Congrats to the Air Canada Components of CUPE who secured a contract between Air Canada and their flight attendants. This was a wild moment in Canadian labour relations. A ten year agreement expired, the union demanded pay for unpaid work and achieved a 99% strike vote. Air Canada preemptively locked out the workers last weekend and began cancelling flights. The federal government ordered the groups to binding arbitration and then ordered the flight attendants back to work. They refused and began an illegal strike. The public largely stayed onside becasue NO ONE LIKES DOING WORK FOR FREE. Then yesterday, the announcement came that the dispute was settled.
This whirlwind week was an important moment for labour in Canada. At the same time as the new agreement was announced, CBC reported last night on the increasing prices of things, especially food, and how the affordability crisis is going. We have heard all kinds of news about price inflation over the past few years, but hardly anyone has talked about wage stagnation. In the past, price would rise, and so would wages. But in the last 20 years, and the last ten years specifically, this difference has become truly unhinged. Nobody in politics with any power, least of all the federal Liberals and Conservatives, have discussed wage increases, but everyone seems to have solutions for inflation, which has largely returned to its “normal” levels.
We need to talk about wages. All the time. You are not getting paid enough. People need to be paid more. And if you are worried about prices increasing perhaps we shouldn’t be because very little of what we are paying in higher prices is going to the people that make things and provide us with the services we need. For things like food, living wages for workers are not the issue. It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together, but we’re still living the neoliberal dream, so at the very least, the lateral thinking needed to do it is wanting.
Rob, from a recent Facebook of his which he captioned “The new me.”
My friend Rob Paterson is dying. I found out on Facebook today as he shared a remarkable thing that his daughter is doing.
Rob was one of those bloggers that you’d meet sometimes in the early 2000s who posted tons of interesting stuff, and thoughtful, place based and personal posts. At his blog you’d learn about PEI, and finance and management, British history (which was essentially his own personal history), and food and health and all the things that his brain and heart were driven to explore. And he was one of those bloggers from those early that, when I met him in person for the first time in about 2006 or something, I connected with instantly. It was like that with Johnnie Moore and Euan Semple and Lila Efimova and Harold Jarche and so many others. In 2009 we visited Rob and his family in PEI and we even made a little video about living systems together.
Rob was always really interested in my work and in 2005 he and Johnnie Moore and I had a conversation about some new idea we called “unconferencing.” We talked about Open Space Technology and ways that people really do want to meet if only people who think they know better would get out of the way. That is such an interesting conversation because Rob described what might be one solid thread of the origin story of podcasting which happened at a conference hosted by Peter Rukavina in 2003 at which Dave Winer and John Muir met and discussed how to use RSS to broadcast radio shows.
That was how it was blogging back in the day. I feel like those of us still doing this or returning to this are keepers of some arcane traditional knowledge. We know what it’s for, what it does, how it changes people. We know how it brings people into our lives in surprisingly deep ways. It is not social media. It is slower than that. More relational. More real.
Rob has left an incredible legacy of writing and musing and conversation and his daughter Hope has embarked on a project to upload all of this to an AI. It’s an intriguing proposition, and perfectly suited to Rob’s penchant for using technology to feed wisdom and connection.
So much love and fondness goes out to Rob and family. My hope for you, my friend, is that your transition is soft and beautiful and that you are carried away on the stories we all hold of you.
Thank you for being in my life, and thank you for inviting me into yours.
Chris Mowles has a lovely post on the perils of an unquestioned commitment to directionality in complexity. Our work is never starting from scratch, and what does “going forward” even mean in a non-linear context?
…maybe there is more to uncover about complex experience than talking as if there is only one tense which is important, the future, and only the individual’s rationality and will to map it out. The future is important, and we are oriented towards it, but this shouldn’t prevent us from thinking about how we have become who we are, and what matters to us. What remains of the embers of the past from which we can still derive succour and find resource?
Rosa Zubazarreta has long been a curious “pracademic” – as she calls herself – about facilitation and deliberation. We have met a few times in the past, but I consider her a close colleague in the work of constantly trying to learn about how to host conversations and design group spaces in which dialogue and listening is maximized. She recently had a peer-reviewed article published called “Listening Across Differences” about deliberative “mini-publics” which are small democratic fora hosted in Austria. Her most recent blog post explores the role of AI in group facilitation, a topic about which she is deeply passionate, and about which I am very curious.
It’s happening and I’m certainly willing to explore it more in deliberative contexts. I have run a couple of small experiments using AI to summarize vast amounts of narrative information and advice submitted by citizens to create high level summaries of advice, high level articulations of dissenting opinions and so on. This becomes material for further deliberation. I have been toying with a design where members of a group all spend time feeding information to different GPTs, querying the data in different ways and bringing their insights to a conversation. It’s about how to make vast amounts of opinion accessible, and generate a learning conversation that everyone can participate in.
This is becoming an interesting field and I notice the twin poles of curiosity and resistance in myself. My friend Jeff Aitken sent along a link to Metarelational.ai which feels like a true TRIP to explore. There are several varieties of trained chatbot there. I have seen and explored some of these, each one cultivated like a garden, each one designed to do something a bit different. Honestly, after a hour or so in a session with these tools, it’s hard to know what terms like “relational” mean. I am firmly in the world of knowing and working with human-to-human relationality. The work at Metarelational seems to at times to evokes a kind of eschatology of human relationships stemming from our own design, and a sort of surrender to AI and machine intelligence that feels religious. It uses religious and spiritual terms and language like “agape” and “right relationship” and “interbeing.” I joked with Jeff the other day about when a new religion might sprout up around an AI chatbot. It’s a joke, but given the proclivity for human beings to seek a higher intelligence that has all the answers, and to be led in a course of action “forward” at any costs, I think there is a serious question here.
The rainy weather here has me thinking about the fall, and we have a few course offerings coming up in the next few months, including two in-person Art of Hosting trainings and a couple of online offerings on working with stories to make change, and facilitating large-group meeting methods.
The Art of Hosting continues to be my core work in terms of training and capacity building. From October 16-19, I will return to Ontario to join Jennifer Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle for our third annual Reimagining Education Art of Hosting. There are still a few space left for this gathering, which takes place at the Queen’s Biological Station near Elgin, Ontario, in the heart of autumn colours season. It’s a rustic location on a lake with a smaller group of fewer than 40 folks, many of whom are involved in public and Indigenous education systems. These folks are joined by others who are working in other sectors and that richness means that it isn’t just an education conference and that people working elsewhere will meet lots of folks who are skilled at creating learning environments.
Twice a year in Vancouver, Caitlin Frost, Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier, Kris Archie and I host an Art of Hosting open to any and all. From November 12-14, A group of around 40 people from all over the world gather in Heritage Hall in Vancouver for a three-day intensive. This is always an incredibly diverse group of people and the connections and ideas and encounters that happen are amazing. Still spots open for this one and we will repeat it in April as well.
Two shorter online offerings are open for registration as well. Along with my friend Donna Brown who does on-the-ground community organizing in Baltimore, we will be participating in a series of courses offered by the School of System Change. Donna and I will appear as provocateurs for a session on Uncovering Stories to Understand Systems on October 8. Registration is open for this session and the whole program now.
And finally, later in the winter, I will be returning again for my annual offering through Simon Fraser University’s Certificate Program in Dialogue and Civic Engagement. On February 13, I will be teaching my one-day Introduction to Powerful Conversations. Focused on World Cafe and Open Space Technology, this course also contextualizes those approaches with a little complexity theory, and an introduction to chaordic design. You can sign up for the session without being fully enrolled in the certificate program.
You can stay up to date on these offerings through our Harvest Moon Consultants newsletter, on my courses page, or by subscribing to my blog at the link below, using RSS, or on LinkedIn or Mastodon.
Clouds continue to hang around here in the wake of our first Pineapple Express storm of the season. The Music By The Sea Festival wrapped up late last night (I was home again after midnight) after three full days of community music-making, with a few professional ringers thrown into our midst. It was a multi-generational event which sprang out of a group of local Bowen Island families who were long time regulars at the Nimblefingers Festival in Sorrento, BC. As a result there was a strong core of bluegrass and Americana music-making at MBTS, which suits me fine. Bluegrass is like folk jazz. Simple chord progressions and beautiful melodies and harmony singing, but incredible virtuosity on the instrumental side, including a strong value on improvised breaks and solos. It is massively accessible music, but for the performer the sky is the limit in terms of technique and creative possibilities.
Importantly, the gathering brought together many Bowen Islander, including several who left the island years ago. The music scene when I moved here was rich and vibrant and diverse and it withered a little as we made the transition between the 1970s-1990s nearly intentional community of interesting characters to a place where property became a financial investment. Since COVID, our demographics have radically shifted and there is more of a feeling of intentional community again. People are moving here for something other than what might be a decent return on a real estate investment. Make no mistake, this is still a massively unaffordable place to live, and our best efforts to address it are swallowed in a context of general inaction and apathy about structural policy solutions. But. There is a revival of community going on here, and I met many people this weekend who are my neighbours and with whom I know I will be making music this year and into the future.
I love short forms of writing. Poetry, short stories, short novels. And aphorisms. There is something about the pithy wisdom contained in a single sentence that can make it powerful. A well crafted aphorism has a rhythm to it as well. It swings, like a jazz lick. And like a lick, it evokes something timeless and connected to an ecosystem of meaning. Peter Limberger lives aphorisms too and here he writes about two medieval aphorists, Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658), a Jesuit priest who wrote The Art of Worldly Wisdom and Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), a French nobleman who wrote a collection of Maxims, while also pointing to his favourite, Nicolás Gómez Dávila.
Sometimes questions are like aphorisms. One has to be careful asking questions that are beautiful in their own right. Questions occasionally try too hard to impress. They aim too much for a response that is in awe of the question itself. Mary Oliver’s “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” is one of those. But asking “What time is it?” Is a question that dances ever so lightly on the fence between genuine curiosity and profound insight in its own right. Tenneson writes “I used to see people more often resist these kind of questions. It was resistance that saw some fluff and said, “let’s get to the real work.” These days, oh gosh, so many more people recognize these questions are the real work. Or are the real contexting that helps us get to the real work.” Amen.
Life is just a long conversation that we drop into for a bit. Patti Digh:
Life, then, is less about owning the discussion and more about showing up to it. Listening well. Speaking honestly. Departing graciously. And trusting that the conversation—like life itself—will carry on.
Perhaps the real measure is not how loudly or how often we speak, but how we change in the process. We arrive thinking we understand the argument; we leave having been shaped by the voices around us. We are participants, yes, but also apprentices to the human story—learning from those who came before, influencing those who come after, even in ways we’ll never know.
Some day, someone else will walk into the same parlor after we’ve gone. They’ll hear the echoes of our words, softened by time, folded into the larger chorus. They may not know our name, but they will inherit a conversation made—if we’ve done our part—slightly kinder, richer, and more open than when we found it.
A decent start to the Premier League season for Tottenham. After an early goal from Richarlison, Spurs were a bit disjointed for the rest of the first half. They came out ganagbusters in the second though and Richarlison scored his second from a beautiful scissor kick off a Kudus delivery. Kudus impressed with his flair and quickness. Brennan Johnson scored the third for an emphatic win in the end.
The latest TSS Rover to turn pro is Aislin Streicek, who played for us in 2022 and 2023 and who was signed by Celtic FC to a two year contract. She made her first appearance yesterday coming off the bench in a 2-1 win over Hearts. Watching and helping young players turn professional is why we do what we do at our little second division Canadian club.