I don’t know much about farming, so this was an interesting article that also made me realize that some of the reasons why food is expensive might have to do with farmers being bilked by their equipment manufacturers.
  • How to Remember Everything You Read | Justin Sung
    As a person with ADHD, these kinds of videos are interesting. I’m currently actively learning two languages (Italian and jazz guitar), continuing to develop my understanding of complexity, and learning how to best teach and share it.

Indigenous Leadership & Legacy

Books and music

Links are to publisher or artist sites where you can buy this art directly.

  • The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. A beautiful novel set in 2019-2020 about a haunted book store in Minneapolis during the first year of COVID and the events following George Floyd’s murder. The book is a deep story of identity, history, language and relationship.
  • The Keeper by Kelly Ervick. A graphic memoir about women’s soccer told through the eyes of a woman who comes of age in the 1980s, just as American women’s soccer bursts on to the scene.
  • Benjamin Britten’s Choral Works. Nearly all of Britten’s non-carol choral music collected and performed beautifully. The choir I sing in, Carmena Bowena, is currently adding Hymn to The Virgin to our repertoire.
  • Cassandra Wilson – New Moon Daughter. Her 1995 release explores multiple genres with cover songs and originals and is backed by musicians who have a wide range of fluency across multiple styles. Her voice sounds so much like Joni Mitchell’s voice from the same time. Deep and smokey and full in timbre.
  • Herbie Hancock – The Piano. An album of solo piano music from 1979 recorded direct-to-disc. Showcases Hancock’s improvisational chops and his curiosity about harmony.
  • Peter Hertmens Trio – Akasha. Every month I like to look for a new-to-me jazz guitarist and explore their material. This month I stumbled on the work of Belgian Peter Hertmens. Akasha is a 2018 release with organ and bass that is just a lovely collection of Hertmens’ original compositions.