Several little realignings in my life have meant that this blog has gone through one of it’s periodic wanings. Also, I have been enjoying some time off and some time developing projects which aren’t ready to be written about yet. But I’m still here, watching calendars tick over, watching the rhythms of light and darkness oscillate in everything, and committed more than ever to a kind of gratitude of the present moment that seems helpful in a world where we are increasingly disenfranchised from everything that lies outside the skin (and some that lies within as well.)
Meg Wheatley has a new book out, and her message is pretty resonant with what I have been thinking lately: that spiritual warriorship is essentially doing the right thing anyway. Doing it in spite of the fact that nothing might work, in spite of the fact that we know no certainty for our effectiveness in the world, that we are small and human and able to do what we are able to do. I have appreciated that.
I don’t like making new year’s resolutions, but in these temporal turnings my thought turns to what is alive in me that may take shape in the next year. At this point I’m refining a new spiritual practice, trying to fit some stuff about what I know into some old stories that I know pretty well. It is engaging my mind and heart and making me more compassionate, but the path is a confusing one and I think being knocked around by it is helpful, for to have certainty in a spiritual practice while swimming in uncertainty is a dangerous thing. I am appreciating a spiritual practice that is chaotic and confusing and demands my attention to inconsistency and struggle. It wants me to be rational and compassionate, exploring new frontiers and rooting myself deeply in old stories. So…
This year too, I’m trying to figure out how to work with power. I mean real, brutal, cold and independent power. Power that doesn’t need me or doesn’t care about me, but might occasionally invite me to engage with it. How do you work WITH the system that you hold blame for? How do you work from within? This comes from a place of occupying, not moving against. It comes from an idea that if we occupy exactly where we are at the moment, we are in good shape, doing what we can. I love the flashmob round dances that #IdleNoMore is putting on. What does that look like when you are bringing that kind of serious play to questions like “how do I bring more life to my work in the bank? Or with a land developer? Or with the establishment?”
My friends Tim Merry, Marguerite Drescher and Tuesday Ryan-Hart and my beloved Caitlin Frost are deepening this inquiry at ALIA this year. Consider joining us.
And I think this is the year I look at the practice of participating, as one of the core Art of Hosting practices. What does it men to be a participant in different contexts? Whose responsibility is it for a good experience? Is cynicism just a way of not participating? I feel this one deeply in my bones, thanks to a lovely inquiry into the nature of the sacred with my friend Tenneson Woolf.
Travel-wise, I’m lucky to have a lot of local work lined up for this year. Nevertheless, I’m off to Ontario and Quebec next week and will travel to Sweden, Denmark, Chicago, calgary and around British Columbia a little this year. I may also visit Estonia and Zimbabwe as well. And who knows what else will come my way. i’m trying to reduce my travel and have happily lost my Air Canada Elite status for the coming year, which was a goal of mine from a couple of years ago. It means that I am travelling less and working closer to home.
Elsewhere, this will be a year of all season stand up paddleboarding, continued music making in sacred and secular contexts (it’s all sacred actually!) and being close to the natural world. Something about a paddle in my hand, a song in my heart and a lung full of forest air.
And I may even return to this space more frequently.
See you out there.
This afternoon, Toke Moeller and I are hosting a little session on Art of Hosting basics at a gathering for emerging indigenous leaders. We decided this afternoon to bring real design challenges into the room and we improvised this simple, simple design checklist. In some ways this is the simplest form of the chaordic stepping stones. Here’s how it works.
In my experience good participatory meetings result from good design and preparation. In this diagram the meeting itself is the last thing we design. First we design the bookends: Purpose on the one hand and harvest/action on the other hand. Once we know that, then we can develop an invitation and finally choose processes that bridge the two sides. The meeting itself therefore become the vehicle by which a group of people reach a harvest and wise action ground in a purpose and a deep need.
Purpose
What is the big purpose that we are trying to fulfill?
A meeting that has too small a purpose has no life in it. It just seems to be a mundane thing done for it’s own sake. To design creatively, keep purpose at the centre and ensure that everything you do is aligned with that.
Harvest
What do you want to harvest?
– in our hands ( tangible)?
– in our hearts ( intangible)?
Not every meeting needs to have a report and an action plan, but every meeting does have a harvest. This question is the strategic conversation that helps us focus our time together. We need to think about the shape of the harvest we can hold in our hands (reports, photos, videos, sculptures…) and those we hold in our hearts (togetherness, team spirit, clarity, passion…).
Wise action
How will we make action happen?
– who will help us tune in to the reality of the situation?
How will you keep people together?
It is easy to make a list of to do’s at the end of a meeting and feel like something has been accomplished, but that is a naive approach to change. If action is required get really clear about who needs to be involved to make it happen. Think about who enables action or who can stop it and what resources are required. And if the resources aren’t available or accessible, then make a different action plan.
Also, never forget to make a plan for how people will stay together. If sustainability is important, then strong relationships are important. Building a process that doesn’t enhance relationships does not contribute to sustainability.
Invitation –
What is the inspiring question that will bring people together?
How will we invite people so they know they are needed?
Good participatory gatherings depend on the quality of the invitation. A lazy invitation attracts confused participants. A clear and powerful invitation accompanied by a powerful personal invitation gets participants who are ready and eager for the work. Invitation is a lot of work. It SHOULD be a lot of work. A good invitation process makes the meeting easy.
Meeting
What will you do to make the meeting creative and powerful?
Once we know all of this we can choose a meeting process that helps move from purpose to wise action. We can use pre-existing processes like Open Space or World Cafe or design new ones particular to our needs. Today we are using the group pattern language card deck to inspire creative thinking about meeting design.
If we really want to create a new normal, we shouldn’t settle any longer for boring meetings. If the processes we are using aren’t serving us, or helping us crack the deepest questions that confound us, then we should stop using them and start being more creative and powerful.
This little tool has the feeling of a portable, quick and dirty design checklist, that allows core teams and process designers to get working pretty quickly. Use it and let me know what you learn.
Working with groups is not easy. This is Ian McGeechan, manager of the British and Irish Lions before a dead rubber test.
My friend Kathy Jourdain was quoted yesterday as saying “our power comes from our vulnerability.” This video reminds me of how that feels some days.
A little reflection today about social change and Occupy coming out of a conversation yesterday.
When I was a young man we talk about “movements” like we were on the go. From whatever place we were in we will move to another. And we marked this action with marches and demos, dancing and action. The feeling of action was powerful and palpable.
Once in a while we occupied a place and sat there for a while. But in general we were all about the movement. We made ourselves different from those we were working against and we moved.
Occupy did two things to change this, or at least introduce some new strategies. For one, they began by staying right where they were: occupying the place where you already are seems like not a very radical form of action, but fully occupying a space, living there, governing yourselves, creating services: that was somehow new, and over the past year I have thought about what it means to choose simply to be present and fully occupy your own space.
Second, the occupy movement in it’s declaration of “we are the 99%” played at a halfway gesture towards thinking about what social change looks like if you first have to build relationships with many who are your traditional “enemies.” The 99% contains a lot of people that you and I would rather not be associated with in any way. The choice was a conscious practice of seeing each other together. Occupy breaks down, as has always been the case, when difference drives people apart. If difference could drive people together, if we could practice handling difference with a container of relationship, then something new might be born.
And third, Occupy gave up the idea that any of us know exactly what changes are required in the world to make it better. Obviously there are strategies, tactics, policies and experiments that can be tried, but there are no answers. Refusing to publish demands is a key piece of this acknowledgment that a) the world is too complex to direct its evolution and b) any action that does not work with existing power in some way is easily crushed. Once demands are issued, the anti-Occupy narrative can be framed and the movement is marginalized and dissolved.
Occupy was, and continues to be, an experiment. It is not a new experiment but it is a recent iteration of an age old experiment to see what happens when we choose to stay where we are and deepen relationships. It continues to share learning, but for me these three practices of occupation, building a common container to hold difference and staying together in no knowing continue to echo in my own work and practice with groups trying to affect changes.