That’s me, teaching something about living and dying systems from a decade ago.
Years ago, I worked on a team with a client at a large US Foundation. We were planning a participatory process for a big stream of their work, and they were nervous. Large-scale participatory group methods were new to them, and lots of the leaders were nervous about losing control. That’s not uncommon, but the one thing that stuck with me was a line that came from our direct project lead. He said, “I don’t mind the highly participatory nature of the work, and I don’t worry about the uncertainty. But there is one thing I cannot tolerate. I do not want you to tell me what experience I will have.”
This comment has stuck with me for years, and I understand where he is coming from. Since then, I have never told people up front that “this will be a great meeting… you will struggle and then enjoy…my goal is to ensure everyone is comfortable and happy….” And even after nearly three decades of facilitating meetings, this is still the toughest thing to check me on.
One of the things that many facilitators and hosts worry about with complex facilitation practices is the outcomes and the quality of the experience. It is the hardest thing to let go of and probably the last piece of “performative facilitation” that deeply experienced facilitators are able to release. Of course, we all want people to have a good experience in the meetings that we facilitate, and we want to create conditions that are safe enough for work to get done in a good way.
But that desire and drive for a particular emotional outcome can be as damaging to a meeting as a drive toward a particular material outcome. It can leave people feeling manipulated or invalidated. If a person is truly having a terrible time or is seeing something painful that needs to be addressed, trumping them with a pre-conceived mould of their emotional experience can be a devastating way to render them invisible.
The truth, of course, is that this stuff is HARD, and some of the conversations and gatherings that we all do will have anger, irrational behaviour, sadness, stress, anxiety, trauma and grief. The work of a facilitator, especially in complexity, is always to create the conditions for the work and not to do the work. In the words of Viv Read, writing in her excellent chapter on complex facilitation in the book Cynefin: weaving sense-making into the fabric of our world, “the intent of complex facilitation…is to sustain an environment for a group of people that enables a socially constructed shared understanding of complex issues to emerge with sufficient agreement to take action.” That means making a thousand little decisions beforehand and during a meeting that ensures that people can struggle together in the service of whatever the work is or needs to become.
So do that. Don’t tell people what they will experience. Don’t pre-determine their outcomes or their emotional journey on the day. Let go of that control and enable the environment.
Working with Complexity Inside and Out
We are getting excited about our Complexity Inside and Out program which starts on April 13 and runs to June 15, every Thursday in the afternoon for the Pacific timezone, early evening in the Eastern time zone and late evening in western Europe. The course will cover:
- Characteristics of complexity and foundation practices for working with them
- Identifying and working with patterns
- Working with constraints to shift sticky situations and unsolvable problems
- Complexity-based tools for shifting inner systems (limiting beliefs, fears other mental gymnastics that keep us locked in unhelpful patterns)
- Evaluation and participatory narrative inquiry
- Using the Cynefin framework for decision making
…and more. This program will serve you well if you are a facilitator working with groups in complex situations, a leader, a community worker, a strategist, a researcher, or a teacher. Or just a human who is curious about how the world works and is developing a practice for working with it.
We have some great folks coming into the cohort from around North America including people working on racial equity in public health and people responsible for quality and change in a province-wide child and family services system. The conversation and practice opportunities will be rich. Come and learn together! Come with a team and we’ll give you a discount!
You can register here. Drop me an email if you want more information.
The Art of Hosting
Our annual west coast Art of Hosting is taking shape for the fall and we are hoping to return it to Bowen Island. The team of Caitlin Frost, Kris Archie, Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier and I are looking forward to welcoming you back here. Get on the waitlist now, as space is limited and tends to fill quickly. We’ll announce the dates soon. Sign up here.
Other training from friends
I have many great colleagues out in the world doing cool stuff. here’s a listing of some other upcoming learning opportunities
March 18
The global Art of Hosting practitioner community has a full 24-hour day of events that will be happening online. I’ll be participating and you should come too. It’s free. Check it out here.
March 30
My colleague Amanda Fenton, who is one of the best I know of in using online tools for harvesting is offering a two-hour introduction to the current state of online harvesting tools. This is not to be missed if you want to level up your harvesting game.
June 2
Amande will be joining Michelle Laurie for Engaging Beyond Words (in BC, Canada or online option, it’s a hybrid offering). The focus is on using visuals to help increase understanding and learning; retain information.
July 13-14
Michelle will be leading her annual Graphic Facilitation intensive in Rossland, BC, Canada. If you want to increase engagement at your meetings, help plan with people in a collaborative way, be more creative and generally help people make sense of complex ideas, and see the bigger picture, this hands-on workshop does this!
A photo of the navigation system on my flight back from Hawai’i
Flying over the Pacific always conjures up the idea that I’m in a low earth orbit. It is a bizarre notion to climb into the sky and have the earth turn below you and then few hours later to drop one sixth of the world away.
On long haul flights there is very much a feeling of relativity. We are together, a couple of hundred of us, in a tube in the sky. There is very little feeling of speed. There are no cues to tell you where you are, especially at night and especially over the Pacific Ocean. Each moment is much like the others until you make landfall and suddenly land rises out of the sea.
The term “raising islands” comes to me though the art of Polynesian navigation. This past week I immersed myself in Sam Low’s book Hawaiki Rising which documents the first six or seven years of the Polynesian Voyaging Society who built a double-hulled sailing canoe called Hokule’a and, under the guidance of a Micronesian navigator called Mau Pilliag, sailed it from Hawai’i to Tahiti.
On the return voyage the navigation was taken over by Nainoa Thompson, and the book recounts two successful and one tragic voyages under his guidance between 1976-80
Polynesian navigation combines a deep and intense attentiveness to every possible source of information available to the navigator. This includes, principally, stars, swells, clouds and light. Getting from one island to another over 2400 miles of open ocean requires a navigator to be present and attentive for the entire voyage. You must know where you have come from in order for your present position to make and sense and in order for accurate decisions to be taken about your course. This means mostly staying awake for almost the entire trip of a month or more with only brief sleeps allowed
When land comes into sight it is said that the navigator has “raised it out of the sea. “ when your whole life takes place inside a small container for a month with nothing but open sea all around, there must develop a very intense sensation of being essentially stationary and instead turning the world below you.
I’m having that same feeling tonight, returning home. Noting that we are 24 minutes from landing and still out of sight of the west coast of Vancouver Island. If you were a Tshshaht navigator perched on an island in Barkley Sound for the night, in a few minutes you might catch our lights rising up over the dark western horizon. And although we will have started our descent, you might not hear us over the surf crashing on the reefs as we skim about 10,000 meters overhead landing in Vancouver which still lies 250 kilometres to the east. It is a journey that would take a week or more in a Tseshaht canoe. But now that we have raised Vancouver Island, we’ll be on the ground before you know it.
The entrance to the Bowen Island Municipal Hall
A good and powerful rant by Dave Pollard on what government should do. I agree with all of it, which isn’t usual for me with Dave’s stuff because he challenges me and confounds me often. But I am aligned with this vision.
Read his thoughts on housing:
I believe the government should authorize and control the construction and maintenance of millions of units of safe, comfortable, ecologically sound housing, and offer them at subsidized prices that enable all citizens to afford decent housing without spending more than 30% of their income on them. That would drive down the prices of units currently being built and rented by private developers. Maximum rental prices based on home size and local costs of living should be instituted to make more units affordable, and homes other than principal residences that are not rented out should be heavily taxed to bring them into the rental market or encourage the owner to sell them.
And then follow on as he lays out a similar polemic for food, energy, health care, infrastructure, education, debt and universal income.
It’s really no surprise that these initiatives have a flavour of leftism about them. The left in Canada generally sees that government has an important role in society, along the lines of what Dave lays out. As a result when they get elected they tend to be good stewards of government, because they know that government matters and good governance matters.
I have very little time for the current flavour of conservatism which has been hijacked by the long journey of Libertarianism from the margins to the mainstream. In the past, I have worked with Libertarian philanthropists who are very interesting because they tend to want to develop solutions to social problems that are not dependent on government. But crucially, they are not cruel. They honestly and meaningfully engage with the real issues of our time, and they earnestly seek non-governmental approaches to these issues. With folks like this, I can have endless interesting conversations.
But I tend to seek out folks who understand governance and policy. Those people are almost exclusively NOT conservatives these days. Present-day Conservatives as embodied by the populists in Canada, the US and the UK mostly farm outrage to cover the massive theft of wealth and the commons propagated in the name of the “free market” and private interest.
Prove me wrong. Please introduce me to thoughtful conservatives who are working on policy solutions that acknowledge the reality of the biggest issues for our times and are working for a society in which all can be well, and our planet can sustain us. I’ve asked before over the years, and I’m still asking.
In Those Years
In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I -- Adrienne Rich, 1992, hat tip to Jim
My favourite scene from the Life of Brian starts with Brian appearing at a window, trying to get his crowd of misinformed followers to leave him alone. He is, in fact, not the Messiah, and exasperated, he tries to tell them that they have it all wrong.
“You’re all individuals!” he cries, to which the crowd responds, in unison, “Yes! We’re all individuals!”
“You’re all different!” cries Brian. “Yes! We are all different!” the crowd replies again.
And then a single voice, with a slightly melancholy edge, quietly says, “I’m not.”
He is shushed.
This diabolical twisting of the Individual — Collective polarity has been on my mind over the past few years. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had the briefest moment of hope that the world would suddenly wake up to pulling together and looking after our public good. We created universal basic incomes, which made the most significant difference in poverty alleviation in my lifetime. We undertook mass public health campaigns to keep vulnerable people safe and not allow our medical and health systems to get too overwhelmed. We even briefly saw our planet’s health rebound as cars and airplanes, and industry generally slowed down or stopped, and the skies cleared.
But it wasn’t sustainable. It was a temporary fix to a global problem and didn’t address the underlying causes of poverty, public health crises and climate change. Within a year, we had splintered and fractured. “We lost track of the meaning of we,” as Adrienne Rich wrote in 1992, “we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible.”
I have been on holiday these past two weeks, on Maui, and I’ve had time to read and think and rest. One of the books I took with me is Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, a recent book that traces how our attention has been stolen by social media, schooling and the workplace. Deirdre, who recommended it to me at Jessica’s Book Store in Thornbury, Ontario, last month, said it made her quit social media.
The book isn’t entirely about social media – it’s much more extensive than that – but the history of social media’s colonization of our attention forms a big part of the book. Hari traces the rise of surveillance capitalism, delivered through the toxic and amoral algorithms that drive us into deeper and deeper echo chambers at a pace and a way that steals our attention before we are aware of it. The need to keep eyeballs on the app instead of the world around us drives us apart. At one point, he asks the provocative question about why Facebook can’t help us connect physically with friends and like-minded folks nearby so that we can make something together or enjoy an evening together. Why does it not recommend amazing projects and activities we could do with friends? It could easily do all of this. It could quickly help us build community, have a good time together, and make a lasting impact. But it doesn’t, and it won’t because the idea is to keep eyes on the app and keep people out of the physical world, which requires them to put down their phones and play.
Hari traces the origins of the psychology of social media back to the behaviouralist researchers and teachers who taught the cabal of engineer-capitalists that built this world in Silicon Valley. Nothing new there, perhaps, but what is different is that one can see how it works on one’s own mind. It is a chilling read because it lays bare capitalism’s unapologetic agenda that uses everything it can to generate wealth regardless of the impact.
Our attention is a battleground and a landscape that surveillance capitalists will exploit as readily as an oil company will exploit a shale play. The difference is that oil companies are subject to government regulation about what they can and cannot do, and surveillance capitalists are not. There is no environmental protection for the pristine nature of our creative minds. The predators have been given free rein to exploit it all.
The result is that we have become radically disconnected from each other. And the pandemic made it much worse as we retreated into our bubbles and became more reliant on social media for connection while at the same time being fed a steady stream of the stuff that is guaranteed to keep us engaged with apps and not each other. I think I first heard the term “doom scroll” in 2020. I recognize it in myself as the embarrassing desire to read one more stupid thread of misinformed comments. It makes me feel self-righteous. I can take on a few transphobes or racists from the safety of my own house. But that doesn’t make a change in the world. Half the time, I might even be arguing with robots.
But of course, this is precisely the cognitive-chemical loop that creates deep attractor basins that keeps us at home, on our devices, facing a massive barrier of inertia to get up and do something. Hari points out that this is not simply a problem that can be addressed by individual actions and habits, like putting away the phone at night in another room. While those are essential strategies for reclaiming attention, Hari clearly points out how attention-stealing is systemically enabled.
I can feel it in my work with TSS Rovers FC as we build this football club and enlist volunteers, spectators, and fans. To try to make a culture around something positive that requires people to come out and participate is to buck the forces of the entire world of surveillance capitalism that wants us on our phones and not in the stands singing and supporting young men and women, co-creating community, having fun together.
A couple of weeks ago, I was having dinner with a friend, and we discussed the crisis of belonging in our world. This has been an important concern in her research and advocacy work over several decades, which has led to all manner of crises, including mental health, development for young people, and our general tenor of social relations at the moment. I think it even contributes to the most significant issues like climate change, which arise from disconnection from each other, our natural world and the community of living things threatened by the actions of our species.
This affects all of us. Our phones and laptops have handy apps that can tell us how much time we spend on our screens, particularly on our social media apps. It is way more than you think. Thinking about places where you spend MORE time than on your social media apps is helpful. To which community do you really belong? WHOSE community do you really belong to? And, do you REALLY belong?
At the moment, I have a few activities outside of work that activates flow in my life: playing music, cooking, volunteering with both TSS Rovers FC and the Rivendell Retreat Centre, writing, gardening, and hanging out with my beloved and my kids. And altogether, I wonder if I STILL spend more time on my phone than doing these things, WHICH GIVE ME JOY. Even as I am typing this, my little tracker tells me that, on holiday, I averaged almost 4 hours of screen time daily.
These past two weeks, combined with Lent, have given me a welcome respite to reconsider my relationship with the thieves of attention who rule my life. Social media is an important part of my life and is probably how you and I are connected.
But Hari points out that the stealing of attention has existential impacts. It might be what prevents us from concentrating enough and spending the time we need together to address and move past existential crises like climate change, populism, and the threat of nuclear war. Suppose we cannot give more time to the collective problems of now because we are instead tilting at the AI-generated windmills of Facebook and Twitter. In that case, we will not be able to find one another, collaborate and perform out of our skins in the service of a viable future for this planet, its creatures, and its people.