It’s Advent right now.
Although everyone talks about this being the “Christmas season,” liturgically speaking, the Christmas season begins on Christmas Day and lasts 12 days until Epiphany. In the Christian year, Christmas represents the incarnation of God into the world, and Epiphany represents the physical manifestation of Christ to humans.
These are times of joy and release that correspond with the return of light to the northern hemisphere and which come after a period of deepening darkness, which is Advent.
When you live on a small dark island in the North Pacific, this season, Advent, becomes meaningful. It is a time of rain and sometimes snow and a time of cloud and fog and the deepest darkness of the year. The sun is gone by 4:15 and doesn’t return until after 8 in the morning and because there are miles and miles of cloud stacked atop us, there are some days when it never really gets light at all. Everything that is not water is still and quiet. Creeks and rivers flow in torrents and the moody sea swings between calm and agitation at will.
It is a season of lingering. What lingers are the odd creature that should have left for warmer climes by now. A humpback whale that has decided to stay for the winter. A sea lion barking every night from its haul-out in the bay below my house is definitely out of time and place. The odd tourist who has wisely chosen to travel during a period in which they will have a whole mountain full of trails to themselves.
But what also lingers is the warmth of community. During the deep darkness of the Advent weeks, we move from event to event, experiencing light and warmth around the fires of other’s homes. We sing together, we visit and drink and eat and tell stories about our year and make plans for the future, and then we head out into the dark and rainy nights, flashlights in hand, careful with our steps, to make our way home. We travel between islands of light and warmth in a sea of darkness and cold. We linger on the memories of summer, or the impressions made by friends that we love. We linger on the memories of those who are no longer with us, who have died or who have moved away and who leave a little hole in our lives once occupied by the delight of a random encounter or intentional co-creation.
This is also the season in which traditions linger, in which a rhythm of community helps guide us and hold us through the dark season. The stringing of lights in Snug Cove and the annual lighting up of the village. The choir concerts and recitals. The reading of A Christmas Carol or A Child’s Christmas in Wales, performed yearly, as it was again last night, by the inimitable Martin Clark.
In the four Sundays of Advent, we reflect on the values and practices of Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. We do so in the darkest month, mindful of a world full of darkness. We reflect on Joy and Hope in its absence, and we practice waiting for it to return. I think one of the reasons why December is so full of contradictory emotions for people is that this is the time of year when we most deeply feel the loss of hope and joy and peace and love. And yet all around us, the market has seized on hope and joy as the reason for the season and exhorts us to buy and give and fill the hole of longing.
But that is not the purpose of Advent. Advent is the season in which we deeply feel the possibility of a world WITHOUT these things. And we acknowledge the pain and anguish of a world absent of light and love and peace and hope and joy. It is perfectly timed in the north to be a season of four weeks when we reflect on and embrace the darkness in anticipation of the return of the light.
We can be together in darkness if we hold each other there. We can have faith that moments of light will return, that love and peace will come back to the world. To people, to families, to whole nations. The liturgical seasons are both a symbolic representation of the reality of the heart’s topography and a container for practice. It is a aberration brought on by commerce that we are denied a chance to rest in sadness and despair together for a while. It is good medicine to do so.
As we approach the Solstice, I wish you days of subtle turning. That the fleeting moments of light that come into your life are grasped and held. That the sadness and despair you may feel at this time of year, in this time in history, can be acknowledged and held. And that joy and hope and peace and love may return to you and your beloveds.
Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.
— From “Gate A-4” by Naomi Shihab Nye
This is the start of a beautiful prose poem worth two minutes of your time to read, and just the kind of thing that I am happy to read today.
A systems change initiative I witnessed on the weekend.
I think my nomination for LinkedIn post of the year goes to Cameron Tokinwise for this one:
Good reminder for those extolling Systems Thinking from Pelle Ehn at the beginning of his still remarkable 1988 book, _Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts_ – that systems are only ever ensembles considered as systems. Systems are not things in the world, but ways of understanding how things in the world relate to each other. Systems Thinking is a choice to interpret the world as sets of systems.
Cameron Tokinwise on LinkedIn, October 2023
To be concerned about trying to effect system change does not mean that there are systems out there needing to be changed, but that one way to explain why change might be proving difficult is to observe aspects of the status quo as systemically interrelated, and so to try to make (design) a new system, that is, new ways in which those things interrelate.
This is important because systems risk being reified into big, solid things that seem to be unchangeable if you think of systems as really existing out there in the world. The classic example is that Babadook we consider to be Capitalism (as opposed to a variety of social relations – and not all social relations [see https://lnkd.in/gPJ8bdnQ] – we perpetuate).
(And yes, things are bit more complicated when observations of systems are considered to be themselves operations of other systems (the ones doing the observing), making such observations performative, constituting the reality of what is observed, at least in the world of/as experienced by the observer and those other systems with whom/which that observer is in an interdependent (or structurally coupled) relation: von Foerester > Maturana > Luhmann > Wolfe.)
I have just today had occasion to bring that up again, talking with a friend about systems change. Like, what is the system? Who says? What are the parts of it we say are the system and why are some things not considered part of the system? And what are we really seeking to change? And what does change even look like?
I continue to mull over this quote and its implications because so much work in the field I am involved in is about “systems change” or “systems transformation” and as long as I have been doing this work, I can see that saying I’m involved in systems change hasn’t really made anything more clear to me. I reject “root causes” of complex problems because, well, complexity tells us that causality is non-linear and effects are emergent so simply addressing “root causes” doesn’t get a predictable change. The root cause of poverty is simply another problem to address, the root of which is something else. The complex world is made of interrelated and interconnected things that aren’t ranked in a discernable hierarchy and that interact constantly in unpredictable ways.
And yet.
We know that there are stable patterns of behaviour that we can look at and call “unjust” and we know there are stable patterns of behaviour that we can look at and call “more just” (one feature of complexity work is that you can never know if you made the best move, but you can usually know that you’ve made a wrong move).
And so, in a conversation with a friend today, I suggested that instead of saying, “We aim to change systems,” why don’t we just say, “We think a just world looks like THIS, and so this is what we will do more of.” You can’t solve all the problems, even if there was a magical root cause that, if we just zapped it with enough transformation, would result in a just world. All that would happen is that competing forces would arrange themselves around other attractors, and new stable patterns would emerge. It might be that, in the battle between individual greed and social compassion for example we get a period of stability for social compassion for a time until individual greed figures out how to tilt the game in its favour again.
In my personal life, I think the world I want to live in has things like organizations and projects done by teams full of people who love and trust one another and that we make things together that people are generally happy with and that we are participating more in the community by singing together, sharing resources and supporting each other. I don’t have a root cause analysis for how I live my life. I don’t sing in choirs because a root cause of alienation and social anxiety is the collapse of co-creative community institutions, and the more spaces for community co-creation that exist, the more felt sense of belonging happens in the world. No. I sing because I love to sing, even when it’s hard and we make mistakes and dry up in performance and slam our foreheads in frustration because it’s hard to sing a minor seventh interval by ear, and I missed my cue again.
The need for theories of change has always struck me as an unnecessary step to making change. There is no perfect theory of change. I’m fond of quoting Micheal Quinn Patton, who said one day, to my delight, “Complexity IS a theory of change!” Good enough. Now get after it, and if things you do create what you think is a more just and caring world, find ways to sustain those things. And if they don’t, stop doing those things immediately. And you can’t do it all, so pick the things you want to do, that are maybe yours to do uniquely, perhaps informed by what others have said are good things to do and do them. Keep an eye on what happens, but trust that your work will travel well in the world. Once it’s out there, you cannot get it back.
Folks in Mitchell County, North Carolina, working with stories of substance use to discover patterns and generate ideas for supporting folks in active addiction and recovery and prevention.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on what participatory leadership really looks like. I use the word a lot in my work – teaching participatory leadership and participatory decision-making – and of course, “participation” is one of the four practices of the Art of Hosting. Hosting meetings and contexts for large-scale work means creating the conditions for participation. And it means learning how to be a good participant.
Words like this are always in danger of being overused, but a couple of moments over the past few weeks has reaffirmed the radical nature of truly participatory design and decision-making.
We have just wrapped up a couple of Art of Hosting Participatory Leadership cohorts with in-person retreats followed by online sessions. For both cohorts – one from a group of 35 senior academic leaders at a large US university and one from a coalition of community health organizations – we did a three-hour online session on participatory decision-making. In both cases, what struck me in discussions with participants is where the heart of participatory decision-making actually lies. It is not enough to be “inclusive” in making decisions. The real work – and the real benefit – comes from an actively participatory process. Inclusion, on the face of it, while worthy in itself, has a kind of passive tone to it. I can say I have included you in a decision, and I can even let you have a vote, but have you participated in the decision? Have you had a chance to co-create what we are deciding upon?
In the right context, participatory decision-making is the most powerful way to create shared ownership over decisions. In this respect, the heart of participation lies not just in having a say in the final stages of a decision but in being a part of developing the proposals being voted upon. I was in North Carolina a few weeks ago working on a Participatory Narrative Inquiry project we’ve been running on substance use and opioids. We collected over 130 stories and, as is a key feature of PNI, ran sessions to bring the community in to make sense of what they were seeing and what needed to happen in their rural counties to address patterns of substance use and support recovery. One circle consisted of folks who were all in recovery or still in active addiction. It was immensely moving to witness them in their power, considering other people’s stories, reflecting on their own stories, and working together to not only generate ideas for local governments and health agencies but actually take the initiative to create spaces for young people to learn about addiction and recovery from those with lived experience. Their feedback was that healing and recovery look like THIS: being active participating members of their societies and communities, and yet that is something that is hardly afforded to anyone, let alone people recovering from addiction.
Perhaps I take it for granted, but on reflection, it seems to me that participation – deep, authentic co-creation – is becoming an increasingly radical act. Where I live, we tend to either consume what is offered to us or are passive participants in the social and cultural dynamics going on around us. What would you say if I ask you where you participate in the world, outside of the decisions you make for your own self or family? How many things do you do where your participation is important to the thing’s success?
Me, I make music, play soccer, help sustain supporter culture at a small semi-professional soccer club, help steward two faith-based communities and participate on teams for teaching and supporting organizations and communities. These are good practices because being a participant in the world is an important capability to keep strong. And if you are someone who hosts or leads participatory spaces and processes, it’s important to know what enables good participation and what it feels like to actively co-create.
But even still, I’m not an active participant in politics, for example, where my participation, such as it is, is minimal and even optional and yet the implications of what happens in the governance arena is deeply influential on my life.
Where are the places we can extend the continuum of participation from engagement to inclusion to participation to co-creation?
—
A resource: Sam Kaner et. al. wrote perhaps the finest user guide to this work with the Facilitators Guide to Participatory Decision Making. This is a useful and very sparse collection of maps, tools and insights to help facilitators and leaders create the conditions for more and more participation in their work. Sparse is a good thing. The book is full of tools that folks with even a small amount of facilitation experience can put to work. A Fourth Edition of the book is being prepared for the new year.
The British poet, musician and performer was an incredible voice over 40 for racial justice and as an advocate for all people taking their place in Britain. His version of the Tam Lyn story, retold above in a stunning performance with the Imagined Village Ensemble, is a brilliant and creative arrangement of the old folk tale but applied to the reality of a refugee living in a 21st century British city and asking that his lover hold on to him as all of the power at play throws itself at him to try to have him deported.
It’s a stunning retelling. Explore Zephaniah’s work and life here.
1 2