Reading Adam Kahane some more and thinking about listening:

It is a truism to say this, but I’ve been pondering the deep implications of this statement and what it means for a practice of listening and opening that becomes a leadership skill.

It is almost impossible to describe what it is like to listen from the heart. We easily talk about “speaking from the heart” or making a “heartfelt” appeal, and we recognize this in someone who is deeply and honestly communicating their truth. We can probably all identify moments when we have heard people speaking from the heart and we may even be able to remember moments when we were capable of this kind of power. One becomes solid in a way that is out of the ordinary. One feels anchored and firm in conviction and confident of the words one is using. It is sometimes accompanied with tears or other hints of emotion but at one’s core there is a steadiness that appears almost otherworldly. One develops a sense of mutuality with the other, and the boundaries begin to blur.

It is by no means a run of the mill state of being for most of us, but it is far more common than it’s attendant skill: heartfelt listening.

If it is possible to speak from the very centre of one’s being what does it feel like to listen from that place, to listen as the Dalai Lama says “with the heart?” How do we cultivate that in daily life?

My experience of listening with the heart was drafted in the Cariboo region of British Columbia. When I was working with the Federal Treaty Negotiation Office, my job was to bring together third party stakeholder to provide governments with advice on treaty negotiations with First Nations. Most of the people I worked with in the Cariboo were virulently opposed to treaty making when we started working there in the mid 1990s. They were loggers, ranchers, miners and business people, among others, and although some understood that reconciliation of the land question was an important and inevitable journey for British Columbia, most thought that treaties would put too much land in the control of First Nations and erode the ability for the resource sectors to make a living in the region.

This was a real fear, although it was based in a story about First Nations that was loaded with assumptions about competence, vengeance and paternalism. Our challenge was to find ways of hearing the interests of these non-Aboriginal stakeholders and bring them to the negotiating table in a way that resulted in agreements that would work for all parties.

If we were successful, it was because I think we learned to hear at a heart level what people were saying to us. AND I think our sincere desire to know these folks gave us the questions that they could ask of each other too. Over years of eating, drinking, working and traveling with these folks I came to realize that people in the Cariboo, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal share something in common: they care deeply about their region. When they perceive a threat to the future of the Cariboo they react like a parent protecting a child: they become defensive and then aggressive.

It was this defensive and aggressive reaction that gave the Cariboo region its poorly deserved reputation. For me it was hard to hear white people talking about Aboriginal in racist terms. It was hard to hear resource industry workers talk about how they felt about environmentalists, people with whom I shared more in common. And it was hard to hear Aboriginal people talking about white people in sweeping generalizations because my background is mixed ancestry and I take great pride in my Irish heritage.

If I was to work effectively with these interests I knew that I would have to hear deeper than the words, right into the heart of the experience and the story. Without fully understanding that, there was no way we could fashion common ground.

What I learned in the Cariboo was what it feels like to listen without blame or judgment. It feels very much like one is holding something open, as if you have your arms raised above your head and you are keeping a tent from collapsing in on you. You can find it hard to breathe, and if for some reason the conversation should switch into a reactive and blaming mode, there is a visceral feeling of the tent coming down., The conversation becomes smothering, people talk on top of one another, and the listening evaporates. Working in this environment taught me to remain open and to hear what people were saying, beyond the “goddamn Indians” comments.

The last time I went up there to work was in 2003 when I facilitated an Open Space session with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people from government, businesses, the resource sector and the community. In the closing circle I made the observation that my five years of working with these people had taught me that deep below the bluster were individuals who cared so deeply about this place that they couldn’t think of letting go of any part of it. I suggested that far from being a hindrance to treaty settlements, this would work in their favour, because a future without care and passion and connection is not a sustainable future. The result of creating sincere dialogue and listening between groups like that is, with the right questions and enough time, they come to see that deep commonality in each other.

Folks in the Cariboo are continuing to work together and the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities are in a place now with each other that 10 years ago would have seemed impossible. Listening to one another with heart has made this future emerge.

As humans, using our deepest faculties, we really have no idea about just how much we can accomplish.

Gabriela Ender, the creator of OpenSpaceOnline has a new eBook available from her site talking about how OSO works and its various applications.

You can download the eBook for free here. Among the international Open Space practitioner community, there is general consensus that Gabriela’s software is the closest thing in cyber space to participating in a face to face Open Space Technology meeting.

Fort Rupert First Nation, BC

I’ve just read “Blindness” by Jose Saramago. It’s a harrowing story of a human dystopia that is brought on by a nearly complete plague of blindness that sweeps through the entire population. It is like a modern day Kafka tale that, as the blurbs say, sums up the deepest horrors of the twentieth century.

In the book, society quickly breaks down as everyone becomes blind and human morality and ethics follow suit. More frightening though is the resignation of the bands of people who wander around the city trying to find food, unsure of where they are, unsure of who is with them. It’s easy to become lost when there is no one to help you find your way home. Saramago plumbs the depths of this chilling scenario with a style that is detached so that his voice becomes one of a parable maker, a distant, dispassionate eye witnessing the unfolding scene.

It’s a disturbing book, but in some ways it is no more disturbing than the loss that I see around me right now. I’m in Fort Rupert today, a small First Nation on the north coast of Vancouver Island. As I write this I am sitting in the big house watching an Open Space meeting with about 50 First Nations youth unfold. There is a huge fire in the centre of the building, fed by logs that are 3 feet long. On either side of me massive carved poles 10 or 12 feet around rise into the smoky depths of the ceiling, some 40 feet above me. It is dark and smoky and cold inside and the only light comes from the fire and some soft lighting along the tops of the walls.

The youth are deeply engaged in issues that are important to them and one of those issues is language. One youth has posted a topic called “Without language who do we know who we are or where we are?” and it brought to mind Saramago’s book.

I wish I could write a novel that talks about the impact if the loss of Aboriginal language in a way that captures the same harrowing disorientation of “Blindness.” Here on the coast, the deepest knowledge of the land, of humans’ relations to it and to each other are bound up in the language, If you can’t use Kwa’kwa’kala to speak to one another, nothing makes sense.

The only way I can give you a sense of the impact of the loss is to have you imagine what it would be like to go through life without having words for anything. And imagine too that as you stopped calling things by their names, they fade away so that in a few short years you don’t even remember what it was you had – it’s all gone. Imagine that this would be true for everything you owned, everyone you love, everything you know.

And then imagine that you were granted a wish and that you did get a language, but it wasn’t yours. You are grateful for the chance to speak again and bring your world back, and you struggle to remember what it was you once knew. You try to describe your children with this new language and what reappears is some crude facsimile of your kids. You try to talk about what the land means and to remember how to live on it, but it’s just a rude approximation of what you once knew and so the land comes back looking different. You don’t recognize the animals and plants. You can’t remember what you once knew about them.

That’s the impact that losing Aboriginal languages is having on communities in this country. As the languages die out, a world fades away and the human community loses the capacity to speak about and understand the complex systems of the coastal forest and the societies that evolved within them. When we use English to describe this land now we miss 90% of what is really there. We can’t see it anymore, we can’t feel it and we certainly can’t connect with it.

Here in the big house, there is a living breathing culture, and Elders and some youth are speaking their language, dancing and singing their songs. The practices that have knitted together community and Nations have been undertaken almost unbroken for thousands of years here. But in the twentieth century, the ceremonies were banned and the language was drummed out of children at residential school and in a few short generations we have lost almost everything.

These youth and the Elders who are with them are living proof that there is something left and that it’s worth fighting for and hanging on to. Languages bring worlds into being and when we lose a language as a human community we lose a world. As we struggle on this planet to be with the massive changes all around us, we need as many world views as possible. We need the diversity to understand and make meaning from the complexity. Anything you can do to support that effort benefits us all.

Port Hardy, BC

Some of my smart blogging compadres are posting series. Dan Oestreich has just put up the third of his leadership practices: caring for self. And Jon Husband has finished his ten point manifesto for managing in a wired world with the posting of number ten: permanent whitewater is the new normal (great title!).

I love it when folks post things ina series. It gives us time to digest ideas as they are emerging and to see how they are evolving. It’s a fun way to write too.

Port Hardy, BC

While traveling up to Port Hardy here I ran into my friend Art Mercer who is charge of Economic Development for the Nisga’a Lisims Government. Art is one of the members of the Counsel on BC Aboriginal Economic Development, a group I have worked with a fair amount over the years. The Counsel is a body that is challenging the status quo with respect to economic development in First Nations in Canada. For the past two years they have been hosting an annual conference called “Strategic Conversations” named for the strategic plan we wrote together in 2002. The Counsel firmly believes in the power of conversations to transform the current mental models that limit many First Nations and government approaches to economic development. By encouraging strategic conversations with community members, economic partners, governments and markets, new models of sustainable economic and community development can emerge for First Nations.

We talked a little today, as we always do, about some of the amazing work going on out there, and Art pointed me to a report published by the Skeena Native Development Society called “Masters in our Own House.” The report came out of a think tank of the same name, looking at new models of wealth creation, prosperity, governance and development for First Nations. Clarence Nyce, who was one of the conveners writes in the preface of the report:

The report itself is a combination of deep economic theory and straight forward practical tools and is worth downloading and reading if you are involved in economic development for First Nations or any small, rural and isolated community.

More evidence of how much good stuff there is right here under our noses.