One of the core practices in the world of participatory leadership is working closely with others, and staying in relationship. I’ve sometimes said that my business model is friendship, and that feels truer than ever as I move into my fifties and find myself practicing more and more accompaniment and mentorship in my life and work. It has been an important metric for me to have more collaborators than clients in a given year. It is a further metric that I count many of my clients as collaborators and friends.
And so here is a list of the amazing people I have had a chance to work with in 2019. Read this like the acknowledgement pages in a book, full of gratitude and celebration.
First Caitlin Frost, my partner in life, love, and business. We are working more and more together as our children move into their adult years and we’re discovering lots of gifts in how our joint practice is growing. More to come next year, including a deep offering on complexity, sharing basically everything we know.
A year ago I declared 2019 my personal year of learning about evaluation and I got to do that alongside many close colleagues from the evaluation world. Thanks to Ciaran Camman, Trilby Smith, Jara Dean Coffey, Meaghan Sutton, Rita Fierro and Dominica McBride for guiding me on this journey.
The Art of Hosting is core to my practice and I spend a lot of time teaching the practice and stewarding the community. This year I was on teams in New Brunswick, Manitoulin Island, Chiba, Japan, Whitehorse, Yukon, Washington State, Texas, Bowen Island, BC and Tseshaat, BC. I worked with amazing folks on those teams: Samantha Slade, Amanda Hache, Lewis Muirhead, Jason Doiron, Julie Feltham, Joanna Brown, Shawni Beaulieu, Rose Moss, Kim Haxton, Kelly Poirier, Dawn Foxcroft, Teresa Posakony, Kris Archie, Amanda Fenton, and Tenneson Woolf.
The Japan crew gets a special call out, for hosting us for a month in Japan over five workshops, including two Art of Hostings, a complexity workshop, a dialogic OD workshop and a limiting beliefs workshop. We had an amazing time in Japan and were hosted by the hardest working group of people I’ve ever met. Thanks to Yurie Makihara, Aiko Kakehashi, Kumiko Kigawa, Kiyoichiro Sorimachi, Cheiko Azuma, Maiko Iseda, Kayo Fujiwara, So Yoshida, Kazu Nakamura and Mokoto Nagaishi. That’s “the band” who rocked and rolled across Chiba, Tokyo, Nagoya and Hokkaido and I know there were many more in support of our work together.
There were others that made it possible for me to offer workshops in Europe and online. My partners here are the women at Bring on the Zoo in the Netherlands: Lily Martens, Helen Kuyper, and Caroline Rennie and my dear friends at Beehive Productions, Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen.
There are folks in my life who make things easier by drawing and laying out materials in sessions or in preparation. Graphic recorders Sam Bradd, Avril Orloff, Tiare Jung, Lisa Arora and Corinna Keeling are indispensable to our work, Marshall Watson and Anna Namshirin did some top rate design work for us this year, and Peter Czimmerman made a beautiful text to cloud conference tool.
This year we redesigned the Leadership 2020 program for the Federation of Community and Social Services of BC which meant getting another chance to work with our team of Caitlin, Kelly Poirier, and Annemarie Travers with guests like Wedlidi Speck, Bradley Dick, Ecko Aleck and Jennifer Charlesworth.
I want to extend some deep acknowledgements out to my learning partners, folks that I continue to have important conversations with over the years even though we aren’t necessarily working on things together. Shout outs to Bronagh Gallagher, Bhav Patel, Jenn Meilleur, Olive Dempsey, Lieven Calwaert, Sonja Blignault, Mark O’Sullivan, Ray McNeil and the Art of Hosting community of practice who continue to push my practice and help me grow. They join my own mentors Harrison Owen, Toke Møller, Monica Nissen, Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang in guiding my work
And finally, I’d like to acknowledge some of my clients, who have become or continue to be good friends over this year because we have been in some big work together. Khelsílem, Kris Archie, Rebecca Ataya, Phil Cass, Daniella Gunn-Deorge, Claudine Matlo, Mike Mearns, Siân Lewis, Jennifer Charlesworth, Trilby Smith, Kazu Nakamura, Lidia Kemeny, Meseret Taye, Barry Seymour, Ella Barrett, and Mary Letson are the best clients I could ever hope to work with. It is always an honour to serve the work they are doing – some of it super hard, and all of it deeply impactful for the people in their lives.
I’m humbled by this group of folks from all over. They represent an immense capacity for bringing good things to fruition in the world. They are brilliant, kind, funny, and generous and I count myself blessed to have them all in my life.
I’m Heading into a reflective few weeks now, and I may possibly spin out some blog posts as we go. Thank you for being along with me on the journey this year, commenting on what you read here and pointing me in interesting directions. I look forward to what emerges in 2020 and where our paths may intersect along the way.
It has been thirty years since 14 women were killed at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, and every year I mark their passing here.
I’ve always associated this song with that event, and I’ve even asked Lynn Miles about it, and she has said to me, despite her introduction in the above video, “yeah, I guess it’s also about that.”
And let’s remember their names and what they were studying or working on that day because they were our peers and their deaths marked a whole generation of us.
- Geneviève Bergeron, 21, was a second year scholarship student in civil engineering.
- Hélène Colgan, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and planned to take her Master’s degree.
- Nathalie Croteau, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering.
- Barbara Daigneault, 22, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and held a teaching assistantship.
- Anne-Marie Edward, 21, was a first year student in chemical engineering.
- Maud Haviernick, 29, was a second year student in engineering materials, a branch of metallurgy, and a graduate in environmental design.
- Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31, was a second year nursing student.
- Maryse Laganière, 25, worked in the budget department of the Polytechnique.
- Maryse Leclair, 23, was a fourth year student in engineering materials.
- Anne-Marie Lemay, 27, was a fourth year student in mechanical engineering.
- Sonia Pelletier, 28, was to graduate the next day in mechanical engineering. She was awarded a degree posthumously.
- Michèle Richard, 21, was a second year student in engineering materials.
- Annie St-Arneault, 23, was a mechanical engineering student.
- Annie Turcotte, 20, was a materials engineering student.
Take a moment, and listen to Lynn’s song, a piece that always reminds me of what we lost on December 6 1989 and what work we still have to do.
One of my mantras that helps keep me focused when I’m designing a process is “I’m not planning a meeting, I’m planning a harvest.” This helps me focus on need and purpose and helps me choose or create processes that make good use of our time together.
Facilitators can be guilty of the sin of falling in love with their methods and tools. Especially when we learn a new thing, we are desperate to try it out, sharing our zeal for this fresh thing we’ve discovered. In my own experience, many times that results in the meeting being about my needs and not the needs of the group. If I design a session based solely on the method – even if it is ostensibly in services of outcomes – I can find myself suffering from intentional unawareness and missing what the group wants or needs.
Because I am a process geek and love my tools and methods, I have found it necessary to disrupt the tendency to suggest a structure before fully fleshing out what is needed. This is why I organized the planning tool I use, the chaordic stepping stones, in a way that saves final decisions about structure until the very end of the planning process.
While it is essential to start the design with need and purpose, equally important is having a strong sense of the outputs, or the harvest of a process. In participatory work, outputs are not merely the tangible record and artifacts of the meeting. They are also intangible. Another design principle I use is “leave more community than you found” which demands that whatever we are doing, we build relationships and social connections in a group as much as possible and at the very least do no harm to social relationships. Building relationships is essential if the outputs of group work are to be sustained after the meeting is over.
Keeping these principles straight is aided by this handy framework I helped develop years ago, inspired by Ken Wilber’s integral theory. It recognizes that every meeting produces outputs that are both tangible and intangible, as well as individual and collective.
Harvesting and Collective Sensemaking
Tangible collective outputs include meeting artifacts, such as data, reports, visible shared purpose, decisions action plans, structure and organization, and records of the event. Intangible collective outputs include social relationships, collective learning, and social cohesion.
Tangible individual outputs can be skills, personal takeaways, a clear personal workplan, or a knowledge of one’s role and responsibilities. Intangible individual outputs can include belonging, encouragement, clarity of purpose, enjoyment, and a sense of purpose.
All facilitators spend time working on the tangible collective outputs of a meeting, but sometimes we give the other three quadrants short shrift. If we don’t pay attention to these things, especially the intangible outputs, we can often create good artifacts but at the expense of relationships or trust. How many times have you been a part of the process where the facilitator delivered on the work, but everyone felt worse afterwards? Harvesting needs to be reciprocal, not extractive.
I use this framework by asking my clients to choose two or three desired outputs in each quadrant. These are things we want to happen as a result of the meeting and they become constraints for choosing our tools and designing a flow for the process.
Recently I helped design a meeting process for the First Nations Technology Council to invite First Nations social development managers to come together and work on an investment strategy to improve the use of technology in their work of providing income assistance to individuals in their communities. It would be easy to make this an extractive consultation, but my client was clear that we needed to build community between these people, encourage learning and peer coaching and ensure that going forward the work was supported and stewarded by the participants themselves..
When I came on to the project, we had a good draft agenda that was tailored towards getting information from the participants to include in an investment strategy being prepared for the federal government. But in checking against the intended intangible outputs, we realized that the process was too dependant on the facilitator and presentations from the front of the room. We made some significant changes to build more community, more peer support, and more ownership of the work. These included:
- Changing an environmental scan to a world cafe in which participants shared their stories about their work and the way they were able to provide services in spite of the technological challenges they faced.
- Moving from a sterile user profile process to a peer process in which participants interviewed each other on the steps that each manager goes through in meeting, processing and reporting on income assistance. We made a process timeline and participants coded their work to show where they used technology, where frustration existed in the system and where the process was bottlenecked. These became key points for the investment strategy.
- Instead of the FNTC writing the strategy themselves, each of the five consultations will appoint two participants to be a part of a sense-making group whose job is to review the work of the entire process and design the investment strategy alongside the Technology Council. This group of ten will convene to produce the final product, and hopefully deliver it to Ottawa, preserving the voice of participants in the work.
The meeting took participants by surprise and many were thrilled to be engaged in a participatory way and have their knowledge honoured. Because these people don’t often get a chance to meeting others in the same job, they were hungry for network building and sharing solutions with each other. Supporting this community will be an important part of the work going forward.
Focusing on the harvest in all of its aspects helps to create a set of enabling constraints that helps me to be a better process designer and provide a better overall experience for participants. Give the tool a try and let me know how it changes your practice.