C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) appearing in the night sky October 17 over Lake Opinion in Ontario. Shot with my iPhone 13
A collection of interesting links I found and posted at my Mastodon account this month. Happy Hallowe’en!
- A really nice overview of Edgar Schien’s book “Humble Inquiry” and his approach to working with clients. Please read this if you are a consultant.
- This is what happens when you privatize a public service. This is no surprise. We absolutely get what we deserve. Don’t want to pay taxes? No problem. Stick your finger in the wind and see what’s what.
- I truly believe that Citizens Assemblies are the way to go now. Public hearings are not helpful, not transparent, and not generative enough. Here in BC, we undertook a significant initiative back in 2004 when we looked at changing our provincial electoral system. It produced a remarkably creative and well-supported result. There is currently one beginning work to examine the amalgamation of Saanich and Victoria.
- The missing people of North Carolina. My heart is constantly breaking for my freinds and colleagues who are mired in disaster that continues. It is nowhere near over, and the trauma and permanent damage to communities, hearts and brains will not abate any time soon
- Dave Winer is one of the guiding lights in the field of #blogging. I discovered him not long after I started my own Parking Lot blog back in 2002 and followed along with some of the folks that helped inspire him to create RSS and podcasting. RSS should be protected as a treasure of the heritage of humanity. It keeps things open. Scripting News is turning 30.
- The Alberta government’s recent legislative actions are deeply troubling. It’s heartbreaking to see a policy based on exclusion rather than inclusion.
- Traditional Waters, Modern Threats: The Gitga’at’s Fight for Humpbacks. First Nations asserting jurisdiction over their lands and waters generally result in good things for life within their territories.
- A nice collection of Complex Systems Frameworks rendered by my friend Sam Bradd for Simon Fraser University .
- LIstening to Rob Piltch and Lorne Lofsky have an intimate conversation on guitar through Cole Porter’s Everything I Love. These two are absolute masters in very different styles and lions on the Canadian jazz scene.
Back in 2015, Caitlin, Tim Merry, Tuesday Rivera, and I were travelling around the world offering a workshop called “Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics,” in which the four of us were sharing our extensions of work that we had developed emerging out of the common root of the Art of Hosting community and our practices. It was a rich experiment, and we met really interesting folks in Canada, the US and the UK. It started some longer-term partnerships and friendships, and from time to time, I ran into folks who were at those workshops.
I met one of them last week again. Dr. Nomusa Mngoma is a health researcher at Queen’s University, where I was last Monday delivering a day-long workshop on the Art of Hosting basics for the Centre for Community Engagement and Social Change. Nomusa saw the invitation and showed up. When I met her, I had a vague recollection of meeting her previously, but I couldn’t place it. We both thought for a while, and of course, it was at our Beyond the Basics retreat in Kingston in 2015, the last time I had taught in that city.
We caught up and went through the day, and as we were leaving, Nomusa handed me her business card, which wasn’t for her job at Queen’s. It was as the owner and instructor of Dansani Dance Company, a local business specializing in Latin Dance and Ballroom Dance lessons. The moment she haded me the card I had a flash of recollection.
“Wait!” I said. “Didn’t you propose this idea as a topic in the Pro Action Cafe at Beyond the Basics?”
She thought for a minute and, with delight, realized that she had indeed! “That conversation changed my life,” she said.
Wow. I love that.
Later, I was talking with my friend Michelle Searle, who brought me to Queen’s, and she wondered how Nomusa had received the invitation to our event. The workshop was open, but the invitation was only sent out through Queen’s and to a few partners. I told Michelle that Nomusa is an Adjunct Assistant Professor and Health Research Scientist. Michelle expressed delighted surprise because, although she didn’t know Dr. Mngoma in that capacity, apparently, Nomusa is famous in Kingston for leading free outdoor dance classes downtown in the summer!
Nine years from a template full of notes in a workshop to joy unleashed in a community and one happy and fulfilled human being.
I’m on the road again, this time back to Ontario where I will be working with Jennifer Williams, Cédric Jamet and Troy Maracle in a reboot of our “Reimagining Education” Art of Hosting on the shores of Lake Opinicon in eastern Ontario. Whenever I work out east I build in time to visit family for a few days. I arrived in Toronto on Monday, and stayed with my brother, visited with one of our TSS Rovers women’s players, Maddy Mah, who plays in the fall season for the University of Toronto, and then caught a train to Belleville. Last night I stayed with Troy and Shoo Shoo at their home on the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory on the shores of Lake Ontario. We head up to the site later today for some last minute design and set up.
There is no time like the fall to connect my soul with this place. I was born and raised in Ontario – and three years in the UK – and this time of year was always my favourite. If you’ve never been in the hardwood forests of the Great Lakes Basin in autumns, you can scarcely believe the transformation that happens as the sunlight grows weaker and the temperatures ease their way towards winter. The maple forests turn bright red and it is one of the true wonders of the natural world to see a brilliant red forest against a calm lake and a blue sky. There is a reason that the Canadian flag features a red maple leaf I think.
Fall is my favourite Ontario season and it is a very different experience than the west coast where I have lived for the past 30 years. Out there, atmospheric rivers and fierce wind storms are the typical pattern of autumn. The storms hit our coast in a chain of wet and wild weather usually from mid October through to the middle of December, when things grow a little calmer. After the calendar turns, and perhaps a bit of sea level snow falls, the rain continues, but gentler and less energetically powered by the residual heat of the summer sea.
Here in Ontario, this is the time of year the forests turn and November brings heavy and cold rains that wash the leaves off the trees providing the forest floor with a rich mulch to protect it against the killing frosts that are on their way. Already the ground grows a bit frosty at night and there might be a skin of ice on the Lake this week if the wind is calm. November in southern Ontario is a dismal mix of cold rain, wind, decaying leaves and increasing darkness. If you love inclement weather, as I do, it’s glorious. If not, it’s a depressing interregnum between the early fall and the snowy winter.
So this morning I find myself in a deeply familiar land and sound-scape, hosted by my old friends at their home in their territory. Orange trees, blue skies, silver sunlight glinting off Lake Ontario, the calls of Blue Jays and Chickadees in the shrubs. In as much as I have lived more than half my life on the islands and coastal edges of the Salish Sea, these sounds, and smells and sight awaken a deep sense of home in me, what the Welsh might call “cynefin,” a habitat of living, one of the places of belonging that has a claim on my soul.
Over the past 15 years I have worked with churches, faith communities and faith-based social justice movements using the Art of Hosting and participatory leadership. In many ways these organizations have been at the forefront of social and demographic changes, getting older while holding a fierce commitment to addressing issues of injustice in the world. Working with faith leaders and faith-based movements allows us to have a different conversation about participatory leadership, community work and spirit. The Art of Hosting seems to wake up the kind of collaboration that faith communities long for, even as they confront existential questions within their own organizations or in the larger world.
In November in Toronto, a very special team of us is hosting an Art of Participatory Leadership training aimed at leaders in faith based contexts and those whoa re engaged in social justice work, specifically anti-poverty and inclusion. This training, while it is directed at folks who are working in these contexts, is open and applicable to others as well, whose work needs active involvement and co-creation with the communities they serve. Non-profits and social change movement workers are welcome and will both learn and add much to the conversations we are involved in.
My co-hosts on this team are Ben Wolf and Violetta Ilkiw. Ben is an old friend who has been a community organizer, communicator, journalist and Unitarian congregational leader for years. He is currently working with Thomas Hübl and bringing trauma informed practices into his work.
Likewise I’ve known and admired Violetta’s work for years. She specializes in conflict transformation, decision-making and deep community-led change work, including working with youth-led initiatives in the philanthropic sector.
In this work we have been invited by Sam Cooper, a minister in the Toronto area who has been devoted to setting up an Anti-Poverty Commission in Mississauga, based very much on the citizen-led initiatives in Scotland (like this one). We are also invited into this work by Pablo Kim Sun who specializes in Intercultural work and inclusion and who works for the Presbyterian Church in Canada.
There are creative tuition options for this training and we want to make it as open and accessible to anyone who resonates with this call, whether you are working in churches or other faith-based organizations, or involved in deep community led change work. Consider joining us. There are spaces open and we’d love to see you there.
Some notes from three days of teaching a small cohort of leaders in the art of participatory leadership.
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When we teach the four fold practice of the art of hosting (also the art of participatory leadership) I’ve taken to doing it in a World Cafe. We use Cafe to essentially recreate the conditions that created the insights of the four fold practice 25 or so years ago. We invite people to tell stories of engaging and meaningful conversations they have experienced, look at these stories together for insights about what made them engaging and meaningful and provide and three pieces of advice to aspiring hosts and leaders about how to create engaging and meaningful conversations.
This not only helps a group discover the practice – which we teach only AFTER the World Cafe – but it also shows that the World Cafe is itself a powerful process for sharing stories, collective sensemaking and knowledge creation. In the context of our work this week, with academic researchers , leaders and administrators at a university, this can be a powerful experience as they experience first hand what it feels like to be hosted in what is essentially participatory research.
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Tennesson’s check in questions this morning featured a question that I love. “Who is a person for whom you are here this week?” I love a question like that. It focuses a learner for a moment on the fact that leadership development is not just personal development. It is learning you do to make the world a better place for others.
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Chaos and order and the Chaordic path is an important and basic introduction to complexity. It is the basic teaching that helps folks to see the polarity between ordered and unordered systems and how our work as hosts is essentially determining what move is required to bring a process into more or less order so that good work can be done. Complex facilitation, a term from the Cynefin world, is all about working with constraints, to loosen or tighten, to expand or contract, in order to create the conditions to catalyse actions or behaviours that take us in a preferred direction of travel. Its is about working with constraints to fashion a container that can become a place for emergence and then managing that emergence by harvesting, shaping, grounding or eliminating it.
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Personal work is critical for people working in complexity, or walking the Chaordic path. When confronting uncertainty and emergence, we run into reactions and emotions. Understanding the reactivity cycle and having a tool to create a subject-object shift that can first recognize the connection between the emotion and the situation and then examine that reaction helps to interrupt the cycle of rumination or fixation that can reinforce unhelpful patterns of behaviour which can make a person less resourceful in a space of uncertainty, leading to reactions like controlling, fleeing or tearing it all down.
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Adrenaline does not just create a flight/fight response. It can also induce freeze, appease, control, and comply response. None of these are helpful in leadership situations especially where there are triggering events like conflict, chaos, tough decisions, accountability and other issues on the line. Understanding the reactivity loop is the first step in shifting our responses. Working consciously with our patterns of reaction is how to disrupt those patterns and discover better ones. And it helps us stay more present and aware when we are in situations in which we are more likely to become reactive.
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My father in law Peter Frost, in his book Toxic Emotions at Work, worked from the premise that leadership creates pain. Decisions create lines and boundaries and good leaders make good decisions with an awareness of some of what will NOT happen while being committed to what will happen. This commitment to a core, once a decision is made, can free a leader up to handle the turbulence at the edge of the chosen path. There will always be those who disagree or dissent from a decision. There will sometimes be winners and losers, at subtle political levels as well as more obvious material levels. Taking the time to hear voices and build as much collaboration as possible before hand, and then working at managing the pain afterwards while committing to the decision is a really key skill. It’s never either or. It’s a dance. And the moment of a decision is a kind of madness, but some of the best leaders I have seen in action are able to do it this way.
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A half day spent on Chaordic design. There is nothing more indicative of the intention to create truly participatory meetings than the willingness to make design them collaboratively. As one young person once said to me about Open Space “I love this process because I know that whoever controls the agenda controls the meeting.” Collaborative design is fractal and can happen at all levels of an initiative. It can also be initiated at all levels of an initiative. My hypothesis is that the extent to which people will participate in a meeting is directly related to the extent to which they are connected to the necessity for and purpose of a meeting. Taking time to name these helps ensure high degrees of engagement. Literally, nothing about us without us.
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A good question that came after I taught the Chaordic stepping stones: “This seems like it would work in an egalitarian environment but what about when there are real issues of power?” Mapping the urgent necessity of the moment should surface that reality. Naming the people who need to be involved is an important moment to name who has the power to say “no” and shut this down. In my experience every new initiative has a window of opportunity and a sponsor who will keep it open for a while. Until they don’t. Knowing you have limited time is helpful to focus on what’s really important and WHO is really important to include and HOW.
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How is Open Space a leadership practice? The moment of posting and the hosting a conversation that matters is what does it. A person responds to a call and takes responsibility for something important. For calling a conversation that needs to be called. They write it up and stick it on the wall and then show up to host. In these simple acts are the hallmarks of participatory practice. Post and host. Take responsibility for what’s important.
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One of the features of things like Pro Action Cafe is the way the constraints some times force naive expertise to be present. Having four at every table means sometimes people don’t get their first choice of projects to work on. They might end up a table where they have no idea what’s happening. We always encourage them to participate anyway because these are where the oddball questions, the “dumb questions” and the new ideas come from. Never underestimate naive expertise. If you want some try to explain what you are doing at work to our 16 year old niece. You will instantly learn some new things.
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