The photo shows my neighbour Shane at the top his game, and the top of a tree, skillfully falling a 50 meter Douglas-fir.
So today is another Friday, which is the day I set aside to do some reading and reflecting, and follow my interests down various rabbit holes. And today the rabbit hole is the crisis of “productivity“ in Canada.
The term productivity crops up a lot when policy makers, and those with an interest in how economic policy affects corporate activity begin talking about their worries and fears. Productivity is simply an economic measurement that divides the gross domestic product – the value of all goods and services produced by a country – by the number of hours worked. Now right off the bat you can see that there are enormous problems with using such a simple metric as such a fundamental pillar of economic policy. For example, unpaid labour can’t be measured either in terms of output or hours worked. That was famously one of the reasons why back in the 1980s, Marilyn Waring launched her critique of GDP as an effective measurement of well-being in a society.
Over the past several years people like the deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and other economic think tanks have described Canada‘s productivity levels as a crisis. Their analyses all seem to sing from the same song book. The Canadian Dimension shows that there is a lot hidden in the measurement of productivity, including who benefits from it.
But let’s look at the stuff that’s in our current public conversation. When you look at this table, you can see that in 2023 we “produced“ only 78% of what Americans do.
Remember this is a completely arbitrary measurement. But let’s take it on it’s own terms and unpack a bit what it might mean
Here is a pretty mainstream definition and discussion about, what the term “productivity” actually means?
So in general when people talk about productivity levers, they mean things such as skilled labor, good machinery, and technology that helps workers work more efficiently. People in the private sector, often call for more investment in skilled labor (usually by calling on governments to do so they don’t have to). People who support free market economics, call for reducing regulation and taxation to enable businesses to invest more, even though very large businesses don’t tend to invest their profits in productive ways, but often engage in acquisition of smaller firms, buying back their own shares, or paying out executive bonuses. For many large companies, the production of material goods is simply the channel to sustained investor returns. I do think in an era where we have financialized everything, the discussions about productivity related to industrial equipment and skilled trades labourers seem almost archaic , if not disingenuous. But here’s a thing. When I looked at the above table, I noticed that there were several countries who outpaced the United States in productivity. You will notice that three of these countries are Nordic countries who have similarities and differences with Canada.
We are similar in that our economies are quite resource dependent, but we are very different in terms of our population density and our cultural attachment to a social safety net. While solutions that work in the Nordic countries are not directly applicable to Canada, it strikes me that we might still learn from what they do.
And glaringly and obviously, that is the role of public services and a robust social safety net, even though nobody in this country seems to talk about that in relation to the “productivity crisis.”.
If one of the easiest ways to increase productivity is to introduce more skilled labour into the workforce then it strikes me that an over abundance of investment in our education system would have both an immediate and long-term impact. Imagine what would happen if we lowered or eliminated tuition and forgave student debt. What if we supported continuing education, professional development, and skills upgrading as an ordinary part of a person‘s work life? Imagine creating employment standards that require businesses and organizations to provide two weeks a year of paid leave for learning for every employee. Imagine all the social and public enterprise that would spring up around that need to provide workers in every industry with ongoing learning and development, materials and experiences.
Imagine if these resources were also available to small businesses and entrepreneurs. People could truly choose their own adventure in life. Learning and creating as much or as little as they wanted to. Fostering creativity and inspiration and motivation and possibility to live your life how you want to.
It is also clear to me, that a robust social safety net provides peace of mind and both tangible and intangible security for citizens who can then feel more free to put their talents to best use in a society. One of the big differences between Canada and the United States is how restricted my American friends are to quitting their jobs, starting businesses, or looking for other work, if what keeps them in a dead end situation is a decent healthcare plan. In 1999 when I started my business consulting I had one client, a toddler at home, and another child shortly on the way, I didn’t think twice about quitting my government job. I wasn’t losing fundamental healthcare benefits. I lived in a housing co-op with a rent geared to my income, which had been capitalized by a federal government housing program in the 1970s. My ability to start a business was enabled by our collective social safety net. I was able to quickly save money as a result and when we had enough to move out of the co-op another family could take our place. At the time, many of my American friends who wanted to do the same, were unable to do so. They stayed in unsatisfying jobs, doing the bare minimum to get by because quitting was too financially precarious. And this was in a good economic period.
Scratch the surface and I think you find that all stories of bootstrapping are based on that fact that someone made the shoes for you in the first place.
We are in a period in this country where social services are being eroded and eliminated, where provincial governments are critically underfunding, health and education and other essential services and where the rhetoric is that the market can provide better public services than governments. But we are also in an era where our economic system has financialized everything from intellectual property to housing to water. This means that any public benefits provided by the market are only incidental results of providing a return to shareholders.
Of all the times in history, this is not the moment to erode public services that support citizens in pursuing their highest and best purposes. Nor is at the time to look to the free market to provide investments in public and social infrastructure when they have an actual fiduciary duty not to do so.
Today’s rabbit hole has convinced me more than ever that our continued hand wringing about Canada‘s productivity crisis is simply empty bluster if it isn’t also accompanied by a demonstrably robust investment in our social safety net. We are on the verge of losing so much.
During a teachers’ strike a number of years ago I asked my MLA what the core issue was, and he boiled it down to teachers demanding more money than we had in the provincial treasury. We did a little thought experiment together, and I dared him to think about what would happen if we accidentally overfunded education. Imagine the terrible fallout of small class sizes, individual learners getting attention to foster their passions, special needs professionals supporting unique learners, abundant resources and tools, and beautiful state of the art classrooms and environments for kids to learn in. Sounds bad, eh?
I still await that day with bated breath.
Thanks for reading this far. I’m really curious about this topic and I’m just learning about it, so if you have anything to add or correct me on, let’s talk about it in the comments.
One of our TSS Rovers Women’s team players, Sofia Farremo, signing an autograph for a young fan while standing in our supporters section at a TSS Rovers game this summer. Supporter culture at our club is HSL.
About 20 years ago, I first met Dr. Mark R. Jones. It was either at The Practice of Peace gathering or one of the Evolutionary Salons called at the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island, Washington. At any rate, Mark was an interesting presence. He sat in silence for most of the time near the room entrance as a kind of gatekeeper, watching the threshold and seeing what happened there. He occasionally played classical guitar and offered insights and reflections to anyone who sat and talked with him.
At some point, I heard the story about his work. He was a senior corporate executive, working in technology and defence-related companies for most of his career. He was also a long-time Tibetan Buddhist practitioner. He once visited the Dalai Lama and was challenged by him to build a practice of compassion based on the idea that “people need to be seen, heard, and loved, in that order.”
Mark took that work and built an approach to compassionate communication based on that heuristic. He called the work “hizzle” based on how he pronounced the acronym of heard, seen, and loved: HSL. I remember being taken by his description of what happens when people aren’t heard, seen or loved. If they are not heard, they shout and raise their voices. If they are not seen, they make a scene so you notice them, or they engage in bullying and toxic power dynamics. If they are not loved, they play a toxic game of approach and avoid that, which creates and then sabotages relationships and connections.
Mark’s insight was that these behaviours were signs of suffering and that when HSL was missing, “mischief occurs.” In this practice, he connected suffering to fear and offered the antidotes to these behaviours with a very simple and powerful way to let folks know they are heard, seen or loved.
To really hear, see, or love others, Mark insists that we have a practice in which we hear, see and love ourselves and become familiar with all of the ways we personally express fear and suffering when our own HSL is thwarted. It’s a practice.
I’ve used this insight for most of my career in situations where folks are exhibiting these fear-based behaviours. It has been a really useful shortcut and reminder for my own practice.
I was reminded again of how powerful this set of insights is when my friend and colleague Ashley Cooper shared some work she is doing to bring this work into the context of supporting parents of children, something at which she is incredibly gifted.
Mark’s work isn’t that easy to find online. His company, Sunyata Group is where you can find him as he is leading teams in creating Beloved Community. His HSL approach has been adopted and modified by the Liberating Structures crew (I believe Henri Lipmanowicz and Ashley were both at the same gathering I was at when we met Mark and learned about his work). Years ago, Phil Cubeta wrote a bit about Mark’s work and included a workshop handout that Mark must have provided him at some point.
In Those Years
In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I -- Adrienne Rich, 1992, hat tip to Jim
My favourite scene from the Life of Brian starts with Brian appearing at a window, trying to get his crowd of misinformed followers to leave him alone. He is, in fact, not the Messiah, and exasperated, he tries to tell them that they have it all wrong.
“You’re all individuals!” he cries, to which the crowd responds, in unison, “Yes! We’re all individuals!”
“You’re all different!” cries Brian. “Yes! We are all different!” the crowd replies again.
And then a single voice, with a slightly melancholy edge, quietly says, “I’m not.”
He is shushed.
This diabolical twisting of the Individual — Collective polarity has been on my mind over the past few years. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had the briefest moment of hope that the world would suddenly wake up to pulling together and looking after our public good. We created universal basic incomes, which made the most significant difference in poverty alleviation in my lifetime. We undertook mass public health campaigns to keep vulnerable people safe and not allow our medical and health systems to get too overwhelmed. We even briefly saw our planet’s health rebound as cars and airplanes, and industry generally slowed down or stopped, and the skies cleared.
But it wasn’t sustainable. It was a temporary fix to a global problem and didn’t address the underlying causes of poverty, public health crises and climate change. Within a year, we had splintered and fractured. “We lost track of the meaning of we,” as Adrienne Rich wrote in 1992, “we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible.”
I have been on holiday these past two weeks, on Maui, and I’ve had time to read and think and rest. One of the books I took with me is Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, a recent book that traces how our attention has been stolen by social media, schooling and the workplace. Deirdre, who recommended it to me at Jessica’s Book Store in Thornbury, Ontario, last month, said it made her quit social media.
The book isn’t entirely about social media – it’s much more extensive than that – but the history of social media’s colonization of our attention forms a big part of the book. Hari traces the rise of surveillance capitalism, delivered through the toxic and amoral algorithms that drive us into deeper and deeper echo chambers at a pace and a way that steals our attention before we are aware of it. The need to keep eyeballs on the app instead of the world around us drives us apart. At one point, he asks the provocative question about why Facebook can’t help us connect physically with friends and like-minded folks nearby so that we can make something together or enjoy an evening together. Why does it not recommend amazing projects and activities we could do with friends? It could easily do all of this. It could quickly help us build community, have a good time together, and make a lasting impact. But it doesn’t, and it won’t because the idea is to keep eyes on the app and keep people out of the physical world, which requires them to put down their phones and play.
Hari traces the origins of the psychology of social media back to the behaviouralist researchers and teachers who taught the cabal of engineer-capitalists that built this world in Silicon Valley. Nothing new there, perhaps, but what is different is that one can see how it works on one’s own mind. It is a chilling read because it lays bare capitalism’s unapologetic agenda that uses everything it can to generate wealth regardless of the impact.
Our attention is a battleground and a landscape that surveillance capitalists will exploit as readily as an oil company will exploit a shale play. The difference is that oil companies are subject to government regulation about what they can and cannot do, and surveillance capitalists are not. There is no environmental protection for the pristine nature of our creative minds. The predators have been given free rein to exploit it all.
The result is that we have become radically disconnected from each other. And the pandemic made it much worse as we retreated into our bubbles and became more reliant on social media for connection while at the same time being fed a steady stream of the stuff that is guaranteed to keep us engaged with apps and not each other. I think I first heard the term “doom scroll” in 2020. I recognize it in myself as the embarrassing desire to read one more stupid thread of misinformed comments. It makes me feel self-righteous. I can take on a few transphobes or racists from the safety of my own house. But that doesn’t make a change in the world. Half the time, I might even be arguing with robots.
But of course, this is precisely the cognitive-chemical loop that creates deep attractor basins that keeps us at home, on our devices, facing a massive barrier of inertia to get up and do something. Hari points out that this is not simply a problem that can be addressed by individual actions and habits, like putting away the phone at night in another room. While those are essential strategies for reclaiming attention, Hari clearly points out how attention-stealing is systemically enabled.
I can feel it in my work with TSS Rovers FC as we build this football club and enlist volunteers, spectators, and fans. To try to make a culture around something positive that requires people to come out and participate is to buck the forces of the entire world of surveillance capitalism that wants us on our phones and not in the stands singing and supporting young men and women, co-creating community, having fun together.
A couple of weeks ago, I was having dinner with a friend, and we discussed the crisis of belonging in our world. This has been an important concern in her research and advocacy work over several decades, which has led to all manner of crises, including mental health, development for young people, and our general tenor of social relations at the moment. I think it even contributes to the most significant issues like climate change, which arise from disconnection from each other, our natural world and the community of living things threatened by the actions of our species.
This affects all of us. Our phones and laptops have handy apps that can tell us how much time we spend on our screens, particularly on our social media apps. It is way more than you think. Thinking about places where you spend MORE time than on your social media apps is helpful. To which community do you really belong? WHOSE community do you really belong to? And, do you REALLY belong?
At the moment, I have a few activities outside of work that activates flow in my life: playing music, cooking, volunteering with both TSS Rovers FC and the Rivendell Retreat Centre, writing, gardening, and hanging out with my beloved and my kids. And altogether, I wonder if I STILL spend more time on my phone than doing these things, WHICH GIVE ME JOY. Even as I am typing this, my little tracker tells me that, on holiday, I averaged almost 4 hours of screen time daily.
These past two weeks, combined with Lent, have given me a welcome respite to reconsider my relationship with the thieves of attention who rule my life. Social media is an important part of my life and is probably how you and I are connected.
But Hari points out that the stealing of attention has existential impacts. It might be what prevents us from concentrating enough and spending the time we need together to address and move past existential crises like climate change, populism, and the threat of nuclear war. Suppose we cannot give more time to the collective problems of now because we are instead tilting at the AI-generated windmills of Facebook and Twitter. In that case, we will not be able to find one another, collaborate and perform out of our skins in the service of a viable future for this planet, its creatures, and its people.
Im just coming back from a meeting this weekend on Vancouver Island where Kelly Poirier and I were working with some specialized health care workers who were meeting with Indigenous families around creating a care model for their children. We had three families with us including six children, two of which were babies, a five month old and a seven month old.
It has been a long time since I facilitated meetings with babies taking an active role in the proceedings. The children were included in this meeting as participants and they had as much to offer both the content and the process while also demonstrating what it looks like when we build a system with children at the centre.
With the world increasingly full of people that are acting like babies, it’s a good time to pause and reflect on the lessons that actual babies bring to the game. Babies get a bad rap.
The clock doesn’t matter. Rhythm matters. When there are babies in the room, we learn to pay attention to natural rhythms. Babies that are constantly held and cared for are very quiet and happy. The two babies we had in the room with us loved being held by others and they were looked after by their older siblings and other participants in the meeting. This of course is common in Indigenous families and large families. The babies had a blanket in the middle of the room they could roll around on and their every need was looked after. If they needed holding, they were picked up. If they needed as nap they could cuddle up with someone. If they needed feeding, they were fed, if they started getting tired at the end of the day, we closed the meeting down. If they were late in the morning, then we started once everyone was present and settled. Babies do not obey a clock, but they do very well at reminding us of healthy rhythms. Watching Kelly facilitate an hour of reflective practice with a five month old baby curled up in her arms sound asleep was beautiful.
Put the children in the centre not around the edges. We had babies in the middle and we had smaller children who were offered many options for being present including going in and out of the room, being accompanied by different adults and contributing. But there was no child care offered for our meeting. The meeting was child care and the children had a place in it. We all took turns being with the children, and they were never out of sight or out of earshot.
Babies change the conversation. The meeting we were running was not full of conflict or high emotions but it was about tricky issues like cultural safety and non-Indigenous professionals meeting with Indigenous families and so there was some nervousness in the room as we were building the container and the relationships. But babies make excellent talking pieces and excellent centres for a dialogue circle and having them constantly in our space made the conversation about them all the time. Their presence helped ground and simplify the conversation and it ensured that we spent our time well so as not to tire them out.
Babies have something to offer. Find a way to include them. Babies offer lots of things to a meeting, including feedback and insight and a kind of checking of the ego. All of the children in te meeting were included in every conversation sometimes in small groups, sometimes in the larger group. They offered their own answers to the questions we were asking because the questions were simple enough that a five year old could contribute “What do you like about your worker?” is a question everyone can answer and the children will often find ways to add to an adult’s story or tell it in their own voice. Additionally the two smaller children we had in our meeting were both excellent singers and when offered the chance to do so, they shared songs with us to end our meetings or bless the food, which is a common practice in Indigenous meetings on the west coast with adults usually offering songs before eating. There is nothing better than a child who loves singing being invited to share their gift with others in services of a genuine need rather than a cute performance.
Babies will tell you what’s happening in the room. Babies are very sensitive to the energy of a group. I learned this years ago, that they will sometimes express the emotions that are in a room in more subtle ways before the audults become aware. If things get tense they will get squirmy or begin crying from worry. It’s a signal to take it easy and take a little break. The baby is the first one to become unregulated in a setting and usually the first one to become regulated again. Babies don’t carry a lot of stories about what is happening in the room, so I pay close attention to their sounds and movements and it gives me information especially in setting like this one where the primary purpose was building a relational field and sharing and making sense of stories.
The baby reveals the truth of the system. If you are developing a model of care centered on children, watch what is actually happening with the children in the room. They way they are included and respected and lifted up so they contribute tells you a lot about how ready the people are to bring a truly child centered approach to their work. I have seen systems where the babies and the children gave us warning signs in the room that much more work had to be done. This weekend though was very special.
Part four of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action
4. Harvest
Back in 2008, SIlias Lucius, Monica Nissen and I gathered at Phil Cass’s house in Columbus, Ohio and talked about the Art of Harvesting. Monica developed this practice because she found herself often as the “secretary” in participatory processes, typing up notes, clustering ideas, graphically recording landscapes, and generally making sense of the conversation. This was great for her, but she realized that the group was deprived of all the learning that she was doing. She set out determined to create a body of work that was complimentary to the Art of Hosting, called the Art of Harvesting.
She and I had already been thinking about this stuff for a couple of years when we finally got a chance to sit down with Silas. At the time, Silas was a permaculture gardener at Kufunda Village, a learning village in Zimbabwe that had been using the Art of Hosting as an operating system for eight years. AS a farmer, Silas had a lot to say about harvesting, and as our conversation explored the connections between harvesting from a meeting and harvesting from a garden, I managed to record our insights and we created a little book on The Art of Harvesting that outlined the phases and stages of harvesting from conversations that matter.
One of my core mantras in participatory process is “I’m not designing a meeting, I’m designing a harvest.” That is to say that my focus as a process designer is on what we will harvest together form our work, and creating the process and structure that will do that. As facilitators we are often involve with our meeting process tools and we end up walking away from meetings with dozens of flip charts rolled up under our arms and hundreds of post it notes, and very little idea what to do next. Paying attention to harvesting, is critical if we are to make good use of our time together in meetings. So here are some principles that keep me focused on this little helper:
Make sure you have a way of picking up what is growing inside your container. It should maybe go without saying, but if you don’t have a way to harvest the conversation you are running a risk of wasting your time. And while I’m not suggesting you keep minutes of a date with your significant other, in strategic work, harvesting insights, ideas, conclusions, decisions, and effects is essential. For important and large scale processes I often work with partners who job on the team is being responsible for hosting the harvest. That means they are responsible for the container for the harvest, whether it is templates for small group work, organizing materials to use later, graphic recording, making videos, or writing. Every strategic conversations needs to be harvested well.
Use PLUME to design your harvest. Yes, it’s another five letter acronym. This one is my touchstone for designing harvests that work well for participatory strategic processes. This one cam out of a conversation I was having with my partners Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen as we were designing a nine-week online course on harvesting a few years ago. The letters stand for this:
- PARTICIPATORY: Ensure that a harvest involves the people’s voices and words and images and is co-created as much as possible.
- LEARNING: Not merely a record of the conversation, a good harvest helps accelerate learning in the organization or community.
- USEFUL: Don’t create an interpretative dance if you’re hoping to raise money for your tech start up. Make a harvest useful in medium and message to those who will use it after the meeting.
- MULTI-MEDIA: totally make interpretative dance one way that you raise money for your tech start up if it helps get the message across to people otherwise bored of powerpoint presentations. Mix it up.
- EMERGENT: Make sure that you capture things that are happening and emerging and not just the things that you thought would happen.
There is a lot more on PLUME at the original post from 2016.
Have some idea of how you will put the harvest to use. No farmer plants a field of wheat without knowing what to do with it in October. Who will it be sold to? What will be done with it? These questions determine how the wheat is harvested, stored, transported and processed. That applies to harvest from meetings too. Have SOME idea about what you are going to do with it otherwise you’ll just stick it up on a shelf along with all of the other ideas that your generated but never did anything with. That’s no way to make change, and it’s no way to make meeting matter.
Decolonize this too! Just as creating “containers” runs the risk of colonizing space and people’s time and labour, harvesting can be even worse. I once ran a meeting with a number of indigenous youth who were reporting on some research they had done on their community. We gathered with non-indigensou adult “allies” and I introduced the process by saying “be sure to tell stories and harvest nuggets of widows that can be carried forward.” A small group of youth got up and left the room. When I found them in the hallway I asked them why they left. One young person stared me right in the eye and said “You’re a f*ing colonizer! You want me to tell my stories to adults who will harvest nuggets and cary them away.”
He was right. I had set up the process to be extractive, and completely without the kind of reciprocity and generative character that would have made for a powerful encounter between these two groups. Instead I unconsciously evoked the worst possible way of harvesting: transporting nuggets away to be turned into value elsewhere. I apologized but the damage was done. The trust was eroded and I wasn’t able to work with that organization again.
In her book “Braiding Sweetgrass” Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about “The Honourable Harvest.” And honourable harvest is one that is reciprocal, regenerative, and based in mutual respect and gratitude. An honourable harvest sustains life and makes everyone and everything healthier. Be sure to incorporate those values into your harvesting process and be extremely careful about extracting knowledge, labour, time and energy from people who are giving it without reciprocity.