A few years ago, Juanita Brown shared a very powerful image with me. She talked about how those of us that practice dialogue and facilitation in a deep way have access to various gateways that take us into a “central garden.” All of our pathways invite us into this garden where we come to discover and realize something about the role of dialogue, meaning making and collaboration. It is a set of realizations that lies beneath the practice of methods.
On a call today with my friend Mark McKergow, we were discussing this image There are a bunch of us – although not a large bunch of us – from different practitioner communities who are always interested in transcending our methods and entering into this conversation. Alongside Juanita, Mark has also been wondering “where is everybody else, and how come we’re not connecting?”
Today we were discussing the failure of dialogue to have enough presence to provide workable and practical alternatives to everything from public policy decisions (such as the EU referendum in Britain, or the polarization of US society) to the everyday challenges of managing and running large organizations, evaluating, strategizing and controlling outcomes, people and money.
We know that our field of dialogic practice is massive, well researched and well documented. We know that leadership literature is filled with the importance of relational and sense making work. We know that that mid-career professionals end up coming to our various workshops to take on skills and ideas that are fundamentally transformative to their work and lives and that they go back to places where “it’s difficult to implement” because other mid-career professionals are wedded to globalized management practices that are good enough for what they are trying to do, within the highly constrained performance frameworks within which they are forced to operate. We even know (thanks to people like Jon Husband) that global organizations like Hay Associates have spent the better part of a century ensuring that these management science constraints are widely deployed and understood. They frame everything, not without utility, but to the exclusion of almost every other way of organizing and being together in human endeavour.
So what is the problem? Are we just lousy storytellers? Are we being deliberately marginalized? Is there something fundamentally flawed about the ability of dialogic practice to actually be of value? And how do we disrupt the standard set of management tools and the narcissism of our own communities of practice in a way that creates some serious openings for change?
What do you think?
Bruce Cockburn is probably my favourite songwriter. I like to say that he’s my favourite psalmist too, because his somgs are like little prayers that capture the full range of human experience from drop-down-on-your-knees awe, to deep and desperate despair. Yesterday I found myself, as I do in times of reflection, going to Bruce Cockburn’s catalogue for some quiet mirroring.
When you’re lovers in a dangerous time
Sometimes you’re made to feel as if your love’s a crime
Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight
You’ve got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.
What is so striking about yesterdays massacre is that it was a direct act of hate against people who were asserting a bold statement of love. That to me is the worst kind of violence – nihilistic, pessimistic, narcissistic and cynical to the extreme.
There are very few things I don’t understand about American culture and society. Americans are nearly identical to Canadians in almost every way that matters. The differences between us are often less than the differences between Americans from different regions or political stripes. But one thing most Canadians fail to understand is the American attachment to guns. It is simply a different way of thinking about society, rights and responsibilities.
A society that is armed to the teeth, that has leaders and presidential candidates fanning the flames of fear, xenophobia, racism and contempt and that extols the individual’s power while knowing full well that the deck is stacked against most people transcending the class they are born in, is a recipe for these ongoing outbursts of anger and violence targeted in whatever way. The fact that every mass killer in the United States, has acquired weapons legally is mind boggling. The fact that some mass killers even self-identify with terrorist groups makes the gun ownership system in the US essentially a pipeline for supporting, enabling and abetting acts of terrorism. In every other country in the world, if self-declared terrorists had access to weapons to carry out their agendas, the state would move to restrict that access. Not in the United States. The heavily lobbied response to each of these killings is to work even harder to allow for everyone, including the next terrorist to have access to the tools of their trade. This is a thing that is hard for us to understand. And I know for most of my American friends and colleagues it’s hard to understand as well. But we have to keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
It has taken me a lifetime to learn to love our neighbour to the south. But I do. And yet, I have friends now who, when they find out I’m going to US, now say “stay safe.” I tell them that it’s really not a dangerous country, and they nod affirmatively but the look of concern doesn’t leave their faces. I’m not going to lie though. Going to open carry states makes me think twice. Mass shootings, racialized violence and blistering rhetoric are often present in my consciousness. I’m trying to love you America, but it’s dangerous times.
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