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Mentoring in the world of hosting

February 6, 2013 By Art of Hosting, Leadership, Learning, Music, Practice 3 Comments

All the best stuff I have learned about mentoring has been in the context of traditional culture, whether with indigenous Elders from Canada or in the traditional Irish music community.  Traditional Irish music is played and kept alive in a structure called a “sessiun.”  There is a repertoire of thousands of tunes, but most musicians who have played for a while will have a hundred or more in common, and that can easily make for a long evening of playing together.  Sessiuns are hosted by the most experienced musicians (traditionally a Fir a Ti, or Ban a Ti; the man or woman of the house).  These guys are responsible for inviting people in, inviting tunes, keeping a tempo that everyone can play with, resolving any conflicts”in short they are the hosts.

But the best ones are also the teachers and the mentors and they dispense wisdom, lessons, encouragement and direction during and between tune sets.  If you are smart and you are learning you try to sit near them in the circle to pick up teachings.
With Irish music, the best mentors I ever had always did a few things well:
  • They were better musicians themselves than I could ever imagine myself to be
  • They created space for me to play with them and gave me increasingly more responsibility from starting tune sets to perhaps playing a solo air to eventually sitting in for them if they couldn’t make it out to host a sessiun.  But they didn’t invite me to lead the session when I was just beginning.
  • When they knew I had a set of tunes down they invited me to lead that set.  If I had a slow air they knew I could play, they would invite me to play a solo.
  • They pointed out things that I could DO, rather than things not to do, and if they played flute (my instrument) they showed me on their instrument what they meant.  There was never any abstract conversations about the music or technique.  If I was doing something wrong, they would suggest an alternative (indigenous Elders, and especially Anichinaabe elders are very good at this.  There is something peculiar to traditional Anishinaabe culture that makes it very hard for an Elder to tell you NOT to do something.  They always point to doing something else.)
  • They protected me from “hot shots” who like to show off by playing tunes too fast for you to play with them.
  • And when I was ready I got invited into more and more responsibility with the sessions and was eventually invited to perform with them.  The day of becoming a colleague is a big deal, and I still feel that I can’t hold a candle to my teachers, even though they insist that we have moved into a co-mentoring relationship.
What was beautiful about all that was that, even when i became colleagues with my mentors I never lost the sense of gratitude of being able to play with them.  Even today 20 years later, it is a treat for me to play with those who taught me.
Mentoring in the art of hosting, of leadership of working with groups is the same.  It is a traditional practice.

 

The varieties of winter on the west coast of Canada

February 5, 2013 By Bowen

Perhaps we need words for the seasons here on Bowen Island.  “Winter” isn’t exactly accurate.  Since December 21 when Winter was supposed to have begun we have had the following kinds of days, among others:

 

  • Cold and clear days with no wind
  • Snow that falls in some places but rains in others
  • Southeasterly winds with rain.
  • Calm and cold everywhere except in the Queen Charlotte Channel where a Squamish wind one mile storm force wind is blowing with freezing spray.
  • Foogy to 100 meters above sea level with an inversion making it 10 degrees on top of the mountains.
  • Damp evenings that produce heavy hoarfrosts in the morning.
  • Nights when the owls call for joy.
  • Sunny and warm mornings when the winter wrens take a stab at their spring calls.
  • Heavy snow that falls and stick on the Douglas-firs and cedars and brings down the alders and rotten maples.
  • Quiet mornings when the towhees explore the underbrush.
  • Days when it rains so hard that the deer just stand in it looking miserable.
  • Calm days where the ocean is like glass and you can here ravens calling from miles away.
It makes more sense around here to follow the old Celtic calendar which has just ticked over Imbolc on February 1, the beginning of spring.  It feels like that today, with southeasterly winds blowing and rain showers coming and going with patches of bright sky over the Sound.

 

 

Why newspapers need to close their comments sections

February 4, 2013 By Conversation, First Nations 8 Comments

Imagine you are stuck in traffic.  By the side of a road is a billboard that changes it’s message every five minutes.  You glance over at it and read this:

“Some claim. One race in Canada should not have to work for a living.  That this race should receive millions in funding without accountability.  That the elite of this race should be allowed to defraud their regular people.  How can anyone support this?  How can anyone slam Conservatives for not supporting this like the NDP/Liberals?”

How would you feel?  Would it make you angry?  Would it make you happy?  Would you wonder how a message like that – containing three of five common racist assertions against First Nations peoples, got put up on a billboard for thousands to see?

The billboard is by the side of a road, and the person who has written that has done nothing to warrent the eyeballs that are staring at it. They didn’t pay for the space, they haven’t had their comment fact checked for accuracy.  They haven’t even signed their name.  It appears that no one even cares if it is hate speech.

And then what if a headline on the billboard declared “Join the Conversation!” and had an ad attached to it? Would you feel like there was a conversation to be had?  Would you wonder who was profiting?

This is exactly what comments sections on newspaper web site are.

The above is an actual comment from an anonymous poster that has been allowed to stand in an article about how the Conservative government refuses to make legislative changes to Bill C-45, which is what the Idle No More movement has been protesting.

As a practitioner of real conversation, it drives me crazy that the Globe and Mail among other outlets invites us to “Join the Conversation.”  What happens on newspaper websites is not a conversation.  It is shrill hit and run racism, unsubstantiated opinion, outright lies and conjecture.  It is often targeted personally (the comments against Teresa Spence and Shawn Atleo in recent weeks have been shocking) and  it cheapens the idea of conversation and free speech and poisons the environment of public service for those who wish to enter it.

The fact that newspaper comments sections are moderated matters not at all.  I don’t believe newspapers are doing society any favours by allowing this kind of discourse to happen.

I am not advocating for a restriction on free speech.  What bothers me about this is that anonymous posters are using the reputation of newspaper to get views on their comments.  These posters have done nothing to warrant thousands of people reading their vitriol.  So why do newspapers cultivate market share, and then allow this stuff to stand?  Money?  The longer you linger on a page – and outrage is a cheap thrill – the better the bottom line.  Pandering to the basest forms of rhetoric works for papers.  No matter how much newspapers disclaim the opinions in their comments sections, the fact is that by providing thousands of readers per comment the are enabling hate speech and giving it a wider audience than it would get on its own.

But this stuff absolutely destroys the calibre of public discourse.  Those of us that are part of Idle No More or who have been advocates for progressive solutions to First Nations issues spend all of our time addressing myths and not creating substantial proposals for change.  And when we do table substantial proposals for change, we are met with contempt by mainstream society and policy makers, who often repeat the lines that are propagated in comments sections.

So here’s what needs to happen.  Let free speech thrive in it’s own free market of ideas.  Newspapers should close down their comments sections and invite people to join the conversation by creating their own blogs where they can publish their opinions as much as they like.  If the opinions have merit, they will get a following.  People can invite comments on their own posts.  If newspapers want to actually foster conversation, they should convene large World Cafes where human beings can meet each other face to face and share their opinions without hiding behind anonymous pseudonyms.

in the absence of that, newspapers surely must see that they are complicit in the falling standards of civic discourse.  Has it come to this, that the only stream of revenue for newspapers is link baiting and outrage?  Responsible journalists write the articles and anonymous Canadians provide the juicy violation of media laws that bring in the page views and therefore the revenue.  I wonder if anyone has the steel to change this.

 

Community engagement is dead

February 1, 2013 By Collaboration, Community, Uncategorized 11 Comments

All things come and go and especially in the world of professional helping (otherwise known as “consulting”). I’ve been around the world of enghagement and consultation long enough that I have seen various names for this work: focus groups, advisory groups, public participation, consultation and now community engagement.

Mostlyover all those years, my practice and the practice of the field in general has gone from monolithic broadcasting of ideas to “tell and sell” consultation to much more complex dialogue based work. And now I think I and we are coming to a more seismic shift in how community is engaged. Since the dawn of the social web, citizens and stakeholders have been able to access as much or more information than proponents of engagement projects. It is wise when planning these kinds of things to assume now that your audience and your advisors know more than you do. it was always the case but now it is much more evident.

And so it is occurring to me, after working with some boundary pushers on this stuff that we are at the point where the term “community engagement” is now redundant. If you have community, you don’t need to do engagement. And if you have engagement, you have community.

My friend Tim Merry has taken to saying that we can’t do community engagement we can only do community. Or not. I think this is a compelling idea. Engagement is meaningless now as a term. We are seeking real community, a genuine sense of being in this together. Whether it is public policy or building infrastructure you have the choice to do it to people or do it with people. Just using the word “engagement” is not enough.

Time to put real power behind the idea of community.

The strange case of Canadian contempt

January 28, 2013 By Conversation, First Nations 5 Comments

I have a confession.  I advise people never to read the comments on newspaper websites.  But I do read them.  I can’t take my eyes off them.  They are a train wreck of logic and hate and contemptuous entitlement.

Lately however, especially the comments on stories about First Nations, they seem entirely predictable.  In fact they seem almost too predictable.  Every article on the Globe and Mail website for example contains hundreds of comments, a huge majority of which repeat some basic themes:

  • Nothing should change until First Nations are accountable for their money
  • First Nations get a free ride
  • The chiefs are corrupt and bad fiscal managers.
  • Treaty rights are a joke: there should be one law for all
  • The sooner Aboriginals merge with the rest of us the better.

So let me address these in brief, one by one.

First Nations are accountable. In fact the Auditor-General of Canada said that First Nations are TOO accountable.  Too much is spent reporting on funds and not enough time is spent actually using them.  But just because you can’t be bothered to look up the financial statements from publicly funded governments does not mean they are not accountable.

First Nations do not get a free ride. All governments receive tax dollars for services.  First Nations are no different.  And on top of that, First Nations are eligible for special programs and services because of the nature of the treaty relationship and the entrenchment of Aboriginal and treaty rights in the Constitution.  But this is not a free ride.  This is the result of agreements that asked First Nations to trade away rights to land FOREVER in exchange for some farm tools a few dollars, some new clothes, a reserve owned by the Queen and a school. That isn’t exactly a free ride.  If someone invited you to a similar deal, would you take it?

Chiefs are not any more corrupt that anyone else. People are people .  When people commit crimes they go to jail and do the time for it.  Many, many, federal, provincial and municipal politicians are criminally corrupt as well.  There is no greater number of Aboriginal politicians in jail for corruption.  Also, there is no federal or provincial government that is not in debt.  Having said that, in December 2011, only 12 out of 633 First Nations were in the equivalent of bankruptcy protection. This means that, according to the federal government’s own policies, and based on overly onerous reporting requirements,  98.2% of First Nations are run fine.

In Canada there is one law for all.  That law is the Constitution. It protects treaty rights and Aboriginal rights.  It also protects free speech, privacy, freedom of assembly and so on.  It also allows for laws to be made that are different for different groups of people in order to ameliorate conditions that lead groups of people to have social disadvantages.  Anyone who argues that First Nations are not currently disadvantaged in Canadian society has simply not done the research.

Aboriginal people have merged with Canada. And the mechanism for doing so was treaties.  And where treaties don’t exist, outstanding issues of Aboriginal rights and title still exist and Canadians and First Nations are compelled to figure this question out.  The problem for assimilationists is that they don’t like the terms of this merger.  Well it’s too late for that.  When the ancestors of settlers arrived in this country they inherited the treaty benefits accorded to all Canadians, which allowed them to own land, start businesses, reap the resources, poison the waters, and profit profit profit.  Obviously settlers aren’t giving their benefits back, and clearly First Nations aren’t getting exclusive title over the land back.  We are merged.  And this is Canada.  And it benefits settlers enormously.

The comments I am seeing online have a strange hollow ring to them.  They parrot these objections ad infinitum and you see these lines everywhere.  No one is really thinking about what they are saying, just reacting.  Perhaps in some cases there are coordinated  communications  strategies to keep repeating these lines over and over until they seem true.  But they aren’t true.  You might have opinions, you might have a view of the world and how you want it to work, you might have an agenda, but it’s probably not what is really going on.

Straw man arguing has risen to the level of hollow social contempt.  It seems funny now.  But where it seems real, try a few of these alternate views on and see if you can have an actual conversation.