Elder Sonny Diabo, (Mohawk, Kahnawake)The group I was working with in Montreal this week is assisted by the man pictured above, Sonny Diabo, an Elder from Kahnewake, a First Nation across the river from Montreal. Sonny is a marvelous and generous teacher, and is invaluable to the group.
In the contemporary world, we don’t always get time to spend with Elders and so when I have the opportunity, I try to take advantage of it by asking about teachings in certain areas of my life that I am currently thinking about. Recently as evidenced here at the Parking Lot weblog, you will have noticed that I am preoccupied with how we know our truths, how we discover those things and what practices and teachings are out there that serve to instruct us in this subtle art of introspection.
I had a chance to speak with Sonny for about an hour on this and he related a teaching about wayfinding based on this diagram:
This represents how people move through their lives. The path is straight and true, and several Elders have related that there is an ideal life path that we attempt to follow. For those familiar with Eastern philosophy, think of the Tao.
One of the ways we know if we are on the path is by our rites of passage. Through rites of passage we engage in introspection on our lives and we also get community confirmation of our true path. In traditional communities, this might include things like naming, whereby an Elder confers on us a name that helps to set our path.
Sonny talked to me about two ways we deviate from this true path, and he described them as right side and left side paths, although he didn’t know why these specific terms are used. Evidently, this teaching is based on the patterns on a turtle shell (as is the I Ching by the way – more Taoist parallels), so the shape might be explained that way. Right side diversions are those, like addictions, which are so easy to take that one hardly knows one is out there until one’s life intersects with one’s true path again in an experience which can be as traumatic as it is healing. It is traumatic because it makes one realize how far one has strayed from the path, but it can be healing to finally “come home” to one’s true nature. Sonny used the example of a long time alcoholic who sobers up and who suddenly realizes how far he has strayed. This experience sometimes coincides with a rite of passage, such as becoming a parent or a grandparent, or perhaps grieving the death of one’s father. All of these situations throw one’s true nature into the light.
The left side diversions are, unlike addictions, full of obstacles that we are forced to struggle against. Sometimes we know we are off our path when we hit a wall and it seems impossible to move without introspection and retreat to find our path again. Shifting jobs from something you hate, with no prospects to something you love and is full of possibility is an example of these struggles and how they can return us to something truer if we take time to reflect on what they mean.
Sonny therefore advocates an approach to life that he calls “two steps forward and one step back.” There is an implicit distrust of easy progress, requiring one to ensure that one hasn’t strayed into a right hand side diversion. Building in periods of reflection serves to confirm progress and also make retreat easier, should that need to happen. It’s a prudent approach.
Sonny alludes to this in his openings to meetings, and also frequently during the meetings themselves. He invites people to work slowly and carefully and not to rush things. “Whatever we don’t finish today,” he says, “we can finish tomorrow or do another time.” This has the duel effect of focusing people on what is really important while at the same time seeming to expand the time available for completing tasks. This is even true in a situation like the one we are working together in, where there is a short deadline for the work to be completed. Especially in a situation like this, it pays to be sure that what you are doing is the right work, because there is no time to correct wildly divergent mistakes.
The approach is all about conserving energy, which of course is the secret to working with spirit. Elders and others who help us on the spirit and energy level are there to ensure that we spend our energy wisely, that we don’t burn out and that we stay focused on what really matters.
It’s a great teaching.
George Nemeth got riffing on my post about project management as jazz and a really cool conversation evolved in his comments (scroll down). One of the comments from John Galt challenged the idea that strategy can be created in an emergent and improvisiational framework:
The jazz metaphor is apt for improvisation. Not for strategy as we are speaking about it. One nice definition of improvisation in strategy is the act of �creating strategy as it is being implemented� or making it up as you go along. Now, classic strategy is a process for thoughtful managers in mindful organizations. Mindful � is a phase that Karl Weick, a strategy guru at U of M has discussed at length. In fact, Weick�s article outlining lessons for organizational strategy from high-performance firefighters in HBR may be a good read in the present context.
Nonetheless, a key point I would suggest is to keep straight that the improvisation idea is great for implementing strategy NOT for developing strategy. Two separate processes � currently there is no strategy for implementing, it appears.The new organization and its projected final shape appears to fit some of the criteria laid out in earlier comments � strong nodes, intersections of energy and resource networks, proven leaders rather than retreads, midsize and large corp. players who will not tolerate chatter masquerading as action, etc. So, it appears to have the right make up to finally help strategy development happen, with or despite the local political leadership.Also, strategy cannot be a networked concept or a movement based idea. No matter how flat an organization is, it needs a head � a leader � to ultimately forge strategy � a direction � and lead the rest of the organization. It cannot be a multi-headed hydra or a shapeless amoeba. Sure, individuals and all-comers may �feel included� but it will not go anywhere soon.
Organization-wide exercises in appreciative inquiry, for example, have not taken off after years of pushing the idea, in comparison to classic strategic planning (or its cousin, contingency planning). Appreciative inquiry may be best for pushing organizations – who have reached a steady state of �good� � to higher planes of �excellence.�
This is an interesting post on several levels. I want to instincively challenge the notion that traditional strategic planning has actually worked. I mean it’s probably fine for actually making a building, but the moment there are self-organizing processes involved (markets, networks, groups) then rigid top-down strategic planning goes out the window. I might not be giving John enough credit here, but I feel like strategy for process, like the plan for a city, could stand to incorporate a lot more improvisation.
In the context of a city, the thing about having someone “in charge” of developing strategy is that it’s kind of a mug’s game. For one thing, the basic fact that 2.5 million people will improvise its implementation should be enough to make planners give up the notions of tight control of its development. Howdo you anticipate the hive mind of 2.5 million people? You can’t do it by decree, not in a democracy at least (and not truly in a dictatorship either, or so says Jonathan Schell). Instead, you need to create spaces where improvisation can flourish and thereby invite the citizens create their own city.
The same goes for organizations too by the way. This is not a case of the “lunatics running the asylum” either. It simply acknowledges that self-organization and improvisation are critical to success and incorporating these dynamics into planning anticipates the kind of outcomes that create and sustain robust enterprises.
Strategy is usually very vague, especially for big cities, and that’s not necessarily a problem. Citizens will claim space, enterprises will emerge, residential units will get developed, markets will spring up and disappear. For sure some people in local government have the power to set parameters, be it by zoning or by laws or taxation, but I don’t think of this a classical strategic planning. If an area next to an industrial area is zoned residential to improve its character and developers don’t want to touch it and the market stays away, then all the strategy in the world isn’t going to get housing built there.
So now you need to think about including many more people in the development of strategy so that you can make good decisions based on the values of those that actually control things: the citizens. Power acting alone is dumb power. Power acting with heart, as represented by the values and meaning that citizens bring to a place is smart power. And that informed power can rely on good planning to help it make the smart move in one direction or another, so that power, plan and people are moving together.
When you start tipping in that direction, then strategy development starts to get quite imnprovisational, and that is not a bad thing. In fact it seems to me that it makes the whole project more robust because it acknowledges right off the top that there are deep self-organizing principles that will come into to play whether they are built in or not. So better to build them in in the beginning.
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.