Three little words to bear in mind. Tuesday Ryan-Hart and I recorded this little video as part of a series for the ALIA Summer Institute faculty. We were asked to reflect on what three words were important in thinking about what change for good really takes. This was our contribution.
I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice. We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of “What time it is in the world?” We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing. We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were emerging. At the end of the Cafe, the hosts gathered in a fishbowl in the middle of the rest of the group and shared their insights, sensing into the patterns that were emerging. I listened with a poet’s ear tuned to the harvest and this is what I heard:
You have to be ready to die on the hill atop which you have heard the deepest call of the world
When you open the smallest space in your life, passion can erode obligation. You become more social, unable to be unaware.
You cannot see yourself in the window of a rushing train but only for a second. You need to slow down so that the reflection can be studied, a life examined.
What would a world looki like that is flowing in responsibility, courage, reverence and wakanza?
Responsibility and courage are individual acts. Reverance and wakanza are products of the collective context, they are responses that are woken up in us by the times.
Our children our the gift we make to the future, they are the long stake in the long view, the holders of wisdom, those carriers of what we have learned about how we have lived.
We are the ones we have been waiting for, and we have been waiting for lives and times beyond our own, living in lives and times beyond our own. We see ourselves as the gift to ourselves when others make it clear in relationship.
Our conversations touch every single other conversation. The world unfolds as one point presses upon another in a great chain of implication and connectivity. The technology of interconnection is vulnerability – the capacity to be open to one another. In that small open space, influence takes root. Ideas enter in that seem to have always been there.
I move and leave pieces of myself behind, and I have no story of grieving? No way to midwife the new in the hospice of the dying? What is being born when things are dying, what enters in when there is a puase in the breath between generations, between conversations, between breaths and between heart beats?
In the moments of silence that open between sounds, there is a chance for the smallest voice to be heard. The babble dies down and there is a pause and a small call has its chance to invite. Judgement kills that voice – sometimes aborts it before it even ever enters the world.
All we have are ideas – take a stand, do what you can to help others to stand. You can reach back to the head of every river to see why it is full of what it is full of. Every tributary signs its joining with specific minerals, with salts and metals, with vegetation and fish. You can find home by simply following the taste of it.
Host others, but host yourself first. Listen to others but first learn to listen to the wind, to listen to the birds and the way the ground moves beneath the feet of the deer. Learn to listen to why people say the things they say. To what soil or water fills their syllables with longing.
Presence. When you host you can become the vehicle through which the world speaks its story. And you hear what you are built for and you speak what you see in yourself.
We are not too busy for change, we are instead addicted to avoiding what is real and what needs doing. People are the agents for their own freedom. But that freedom cannot be won without something being let go. We are in a culture that doesn’t end things very well, but instead loads layers and layers of more on top of the foundation. With no rite of passage available, nothing gets completed and ushered out, there is no way to make space for the new. Honour and reverence.
We are crying for passages through and for the rites to understand them and to be invited into them.
Can you be authentic in your work if you’re not authentic in your personal life? How do you discover you are not aware of yourself without rites of passage and ceremonies that acknowledge what is coming and what is gone, what is to be picked up and what is to be put down.
How do we foster self-awareness when we perceive crises and emergency? We tell the truth and we tell all the stories, even the ones that represent success and resilience and that buck the trend of the depressing scarcity that keeps us embedded in fear, we insert pauses where previously we would rush to solutions.
We are a greedy culture, but we can be greedy for community and that hurts no one because it only activates the abundance that sleeps in a cradle of scarcity. We can’t afford to throw a few things on the grill and offer some to the neighbours? Come to me in the late sun of the evening when the wind is still and the birds think before they sing, and cars pass by quietly in the languid air. Come and share a meal, and tell me what is in your heart.
Like Meg says,
Notice what is going on.
Get started.
Learn as you go.
Stick together.
Nineteen years ago today I set off on a short walk on a beautiful Ottawa spring morning traveling about eight blocks from our apartment on Frank Street to my office on Cooper Street. For me it was the first day of work at the National Association of Friendship Centres and the first real salaried job I had since leaving university in August 1991. I remember the walk well, remember the warm morning, and the feeling that I was lucky to have landed a job with a great organization, especially after a winter of living on meager UI benefits. I knew then that, thanks to the determination of my friend Marc Maracle to hire me, my life’s work would unfold from this place.
And so it has. Working for the NAFC gave my crucial skills in beginning to practice facilitation, in beginning to see the true challenges of community work and in working for Aboriginal communities as an oshkebewis, an Anishnaabemowin word that means “helper of a medicine person.”. I identify strongly with that term as I often have the sense that my work is all about working with the medicine of community, finding ways to restore wellness and energy especially in places riven with conflict, fear and desperation.
I owe a huge debt of thanks to Marc for finding a way to hire me on that spring day and to my first boss Terry Doxtator and our board and staff. What I got from them was a solid grounding in skills and a generous and supportive place to practice. I consider myself a Friendship Centre success story, one of the many people across Canada who cut their teeth in the Friendship Centre movement and who have taken their skills and experience into the wider world. Everywhere I have travelled I talk about how important Friendship Centres are to the indigenous communities of Canada and I’m proud to embody that value.
So a big Nia:wen to Marc, wherever you are out there. One day you’ll find this post and receive once again the gratitude that I owe you for kicking me into the world with such fun, support, challenge and faith.
Analyse this...!
Yesterday I had a chance to grab lunch with Dave Pollard in our local coffee shop on Bowen Island. One of the things we talked about was the supremacy of analysis in the world and why that is a problem when it comes to operating in complex domains.
I have been intentionally working a lot lately with Dave Snowdon et. al.’s Cynefin framework to support decision making in various domains. It is immensely helpful in making sense of the messy reality of context and exercises like anecdote circles and butterfly stamping are very powerful, portable and low tech processes.
Cynefin is also useful in that it warns us against a number of fatal category errors people make when trying to design solutions to problems. The most serious of these is remaining complacent in a simple context which has the effect of tipping the system to chaos. Nearly as infuriating and problematic to me is the applicability of analysis to complex domains.
Analysis has a dominant place in organizational and community life. It provides a sense of security that we can figure things out and operate in the space of the known. If we just analyse a situation enough we can identify all if the aspects if the problem and choose a solution. Of course in the complicated domain, where causes and effects can be known even though they are separated in time and space, analysis works beautifully. But in complex domains, characterized by emerged phenomenon, analysis tends to externalize and ignore that which it cannot account for with the result that solutions often remain dangerously blind to surprise and “black swan” events.
The Cyenfin framework advocates working with stories and social constructed meaning to sense and act in complex spaces. Where as analysis relies on objective data and meaning making models to create rules and tools, action in complex spaces uses stories and patterns to create principles and practices which help us to create small actions – probes in the system – that work in a nuanced way with emergence.
In this respect culture matters. The stories that are told and the practices thy are used to make sense of those stories is the method for acting in complex space. This distinction us helpful for me working with indigenous communities where program management may rely on analytical tools (and culture is stamped out in the process) but practices need to be grounded in culturally based responses. Using stories and social meaning making restores culture to its traditional role of helping groups of humans move together in complex domains while using analysis more appropriately.
