Long days of retreat facilitation. They start early. 6:30 wake up, and a little focused think about how our day is going to go. Breakfast with the group and off to commemorate the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation at the incredible Haida Heritage Centre near Skidegate. We are working here with the Sahatu Renwable Resources Board, the wildlife co-management body that was formed under their Land Claim Agreement in 1993. The history of intergovernmental relations in the Northwest Territories is fraught, as it is everywhere when fossil fuels are driving the agenda. The Sahtu people persevered for a century standing in their integrity on their lands waiting for an agreement that would serve their communities. The Haida representatives at today’s ceremony, which was MC’d by Miles Richardson, were deeply appreciative that the Sahtu had chosen to come to Haida Gwaii for this retreat, and tomorrow we will spend some time with their leadership discussing wildlife co-management in different contexts.
After the ceremony we returned back to Haida House for a deep check in and some timeline mapping and story sharing. The main goal of this retreat is relationship building, so stories are a critical aspect of that. It was a long day, but I’m happy with how it went.
Afterwards I got a chance to unwind by catching up on the Bodø-Glimt v Tottenham Champions League match. it was a weird game. The first half showed a flat and uninspired Spurs team, who spent most of the half absorbing pressure, with only Lukas Bergvall pressing the back line out of possession. Nothing worked and a series of dramatic giveaways resulted in a penalty that was skied by Høgh and some other rued chances. The second half began with more of the same, except the home side led by a scintillating performance by Hauge, took the lead. After Bentancur had a goal disallowed, Hauge scored another and Spurs were in deep trouble. Things looked a little better after Simons and Kudus cam into the game, which at least stemmed some of the awful giveaways we were having. Micky Van der Ven managed to get one back on a header from a Porro set piece, and late in the match at 89′ an Archie Grey ball fizzed into the box bounced of the Bodø-Glimt keeper and onto his defender Gunderson and into the net. A 2-2 final score saw Spurs return to London with a point we really had no right to have. A long day at the office for them too.
Crossing Skidegate Inlet, yesterday
We are working in Haida Gwaii this week. At the Haida House Lodge at Tllaal on the east side of Graham Island, there is a dictionary of Haida words collected from Skidegate dialect speakers over the years. Last night I sat on the covered porch while the rain came down off the Hecate Strait and a southeasterly lashed the side of our cabin. This morning I had a look in the dictionary and there are dozens of words and expressions for rain. My blog doesn’t have the ability to write Haida orthography, so I’ll share some of the translations:
- Fine rain
- Fine rain coming down
- It is raining so hard the water gets calm
- One drop of rain less
- Misty
- It is raining small drops; crying on the way
- Sprinkling rain
- Heavy or big rain that hits the water and bounces up
- Rain that calms the sea
- Rain drops here and there
- Rains too much and everything is damp
- Starting to rain
- Starting to rain hard
- Rain that cleans
- Rain that is hard and noisy
- Rain that is easing off.
- Rain shower that goes by
- Rain squall coming that darkens the sky
- It is raining so hard the droplets are sticking together
- Snow turning to rain
- The clouds keep rubbing
- The rain that is pouring straight down
It’s a grey muggy day here on the south coast of BC, and the photo above is from this morning’s ferry ride into Vancouver to begin a trip to Haida Gwaii this week.
Chris Mowles has a good post on the politics of uncertainty and writes about how that is unfolding in health care systems he is working with. I resonate with these words:
My colleagues’ dilemmas also made me think about the anxiety associated with uncertainty and how it is unevenly distributed. In times of crisis and hardship there is often a myth that ‘we are all in this together’, whereas in reality some are more in it than others. In his book The Politics of Uncertainty Peter Marris (1996) explains how group life, particularly in highly individualised and competitive societies, also comprises competition over who gets to sit with the most uncertainty. Your position in the hierarchy will determine how much you can pass on uncertainty to others. And Marris argues that the most marginalised are likely to bear the brunt.
This isn’t just true of inter organizational politics but of social politics as well. If you want to assert power, offload as much uncertainty as possible(and it’s accompanying anxiety) to others. That way you live with at least an illusion of comfort, shielded from the mental health challenges of being on constant stand-by for crisis or emergence.
It’s one of the reasons why I think it’s important to build capacity for working with complexity throughout organizations and societies, and especially deep in the lower middle management parts of these societies, where anxiety and uncertainty (and accountability) has been shifted. Of course, senior executives and government ministers have massive uncertainty to deal with, but typically they are resourced well to do it. Making complexity tools available to everyone helps everyone, becasue everyone is needed to deal with complexity.
If you want to to talk more about this and how we can provide accessible, lower cost training and capacity building to these levels of organizations and community, let me know. I’m constantly developing my practices and tools for doing this. We are doing this through story work and Participatory Narrative Inquiry, through sharing frameworks like Cynefin and the Two Loops, through our own bundle of complexity tools for facilitation and process design, and through facilitation and leadership practices that increase the relationships and participation that is needed to share the burden of living with uncertainty wherever you are at.
The rain and fog has rolled into Howe Sound. Autumn on Bowen Island is really divided into two halves. The first begins August 1 when the harvest gets going, the crickets start chirping and the slightest chill comes into the air. The days begin to grow shorter, but there is still lots of warm heart and summer calm. The second half begins around the end of September, when the rains arrive and the southeasterly flows of the low pressure systems in the Pacific bring cloud and rain and powerful fall storms. This weekend the rain has started in earnest, and I awoke to a grey and foggy morning, which set a perfect mood for a few hours of watching sport.
I do love watching rugby. I don’t follow it closely, but I’ll usually make time in the winter to watch the men’s Six Nations matches. The women’s World Cup concluded today with a dominating England performance over Canada, a 33-13 result in front of more than 81,000 at Twickenham. Until this morning, I didn’t watch the tournament at all, to my slight regret; one can’t follow every sport, and I was away a lot this month. Canada is a top international team despite a patchy infrastructure for the game, and the final clearly wasn’t representative of Canada’s play through the tournament. National pride aside, rugby is the only sport that can regularly get me out of my seat as a neutral. There is nothing more tense that a persistent drive towards the try line with a team going through phase after phase of play, with a rhythmic cadence of relentless attack and a defence putting everything into stopping them. It’s thrilling stuff.
Closer to home, AFC Toronto has won the inaugural Northern Super League title. Calgary beat Montreal 0-2 in a bit of a shocker in Laval, and that win secured the title for Toronto. Coming into today, the final playoff spot was still up for grabs, with Vancouver needing only a draw to secure it after Calgary won. They got it with a Holly Ward equalizer 78 minutes into the match against Halifax. Toronto. has run away with the league title on the strength of several players who were developed in British Columbia by the Whitecaps academy programs, including three players who played with our TSS Rovers inaugural women’s team in 2018: Emma Regan, Ashley Cathro and Kaelen Hansen. It is an ongoing puzzle as to why the Vancouver Rise weren’t willing or able to lock up those players.
Meanwhile in North London I set my eyes on the Tottenham match with some dread. Wolves have been terrible, but had a decent cup result against Leeds this week. That team has always done well at Tottenham, and I recall a game in 2012 which I attended with my dad, in which Luka Modric saved a point with a beautiful goal from outside the box. I think that one dismantled our chances for the title and we weren’t the same despite being top at Christmas. Wolves’ shirts are the colour of banana skins. Today was typical in the pattern. Spurs dominated the chances in the first half but scoring nothing from it, and Sam Johnston in goal can take a bunch of credit for that. A ragged Wolves goal at 54′ led to substitutions of Bentancur and Spence for Johnson and Porro a few minutes later. Paling, who has had a terrific week, left it to nearly the last kick of the game to score a beautifully sculpted equalizer to salvage a point from the match. 1-1 draw.
If nothing else, the deep divisions and culture wars in the US, and here in Canada too, are providing us with an opportunity to engage in deep practices of listening across difference. It’s harder now that it has ever been Dan Oestrich, who knows a thing or two about this, explains why.
Process artistry also has its place. Arts and well-hosted conversation are at work in Alberta where a group of researchers have initiated the Common Ground project to address stereotypes in the province. It is providing some useful lessons.
Depolarizing conversations is an initiative of my friends and colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum. It arose in 2021 during COVID when social media had divided families and small towns and disagreements had devolved into violence, assaults and the tearing of the social fabric. They have published some really helpful tools and resources on hosting these kinds of conversations. Get them while you can (and support them in continuing their work).
Irreconcilable difference is inevitable in a complex society but not every issue is an irreconcilable difference. Some are just conflicting perspectives. As long as we conflate conflict with war, we will maintain a tendency to want to avoid conflict instead of courting and supporting difference. Conflict transformation has long been the approach used to create a resilient container for what I call conflict preservation. We need this more than ever. And so do the orcas and the salmon.
One of the tools I use for working with polarities where there is a strong both/and situation is polarity mapping. I’ve written about it before but I love the way Kai Cheng Thom weaves it into her Loving Justice framework.
For more tools and training I can recommend Lewis Deep Democracy as one deeper approach to this work. It’s based in Arnold and Amy Mindel’s processwork. In Canada, I can recommend Camille Dumond and her colleagues at the Waterline Co-op. You’ll see my testimonial on their website. It’s accessible and practical training, even for experienced practitioners, and it will take your own practice deeper.