Notes on Dreaming, inspired by the Sunday Open Space at gassho…
In the Ojibway teachings I have received, all the animals at creation were given a gift. For humans, our gift was to dream.
According to Elder Basil Johnston, although we can all dream, dreaming – more properly, visioning – is said to be most important for men. Women are said to have been given the gift of self-fulfillment through creating life but for men, we need to find self-fulfillment through a vision quest.
And so, as has been the case from time immemorial, young men under the tutelage of an Elder, go to live in the forest for four nights, deprived of food and amenities, to invite their vision. On Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, one of the most significant spiritual places for Ojibway people, there is a large rock outcropping called “Dreamer’s Rock” which is a place for young men to go a receive their vision. On the top of the rock is a little impression in which many bums have sat while the vision is revealed. The view from the top looks off over a maple and birch forest and it is so high up that one can feel the coolness of the air at altitude and imagine oneself to be aloft.
I’m increasingly thinking that when we start looking for visions, whether in organizations, communities or in our personal lives, we need to begin by digging deep for cultural imperatives that compel us to dream for a bigger reason, not simply to increase profits or make the community successful.
I’ve been an autodidact all my life. My learning programs have had little to do with what I was fed in school or in the approved training programs of the various places I’ve worked. In fact, when I was with the Department of Indian Affairs, I tried to initiate a new learning program to foster leadership. I advocated giving every employee their $800 a year training allotment and allowing them to spend it on whatever learning program they wanted. If employees chose to take the government sanctioned filing training, that’s fine. If people wanted to spend the money on a 13 week cabinet making course, no problem. As long as the money was spoent on a learning program, it was fair game.
Naturally, you can imagine that the powers that be in the federal government were a little nervous about the notion of public servants spending taxpayer’s dollars on cabinet making classes, but my point was a bigger one. It is in learning about something we are passionate for that we develop the capacity to make connections to the world of work. We become better thinkers when we can connect the experience of learning to the rest of our lives. Despite the fact that the Government of Canada has a pretty good management development centre, it’s a tragedy that the vast majority of career public servants to go through life with the the only learning taking place in labs where they study contract management or learn how to write replies to letters sent to their Ministers. In that respect, I think that we are not serving our public servants, or those that work in our corporations, within our society. Connect learning to real passion and you have employees who suddenly discover that there is something that they care about. Triggering that reaction leads to them finding other ways to bring an autodidactic approach to the workplace.
And this is the time for that. We are living in an era that I fantatsized about 25 years ago when I first saw the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Even as a 10 year old boy I knew right away that the Hitchhiker’s Guide was the thing I wanted. A little handheld device that contained all of the knowledge known about the galaxy. Twenty five years later, I’m hooked up on the web to a fat pipe, I can carry a PDA and learn just about anything i want to. I can even take a course at MIT.
All of this is to illustrate that we live in an era where networks can serve autodidacts beautifully. Not just data networks either, but social networks, communities of practice and learning exchanges. We suddenly have the capacity, each one of us, to live in a world of rapid change, adjusting our learning styles to suit the needs of our lives:
Change is racing along so fast that the old learn-in-advance methods are no longer sufficient. While network infrastructure is evolving exponentially, we humans have been poking along. Because of the slow pace of evolution, most human wetware is running obsolete code or struggling with a beta edition. We�ve got to reinvent ourselves and get back on the fast track.In a world where we don�t know what�s coming next, what constitutes good learning? We�re in whitewater now, and smooth-water sailing rules no longer apply. In whitewater, successful learning means moving the boat downstream without being dumped, preferably with style. In life, successful learning means prospering with people and in networks that matter, preferably enjoying the relationships and knowledge.
Learning is that which enables you to participate successfully in life, at work and in the groups that matter to you. Learners go with the flow. Taking advantage of the double meaning of �network,� to learn is to optimize one�s networks.
The concept that learning is making good connections frees us to think about learning without the chimera of boring classrooms, irrelevant content and ineffective schooling. Instead, the network model lets us take a dispassionate look at our systems while examining nodes and connections, seeking interoperability, boosting the signal-to-noise ratio, building robust topologies, balancing the load and focusing on process improvement.
Does looking at learning as networking take humans out of the picture? Quite the opposite.
Most learning is informal; a network approach makes it easier, more productive and more memorable to meet, share and collaborate. Emotional intelligence promotes interoperability with others. Expert locators connect you to the person with the right answer. Imagine focusing the hive mind that emerges in massive multiplayer games on business. Smart systems will prescribe the apt way to demonstrate a procedure, help make a decision or provide a service, or transform an individual�s self-image. Networks will serve us instead of the other way around.
It’s a tragedy that we still rely on classrooms full of bureaucrats doing paperwork as the paragon of corporate learning.
Whale to human transformation mask (Haida)
From Civilization.ca
Harrison Owen, the guy who invented Open Space Technology, in replying to my post about stories, put some words around it � gave me the story in fact � and so I realize now that the reason I love practicing OST is that it really does invite an organization or a community to embody a new story about itself – or to rediscover very old ones. Harrison wrote:
There used to be a day when the power of these deep stories was appreciated, but in recent times they are dismissed with the light thought that they are �just a story.� And of course we all know that only the �facts� will do. And when it comes to myths, these are not only dismissed, but dissed. Worse than a story, myth now means lie and falsehood. How the world changes. And of course, for enlightened people such as ourselves, we have long since thrown off the bondage of myth. How sad. And we never really do � throw it off, that is. We simply develop new ones, and they of course, are understood to be The Truth, or better yet Scientific Truth. But it is still a story, now dressed up in different clothes. We call them �Theories� � but at the end of the day, these Theories are simply likely stories which help us interpret our world. So our essential nature hasn�t changed � we are still story tellers whose life expectations are shaped by the stories we tell. Myth by any other name. What is different now is that the formative power of these tales is somehow out of our awareness. And when the stories are warped, distorted or partial � the world and our space in that world is distorted and shrunk. Of course, we could tell a different story. . .And I think that new story creation is a major part of what happens in Open Space. But it is not so much telling a story as being a story.
This is really important in a lot of the places I work. In indigenous communities and other places where colonialism has done its work, the story of how and what we should be is so deeply informed by the colonial culture that it is very rare that an Aboriginal organization or community actually gets to embody and manifest an identity that is NOT constrained by the colonial story. In these communities of course this is most visibly seen by the way local First Nations governments organize community meetings by setting the room up as if it is a school room, with the experts at the front and the masses in rows of chairs. Even if the government is trying to embody an inclusive style by holding consultative meetings with the community, I often wonder if the form of the meeting, the process itself is doing more harm than good. And when the subject of the meeting has something to do with the recovery of cultural resources, or land rights or something else that is so closely aligned to indigenous identity, then it school-room type public meetings become almost too painfully ironic for me.
As groups working in Open Space, we get to try out a new story, and this is largely the process benefit of the one-off or event-based OST meeting. I realize now that I usually close these meetings by inviting people to notice how the quality of the room has changed, how relationships have changed, how the same people we looked at in the opening circle suddenly seem different after only a few hours together. The people haven’t changed of course, but our stories about them and about how we can relate to them, have changed. It’s nice to leave people with a question in their minds about how that change took place and how easy it might be to recreate it.
In that sense OST is a powerful tool for decolonization and healing in communities – that has largely been my experience. Some people fall into OST like it is a feather bed – they just seem to enfold themselves in the dynamics. Others find it hard going, and some hate the process. And still others, and I count many of the “results-based”cynics among them, change and transform and open their eyes to new possibility.
Here on the west coast of North America, many indigenous communities have stories of transformation. You may have seen elaborate transformation masks that feature one animal splitting in two and another coming forward. Those new creatures come forward fully formed from within the original being. The dances and stories that accompany these masks talk about a time in the world when animals and spirits and humans could change easily from one form to another. It is a reminder of both the interrelated nature of all beings and the ancestral time when these happened regularly.
For me too though it is also a reminder that the story of transformation lives very powerfully in these communities and cultures. Whenever we talk about transformation here on the coast, I invite these stories and see what they can offer us about transformation of our organizations and ways of doing things and perspectives about work, results and process. Often they invite us to uncover the real core story that lies fully formed beneath the unconscious exterior.
Recovery of these tools and stories is critical to recovering authentic expressions of community and organizations that nestle naturally within the indigenous context. Because after all, at a very deep level, indigenous cultures and world views are still here and still alive although they may be glazed over by the patina of a century or more of contact, sharing and transcendence.
Open Space invites us to go deep and rediscover the foundations that inform all of our process work and which, in the end, does get results. So it becomes an elegant BOTH/AND thing. We can foreground parts of the contemporary “results-based” story that help us do work and “make things happen,” and we can also choose to foreground the stories that show us how we live in relation to one another and to practice living and working in full acknowledgement that our lives are dependant on those connections.
There has been an interesting discussion about outcomes at the OSLIST, the listserv for the international community of Open Space practitioners. It began with a challenge from a cynic who asked “show me one instance where Open Space has resulted in a better world or a better product. ” That sort of line.
My initial response to the question was, as it always is, to deconstruct the notion of “results” and “outcomes.” Process work of any kind is by definition, process work. The outcomes are not always immediately tangible because process work is not the same as manufacturing. That is not to say that process work, and especially Open Space Technology do not have tangible outcomes and benefits. In fact, in my experience, Open Space does a better job than the standard VISION – MISSION – GOALS type of planning exercises, but that’s another thread.
What started to pick at my thinking was this implicit assumption that if something does not immediately change things in a controlled and predictable way, then it has no value. And so I crafted a long response to this problem this morning, which I reproduce here.
There is no sure fire answer to the problems of organizations and community. The point is that anytime we are dealing with a situation where there are more than two people involved (sometimes even one!) there is tremendous complexity brought to the space. To think that we can be in charge of this complexity and by intervening we can make the exact difference we want seems to me to be somewhat folly.
But there is a reason we think we can get there. It lies in our myths and stories about what organizations are and what creation is, and what the process of collaboration really means. In this sense I think there is a real cultural foundation for what we are talking about and the tension I sense between the remarkable intangible results of OST (bigger than one thinks) and the desired “hard” outcomes of the clients (which are less significant than one might think) are captured up in the dissonance between these stories.
So allow me to share an extended quote from Thomas King, one of my favourite Aboriginal writers, and a man who knows a lot about the shift from one kind of story to another.
In a recent series of lectures, broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called “The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative” Thomas King compares and contrasts the archetypal North American Aboriginal creation story with the archetypal Islamo-Judeo-Christian one. His quote is really revealing, but before I write it out, you have to sit through a couple of stories. The Aboriginal story, a set of images which forms a fairly common narrative about the story of the creation of what in Ojibway is called Mishee-Mackinakong or Turtle Island, goes like this:
Kitche Manitou (Great Spirit or Great Mystery – it’s the same word in Ojibway) created the universe and the elements and the world. After that everything ran on its own. In fact although there are lots of spirit beings in Ojibway stories, Kitche Manitou never puts in another appearance after the beginning. Kitche Manitou creates all this and a spirit woman called Nokomis who lives in the sky. Nokomis becomes lonely so Kitche Manitou creates a consort for her and Nokomis becomes pregnant but the consort leaves her. More despondent than ever she lives in the sky alone. At this point Kitche Manitou exits the scene too, but KM doesn’t really leave, just sits back and watches. Holds space.
Down on earth meanwhile a strange state had enveloped the planet. Everything was flooded. It’s important to note that the flood didn’t happen because Kitche Manitou was punishing anyone…it’s just what happened. The world lay cold and wet, covered in water with no land. There were lots of animals living in the water and, seeing how sad Nokomis was alone in the sky, they invited her to come down to earth to give birth to her children. The turtle volunteers to offer up his back for her to land on. She does and once she touches down, everyone gets really quiet and then someone asks “now what?” Nokomis suggests that the situation they are in calls for some action, or at the very least some land, as she is not very good at swimming and she’s getting cold and hungry. The animals puzzle about this, as there is no land anywhere, and they don’t remember stories about the land. Finally Nokomis suggests that one of them dive down to the bottom of the sea and get some mud from there. Eager to serve her and be good hosts, each of the animals volunteers and one by one, the loon, the ducks, the beaver, the marten and many others all try to swim to the bottom of the ocean, and all come back empty handed.
Finally the muskrat, the smallest and the most humble of all, volunteers. Everyone scoffs at him, but they don’t have any other ideas so away he goes. He stays away for a long time and doesn’t come up and eventually the rest of the animals give him up for dead. They start to really worry now, because there seem to be no options left.
Suddenly the muskrat appears more dead than alive with his eyes closed and out of breath. They pull him on to the back of the turtle and lo and behold he has a tiny amount of mud clenched in his paw. Nokomis takes the mud and spreads it very thinly around the edge of the turtle shell and is begins to expand and grow and cover the shell. Soon the turtle is covered in earth and things begin to grow and the world is created again. It becomes a beautiful place and eventually Nokomis gives birth to her twins, balanced with spirit and body in equal parts. These children were the original Anishnabeg, the “spontaneous beings” from whom we are all descended, so the story goes.
So that’s one story.
The other one you are probably more familiar with, the one where God creates the universe and then the world and then plants and animals and Adam and Eve and after Adam and Eve taste a pomegranate from the tree of knowledge they are forever banished from the Garden in which God had nurtured them. They are forced into a barren world, punished, banished and stripped of their innocence. The world outside the garden is lonely and unforgiving and they are forced to make something of what little they have. The first generation of their children are wracked with violence when one brother kills another. God keeps coming back to intervene either by saving the crowd or punishing them.
You are perhaps more familiar with the second than the first, and of course there are many, many complexities to both stories, but we are dealing with archetypes here. So on to Tom King’s quote.
After he recounts these stories in this lecture called “You’ll Never Believe What Happened” he concludes by pointing out that these stories create two worlds, both of which we dwell in:
So here are our choices: a world in which creation is a solitary, individual act, or a world in which creation is a shared activity; a world that begins in harmony and moves toward chaos, or a world that begins in chaos and moves towards harmony; a world marked by competition or a world marked by co-operation.”
These are pretty stark conclusions but you get the point. These stories can inform everything, and especially the expectations of people in situations where things go wrong. We can choose in those situations to look for the answer from above, from some omnipotent deity that will set things right again, or we can accept the invitation of the animals: we don’t have much, but we have a solid foundation, and with a little help from everyone, we can create a safe place to live.
I think we are in a time when our stories about who we are and where we have come from are changing and paradigms are coming to rub against each other in deep ways. OST is a process predicated on the fact that all of us can have a hand in creating the new world. It is nearly the very extreme example of that, in the world of organizational development. Other methods rely on facilitators or experts (sometimes called “management gurus” which isn’t far from being gods) to come in and fix things, banish the bad and tinker with the good. It’s easy to see results when evil is banished. That is a tangible step towards the “better world” demanded by cynics. It’s much harder to see tangible results from a process where the first step towards making a safe place for your babies is to smear the back of a turtle with mud.
We operate out of deeply held stories about creation and renewal. Where we come into conflict with one another it feels dissonant but sometimes we can’t put our finger on why. I’m suggesting that some of the dissonance we “process” people feel from “results” people is at a fundamental level. I mean, which story do you really resonate with?
You know my answer.
My friend Toke Paludan Moller gave me a huge gift at the Practice of Peace conference. He issued a challenge and an invitation to work at a deep, deep level. Since I heard him speak these words, my work has changed measurably.
After the conference was over I asked if he could remember what he said and asked him if he could write it down. He did his best to put the ideas in an email, which I have recast as the poem that it is.
it is time!the training time is over
for those of us who can hear the call
of the heart and the timesmy real soul work
has begun on the next level
for me at leastcourage is
to do what calls me
but I may be afraidwe need to work together
in a very deep sense
to open and hold spaces
fields
spheres of energy
in which our
and other people’s
transformation can occurnone of us can do it alone
the warriors of joy are gathering
to find each other
to train together
to do some good work
from the heart with no attachment
and throw it
in the riverno religion, no cult, no politics
just flow with life itself as it
unfolds in the now…what is my Work?
what is our Work?