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Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss

October 7, 2007 By Being, Poetry 3 Comments

Battle Creek, Michigan, USA
I’m reading a marvellous little book called “Dispatches from the Global Village” by my friend Derek Evans. Derek is a remarkable individual, having most notable served two terms as the Deputy Secretary General of Amnesty International. He now lives in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia and is the spouse of my long time homeopath, Pat Deacon.

What I really like about Derek is that he embodies a certain tempered optimism that the human species is capable of great things despite it also being capable of unimaginable acts. Derek has assembled a book out of a series of columns he wrote for his neighbours in Naramata, BC. THe column are the musings and reflections of an internationally important peacemaker. There are many gems in the book, which I’ll share over the next couple of days, but I offer this one tonight to those who are despairing at the moment that we might just have it all wrong.

This is a poem that Derek spotted on the London Underground several years ago by Sheenagh Pugh:

Sometimes things don’t go after all,
from bad to worse. Some years muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives;the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

This poem reminds me of a line that escaped my lips earlier this year when I was juggling with friends Tenneson Woolf and Roq Garreau. I said that I though juggling is so compelling because “there is always the possibility that a ball might not drop.”

[tags]derek evans, sheehangh pugh, hope[/tags]

Happy birthday to wood s lot

October 7, 2007 By Uncategorized

The National Capital Freenet in Ottawa was the host of my first email address.   It’s most famous web page may well be the amazing   wood s lot.   Today, Mark Woods’ blog turned seven.

Happy Birthday!

Old vs. New (or new vs. old, depending on which continent you come from!)

October 5, 2007 By Conversation, Organization 3 Comments

My young friend Dustin Rivers nails the difference between the old system and the new system.

Moleskine harvest 2 – the pattern of work that scales

October 5, 2007 By Art of Hosting, Facilitation, Leadership, Learning, Moleskine Harvest, Organization

Back in March we ran an Art of Hosting for the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team and all of our comunity partners.   At the conclusion of that Art of Hosting we held an Open Space.   One of the topics that I posted was about the pattern of our work with community based on the experiences that people had had over the three days of training.   I was interested in seeing if anything we did over three days with forty people in an Art of Hosting could scale up to larger levels in the system.   I had a couple of powerful insights during that session.

  • The idea of “consultation” with community stakeholders is dead.   This process is about inviting community members to take ownership over the structures and institutions that affect their lives.   Instead of a one-way flow of advice from the community to VIATT, the new model is a gift exchange between cousins, relationships between familiy members who are putting children in the centre and looking after each other.   As such there is expertise, care and ownership everywhere in the system and so we all must actively become “TeacherLearners.”
  • The circle is the fundamental pattern for reflection: leadership at the rim and inquiry in the centre.   The relationships in the Art of Hosting developed quickly because we established trust and openness in the beginning with an opening circle.   We were able to establish a real sense that everyone was sitting on the rim of the circle together, facing inward at the question of how to do this work.   The circle is a structure that opens up the possibility for leadership to come from anywhere, with inquiry at the centre.   In this case the questions at the centre of the circle revolve around the principle that when the system puts children in the centre everything changes.   This is a powerful   organizing principle guiding our transformation of the child and family services system from a system that places resources and institutional interests at the centre while trying to keep families there.   The proof of this is embodied in the idea that when the current system breaks down, and a child dies, the parts of the system fly apart and many different process are required to bring it back together.   By contrast, when a child dies in a community, everyone comes together.   There can be no one else in the centre, only the needs of the family.   That is the ideal for our work: a system that places children in the centre.

It is interesting to see the way some of these insights have deepened into operating principles.   The idea of Children at the Centre has become a simple but powerful organizing principle for all of our community linkage work with VIATT.   The idea of TeacherLearners in the community has informed the way that we are developing community circles – policy and decision making bodies that will hold significantly more responsibility for the system that mere advisory committees.   At the moment we are looking at using   study circles as a methodology for running the community circles.

[tags]VIATT, community consultation, circles, children, child and family services, study circles[/tags]

A tricky spot

October 4, 2007 By Collaboration, Conversation, Facilitation

Today I ran into an interesting situation.   I was in a conversation about a community process I have been designing and a potential participant took me aside and said that she would love to participate but that one of the people who had already agreed to also participate had committed some serous abuse against her partner.   She wondered how I would do to resolve the situation.

That was a good one, a little bit out of the blue and somewhat unexpected.   I thought for a moment and then, putting my best collaborative principles into practice said “I don’t know.   What would you do if you were in my situation?”   She wasn’t expecting this answer, but to her credit she stopped and thought about it.   We stood next to each other in silence for a few moments.

“I don’t know,” she said.   “Well then,” I said.   “That makes two of us.   Let’s think about this together.”

We shared a little laugh and then I started thinking out loud.   I mused about the fact that we needed many perspectives in this process, and perhaps even the perspectives of “abusers” whatever that means.   Having all voices in a process does not come cost-free.   I also acknowledged her needs for both safety and a way to contribute to the process.   The truth of things, as Christina Baldwin has said, is that as a facilitator I can’t guarantee anyone’s safety, but I can help a group create the conditions that would look after its own safety.   In that spirit I invited her to join our process and be in dialogue with me about co-creating the conditions of safety and participation that would meet her needs and keep the group functioning well.   This was an agreeable proposal to her and so we will be in conversation as our process unfolds to make sure that the group is doing its best possible work.   She has taken some responsibility for helping us to understand her experience of the situation and we’ll deal with whatever comes up with inquiry, curiosity, imagination and patience.

It is a great gift when individuals in a group step up to take responsibility for co-creating conditions of safety and efficacy in their dialogic container.   It pays to be honest with people and as for help when you don’t know what to do, and see if proposals forward can be co-created.   I was reminded today how important that is to adopt as a world view and not just a facilitation trick.