Menu

Reconciliation: a practical guide for non-indigenous people

June 2, 2015 By First Nations 6 Comments

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported out this week. It has finished its work, listening to the stories of the survivors of Indian residential schools, promoting dialogue and healing and urging Canadians to understand what is implied by reconciliation.

For many Canadians, the TRC’s work will receive a minimal passing notice in their day. They will have heard of it, they will probably know something of the history of residential schools, but they are unlikely to know how the legacy of residential schools plays out in contemporary society. Most non-indigenous people think it was “all in the past.” For most non-indigenous Canadians, residential schools was something that happened to others, who suffered injustice at the hands of people who are long dead.

So if you are a non-indigenous person, what does reconciliation mean to you? I think it’s important to understand that Canada was founded on two parallel strategies: brute force colonization and agreements meant to uphold the “honour of the Crown.” It’s kind of crazy. If you are an indigenous person you’re never quite sure if Canadian society is here to live up to its obligations or smash you in the face, because since the very beginning to the present day, one hand is offered in peace and the other is a fist.

And here’s what you need to understand if you are a non-indigenous person. If you are a Canadian, you are a treaty beneficiary, end of story. No matter if your family arrived in 1532 or last Tuesday. If you have Canadian citizenship you personally benefit from the treaty relationships that, over time, have made it possible for Canadians to own land, to develop resources, to use water, to hike in the forest, to grow things and make money. In exchange for the ability of the Crown to permanently occupy and use these lands, and therefore give you personally that same right, treaties created a relationship that is just as permanent with indigenous nations. If you are an advocate of “tearing up the treaties and starting over” then you are obligated to return your private land and all the wealth you have generated from Crown lands to the bargaining table. Because the very fact that you can live in this legal frameworks is a result of you personally being a treaty beneficiary. Yes, even in places where there are no treaties.

So the first thing you can do to advance the cause of reconciliation is to understand that you benefit from treaties, and that you personally have rights and responsibilities to First Nations that flow from this relationship. Some of these responsibilities are exercised through governments, but you pay for them personally with your taxes and that is as it should be. So remember this and remind others that Canada is a land founded on relationships and legally binding contracts and you have a duty to uphold the honour of the Crown’s end of the bargain. Not only governments. You, also.

Secondly, understand that First Nations are still to this day experiencing the brutal fist of colonization. When you see socio-economic statistics that talk about homelessness, addictions, abuse, diabetes and suicide rates that are far above the national average, understand that you are seeing colonization in action. When you see the rates of missing and murdered indigenous women and you see government’s luke warm response to this crises, understand that these girls and women are taking the full force of a society that still propagates violence against indigenous people with much impunity. When you hear of First Nations being steamrolled by global corporate interests like mines and tar sands operations and pipelines and fish farms against their consent and will, you are witnessing the same dynamics that were at play in the “dark days” of colonization and western expansion. If you think it was wrong then you must see that it is wrong now. Thankfully First Nations have more and more rights recognized in the Canadian court system and so it is harder and harder to be subjected to this kind of colonial activity. But you have to understand that this is not First Nations stopping economic growth: it is indigenous peoples using the Constitution of Canada to resist the abusive power of colonization. It deserves respect and support, because when Nations do this, they are operating within the legal framework of the country that gives you your own rights. To diminish their ability to do so would weaken the rule of law that benefits you.

Understanding that these two dynamics are at play is a practical, critical thing that all Canadians can do to make reconciliation real. And you can think about these things, see how they personally play out in your own life and address those who say that “treaties need to be redone” or “Indians get stuff for free” or “all that violence happened in the past” or “it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

We have to fundamentally restructure the relationship in Canada but it does not start with governments. it starts with you and me. Take this moment in time to take a step closer to real reconciliation and help the TRC’s process actually have a legacy. Don’t wait for other people to create that legacy for you.

A couple of great days in Montreal

May 26, 2015 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Conversation, Evaluation, Facilitation, Learning, Travel, World Cafe 3 Comments

Just about to leave Montreal this morning for Toronto and north to Thornbury, Ontario to visit family.  I was here for the conference of the Canadian Evaluation Society, where I participated on a panel on innovative dialogue methods (and yes I noted the irony in my remarks) and later led a World Cafe where I presented some of the sense-making processes I’ve been working on.  I was here on the recommendation of Junita Brown who has been in some good conversations with evaluators around the use of the World Cafe for evaluation purposes.  Originally Amy Lenzo and I were scheduled to host a cafe here that was much more ambitious: a plenary cafe with the participants to explore the learning field of the conference.  Through various machinations that was cut back to a panel presentation and a very small world cafe at the end of the day with 16 people. The conference was one of those highly scripted and tightly controlled affairs that I hardly ever go to.

The session before us was a case competition where student teams were responding to a mock RFP from Canada World Youth to evaluate an Aboriginal Youth leadership Program.  Not a single team had an Aboriginal person on it, and every single presentation was basically the same: full of fundamental flaws about what constitutes success (“Did the youth return to their communities”) or what constitutes a cultural lens (“We are using a medicine wheel to understand various parts of the program).  One group of fresh faced non-Aboriginal students even had the temerity to suggest that they were applying a decolonizing strategy.  Their major exposure to indigenous communities was through a single book on decolonizing methodology and some internet searches about medicine wheels.  It was shocking actually, because these were the students that made the finals of this competition.  They looked like fresh versions of the kinds of evaluation firms that show up in First Nations certain they know what’s going on.

To make matters worse, the case competition organizer had a time mix up with the conference planner meaning that our panel started 30 minutes late which gave me very little time to present.  As I as doing a a cafe directly afterwards I ceded most of my time to my panel colleagues Christine Loignon, Karoline Truchon who did a very interesting presentation on their use of PhotoVoice.  It was clear to me at the conference that the practitioners among us had a better grasp of complexity theory, power  and non-linear sense-making than any of the professional evaluators I met.

I presented most of the work that I have been documenting here over the last few months, and later led a small group through a cafe where we engaged in the creation of a sensemaking framework and used a pen and paper signification framework.

By far the better experience for me was hanging out with friends and colleagues.  On the first night I arrived I had dinner and drinks with my friends from Percolab: Paul Messer, Samatha Slade and Elizabeth Hunt.  We ate fish and chips, drank beer and whisky and caught up.  On Sunday I met Jon Husband for lunch on the grass at McGill with his delightful godson and then joined the Percolab folks for a visit to the new co-operative ECTO co-working space on Mount Royal in the Plateau, followed by a barbeque with family and friends.

And Last night, after my presentations a great evening with Juan Carlos Londono and Lisa Gravel. We had dinner at Lola Rosa and spent hours going over the new French translation of the GroupWorks Pattern Language Deck.  This was a brilliant time.  I learned a bunch of new French words and most fun of all we discussed deeper etymology, nuance and the limitations and benefits of our respective languages in trying to convey some of the more esoteric practices of hosting groups.  The new deck has some beautiful reframing and some names for patterns that need some work.  But it’s exciting to see this translation and I always love diving into the language.

I really do like Montreal a lot and in the past number of years come to love it more as I have lost my inhibition about speaking French.  the more French I speak, the more French I learn and the more the heart of the city opens up.  Many English Canadians have the idea that Montreal is a cold hearted city to English speakers, but I find that isn’t true at all.  Just offer what you can in French and people open up.  And if you’re lucky enough to sit down with lovers of words like the friends I have, your learning explodes.

Off for a couple of days to visit family and then home to Bowen Island for a series of small local facilitation gigs, all of which will tell me something deeper about my home place.

Extending the Four Fold practice of the Art of Hosting

May 21, 2015 By Art of Hosting, Facilitation, Leadership, Practice One Comment

The four of us on the Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics team are all global stewards of the international Art of Hosting community of practice.  We have all attended or hosted at least two of the global stewards gatherings and we have been deeply involved in the creation and growth of the Art of Hosting community over the past decade.

As such, the Art of Hosting is our lineage.  It’s where we met.  It’s the most important community of practice in our lives and it continues to shape our work.  And Beyond the Basics is very much rooted in the Art of Hosting.

A couple of weeks ago in Minnesota while we were preparing our teachings I saw clearly how we were extending what we know about the Art of Hosting.  It’s not just that Beyond the Basics focuses more on how the practice of participatory leadership extends past meeting facilitation into longer term and broader strategic initiatives.  It’s that our work builds upon the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting the simple pattern that lies at the heart of this approach to facilitation, leadership and community work.

The four fold practice was the first pattern that gave rise to the Art of Hosting.  It is simply an observation that great conversations happen when people are present, when they participate, when they are hosted well and when they co-create something.  Some of the originators of the Art of Hosting, people like Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen and Jan Hein Nielsen began asking the question, what if these patterns became practices?  And in that moment the decades long inquiry that is the Art of Hosting was born.

Our Beyond the Basics offering refers to these practices, but only now have I seen what we are doing.  Toke has always called the four fold practice “The Basics” and I have no need to creat new basics.  But I can see now how deeply rooted we are in extending and deepening them.

Be present. For all hosts, personal practice is essential.  Whatever you can do to bring yourself to be present with a group serves the group.  In the Beyond the Basics offering, Caitlin is a deep  practitioner of The Work of Byron Katie which is a powerful personal practice that we all use to get at what keeps us stuck, to address what we are afraid of, and to help us become resilient and quality hosts of uncertainty, complexity and confusion.  The first clarity we need to address is our own, and we do that with the Work.

Participate. It is impossible to be a part of a participatory process without participating.  And it is impossible to affect a complex system from the outside.  Understanding how systems works helps us to be more effective participants in the strategic work we are called on to lead and host.  Using theory from the science and sociology of complex adaptive systems creates a more powerful way to see and understand and leverage people’s participation in their own work.  through teaching Cynefin and working with harvesting methods that are sense-making based, we extend the practice of participation to move beyond the acts of listening, speaking and learning and into the realms of sensing, interpreting and decision making.

Be a host, so everyone can make a contribution.  Tim’s work with his Collaborative Advantage model extends this practice of hosting beyond the methods that for the core of the Art of Hosting practice. While we are deep practitioners of World Cafe, Circle, Pro-Action Cafe and Open Space, we know these methods alone are not enough to host large scale strategic change work.  We need a framework to understand the levels of transformation that need to be hosted and the key design pieces (such as power, results and capacity) that need to be addressed so long term change can continue to be hosted from within systems and organizations.

Co-create.  It is one thing to say “just work together” and quite another thing to do it when our communities and organizations are soaked in differences.  Where power, privilege, race, economic opportunity and all kinds of other differences are at play we need a set of practices that can bring us to deeply transformative shared work.  Tuesday has been developing this framework for many years now and it is taking form in a way that has fundamentally changed my own approach to co-creation.  Moving to a place of shared work is taking co-creation beyond the basic level of just doing things together.

In our AoH Beyond the Basics offering we are addressing this extension of our lineage with teachings and reflective practice that help participants to dive more deeply into the four fold practice.  You don’t have to have come nto an Art of Hosting to understand or work with what we are sharing, but if this framework makes sense to you, the three days we spend togther will help challenge and deepen your practice in these areas.

We would love to have you join us this July in Leicester, UK or in October in Kingston Ontario.

Why is it called Open Space “Technology?”

May 5, 2015 By Open Space One Comment

I get asked this question a lot.  It makes me laugh because truthfully there is very little “technology” to an Open Space Technology meeting.  You just need some paper and markers and some tape and away you go.  In fact you don’t even need that.

So why is it called “Technology?”  Well, I have known the story for a long time, but today I goaded my old friend Harrison Owen to tell it again, and he did, beautifully, on the OSLIST:

It was 1989 in Bombay (now Mumbai). My friend and colleague, one V.S. Mahesh, a senior member of the Tata Administrative Service Corps, had invited me to do a series of lectures, in addition to an Open Space conference in Goa. How could I resist?

At the conclusion of the several programs, Mahesh convened a press conference for the business reporters of India. This was rather a formal event, and in the way of such things in India, Mahesh’s introduction of myself seemed to go on forever. He covered my CV in detail, including articles and activities I had forgotten, one of which was a review of a colleague’s book entitled, “Global Management Principles.” This 725 page monster described the work of 4 management theorists under such headings as, “Primal Management,” “Developmental Management,” – and last,  “Metaphysical Management,”  …and that was me.

As Mahesh drew to a heart stopping close, he said… It is my pleasure to introduce Harrison Owen  … and Harrison will you please explain to the gentlemen of the press what you mean by Metaphysical Management and Open Space…Technology. And he sat down.

I think I could have shot him. “Metaphysical Management” was the invention of a colleague. I think I know what he was getting at, but it surely would not have been my choice of wording. As for Open Space Technology, that was, I do believe, Mahesh’s invention. “Open Space,” I admit to… as for “Technology” – I can only think that Mahesh got on a roll. “Metaphysical Management” was pretty cool. But “Open Space” was a little weak. Needed a tweak.  “Technology” might just make it into the titles of the next day’s articles.

Mahesh was right. The Press took the bait. And we have been stuck with it ever since.

So that’s the story… as best as I can tell it. But I think there is a moral. If we ever take what we are doing too seriously, we are definitely in trouble. What we “do” is really a joke. Truthfully, it all happens by itself. We just take naps… if we are smart.

So that’s the answer.  And like all good Harrison Owen stories, it comes with a bit of self-deprecating humour and some very good advice.

You can’t fix this. So please stop trying. Start thinking differently.

May 1, 2015 By Community, Complexity, Evaluation, Leadership

I want to invite you to bite down hard and read this article by Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review: Baltimore, a Great Society Failure:

Read More