My first facilitation teacher, Bruce Elijah.
I have told this story for decades but finally wrote it down today.
Back in 1992 I was working in Ottawa for the National Association of Friendship Centres. One of the Elders that worked closely without Board and staff was Bruce Elijah. Bruce is a wonderful Elder, brilliant leader, and teacher, raised in his traditional Oneida culture. His heart is unlimited in its goodness.
There was a day when I needed to facilitate a conversation on creating a domestic violence prevention program with a number of our member organizations from across the country and representatives of the federal government who were responsible for funding the effort. I was dreading the conversation, both because of the emotional weight of the conversation and the high stakes nature of the day. I turned to advice to Bruce. He gave me the briefest of facilitation trainings. He handed me the eagle feather that our organization used as a talking piece and he said “The Creator gave us two gifts — circle, and story. Use them.” And that was it.
When I arrived in the meeting room at a hotel in downtown Ottawa, it was set up with tables arranged in a hollow square, water and notepads in front of each chair and all facing one small table that I was supposed to sit at. With Bruce’s words in my ears, I did the unthinkable and had the staff reset the room with just a circle of about 24 chairs. When the participants arrived for the work, they were slightly taken aback by the room set up, but many of our members who had travelled from their communities expressed relief that the room looked different from traditional federal government consultations.
When we were ready to begin, an Elder gave us a prayer to bless our day and I introduced the day with a short speech about how we had gathered to generate ideas about a domestic violence prevention program and I knew that everyone in this room had some stories to tell about what that kind of program might mean to them and the people they served. I then invited people to share those stories and passed the feather to the person on my left.
By the time the feather got back to me, it was lunch time. Over three hours we heard stories of deep despair, of hope, of desperate need. We heard personal stories of violence and abuse, and stories of relatives and loved ones who had suffered at the hands of their intimate partners. We had humour as well, jokes and asides and situations so absurd that they were laughable. By the time lunch rolled around it was impossible to tell who were community workers and who were federal government workers; the issue was pervasive and crossed every line.
After lunch we repeated the process although this time I asked “we heard these powerful stories this morning. What then should we do about this?” Again the feather travelled its slow journey around the circle and this time everyone shared ideas about how such a program would look in their community, what it would enable, what kind of change it might make.
During these conversations my only job was to capture pages and pages of notes that I later turned into a report that informed the establishment of the off-reserve portion of the Aboriginal Family Violence Initiative. It was a powerful way to make policy and also a powerful way to create commitment between people. We watched the bones of a federal government program emerge out of an empty circle and a collection of stories. Bruce was right: this indeed was the gift of creation.
That was some years before I stumbled on Open Space Technology and more formalized processes of large scale dialogue. But it taught me that simple constraints — a circle, a feather, a question — could result in profound outcomes. It taught me to make space for stories of the heart and deeply personal experiences. It taught me that attending to relationality was as important as attending to outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, it taught me that there is hardly anything more powerful and profound than a group of human beings making meaning together in a life-giving context.
When he was Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney presided over the release of a remarkable report called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy” which skewered the idea that governments print money and create inflation when it is actually private banks that do that. David Graeber’s 2019 paper “Against Economics” came at a time, perhaps the last time, when I think we could have retooled economics to redistribue wealth through policies more in line with the ones that created the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s. Alas. The populists and oligarchs have now combined to divide up the world and everyone else is scrambling for cash. Carney knows better, but the coming federal government austerity is just what the richest want: make credit cheap so that more money is created that eventually ends up in their pockets. We are not on a track to create a prosperous society let alone use the money we have to reverse the social, educational and climate crises that require resources and public infrastructure investment to address. (H/t to Harold Jarche for the links).
While following a thread about systems thinking I was led to this blog called Perspicacity from cognitive researcher John Flach. Flach has recently co-authored a book called “Do Systems Exist: A conversation” which I am interested to read. I think there is a lot more to say about this, but if you were to ask me the question right now I would say “yes and no.”
I’m in Canoe Cove this morning which is a small boat harbour near Swartz Bay on the northern tip of the Saanich Penisula near Victoria, BC. This is a popular destination for the road bike riders who come up the peninsula from the City on a weekend morning. While having an espressos I. The very good Fox and Monocle bakery cafe, I saw a woman in a bike shirt that read “Samsara” on the sleeve. I am unsure if this is an ironic branding.
Links to explore from this week:
- July 21, 2025: knowledge sharing as legacy. Joanna Macy and sharing facilitation wisdom.
- July 22, 2025: barely hanging on to the world wide web, Finding each other, slowing down, and deeply connecting
- July 23, 2025: points of view,. Women’s football and how AI might give us a different perspective on democratic practice.
- July 24, 2025: destination and direction. It’s the journey, as usual.
- July 25, 2025: doing the little things right. Making beauty by paying attention to the small things right in front of us.
Enjoy the weekend.
Close relationships and small adjustments to stay together make it easier to address changes that might lead to catastrophe. Johnnie Moore posting about the more boring and competent of the two famous Antarctic explorers, Amundsen, and how his matter of fact competence led him to safety. But also in this post, Johnnie talks about a self-led choir that relies on intimacy, close listening and weak signals to make music without their conductor. Musica Intima here in BC also does this. From my own experience singing like that it is the small moments, relationship and adjustments that are everything.
My TSS Rovers are in Kamloops tonight for the final matches of the League 1 BC season. The women’s division was settled a couple of weeks ago and we will finish fourth for the fourth year in a row. But there is drama with the men’s division. We sit in first place two points above Langley United. Our fate is in our hands meaning that if we win tonight we clinch (and defend) the men’s division title. Any other result puts us in peril and opens the door to Langley pipping us at the line if they win tomorrow. It has been a season of bumps and twists and turns, and my heart will rest a lot easier at 9:30 tonight if we put it to bed. Forza Rovers!!
…and also doing the little things wrong. Like how a country disappears into a fascist dystopia. Never all at once, only gradually. In small intimate ways.
The golfer Scotty Scheffler, who just won The Open Championship, has made some waves recently with the interview he gave before that tournament where he talks about what is fulfilling in life. It’s not winning golf tournaments. In fact he expresses a little astonishment and confusion about why he does what he does, even though he is one of the best in the world at it. “You work all your life for two minutes of euphoria…” As a musician I can relate. We puts hundreds of hours of practice into learning a piece, only to perform it once, perhaps, for a couple of minutes of interesting music. And that’s not even counting the lifetime of work that goes into the training the voice, the fingers, the ear, and the heart to be able to perform competently enough to even be on a stage in the first place.
I was struck by the moment in his press conference where he says “am I making sense?” At that moment, I nodded, but clearly the golf and sports press gallery didn’t. And that is what separates artists from those who value the end line. As Alan Watts once said, if the result was everything people would only go to hear the final chord of a composition, or dancers would head to one spot on the stage and stay there. It’s a cultural error, which is what makes Scheffler’s comments seem so confusing, in a culture that worships the final result.
More patterns that are everywhere. Last week I shared a link about how the Golden Ration is over represented in our ideas about the universe. Today comes a beautiful article from Aeon which talks about the prevalence of the branching network (like a river valley or a bronchial passage) and the web (like neural networks or cosmic galactic clusters) and how they operate across scales. Interestingly in the article, the author Mark Neyrinck doesn’t seem to distinguish between networks with ends and those without. Networks where things arrive at certain places, and networks where they don’t.
I wonder if we are losing our ability to organize and work in networks at scale for social good. Here in North America we are very individual focused in terms of meeting needs and our current governments are most focused on creating the conditions for an efficient return on capital investments and concentration of wealth, following the long discredited trickle down theory of Neo-liberal economics. We are probably going to need networks of care, becasue the federal government is about to gut a number of public facing service personnel to pay for national defence spending and tax cuts. Most of these jobs are the liaison people that help folks with their federal pension plans, employment insurance, and federal taxation issues. The Department that serves First Nations communities and maintains Canada’s end of the bargain in terms of treaty benefits, stands to have substantial program cuts. This is one journey that is going to result in some dire destinations for vulnerable folks, newcomers, and Indigenous communities