A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the nuthatches have disappeared from my home island this year and how I was missing their little calls.
Today,fromt he other side of the world a friend shared with me a watercolour he made inspired by that post. And so, through relationship and connection across time and space, one nuthatch has re-appeared on Bowen Island, , early on a holiday morning.
It is apparently International Tea Day, and my friend Ciaran Camman sent along this beautiful twitter thread describing tea culture across the Muslim world. It put me in mind of some memorable cups of tea I have had in my time:
Grateful for these experiences and connections.
Over on LInkedIn, Bryan Stallings pointed to a 2017 post at the International Association of Facilitators site that contains a set of definitions of facilitation. I don’t remember contributing to that article, but I quite like what I said at the time:
“While facilitation traditionally means ‘to make things easy’ I think we need a new definition that means ‘to host the struggle together.’ Good facilitators help create a container for people to work with difference and diversity to make good things happen.”
That’s pretty good, I think. It describes what I do and it describes a shift in my practice over the years. Like many, when I started out as a facilitator I was really trying hard to deliver outcomes and to lead a group through a process to get to a preconceived set of ideas. It’s not that I wasn’t alos hosting some creative work, but my early forays in the field were probably brutal to sit through as I steered people through a process and, being a naturally conflict averse person, quelled differences. There would be brainstorming, but I was very much the kind of guy that seized on ideas I liked and inquired more into them, even if the group had other thoughts. Ick.
Now it’s all about the right tools for the right job, and sometimes that’s just the right tool. But not often. And definitely not in the unconscious way that I applied facilitation.
Once I trundled into the world of Open Space Technology, the Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development and the complexity world, my practice radically changed. It really did become about building containers for dialogue, creating spaces and contexts in which interesting things might happen. It took to locus of responsibility for the content off of me and put it on the participants. I became responsible for managing the constraints that would help a group do that.
If you look on my site for posts on complex facilitation, you’ll find a bit more thinking on that practice, but one things that stands out in the IAF article from 5 years ago is the commitment to difference and diversity. I recently took a Deep Democracy workshop with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson as a part of my reluctant commitment to overcome my aversion to conflict, and I walked away with the idea that we need to get good at the practice of “conflict preservation” instead of “conflict resolution.” By that I mean that we need to be able to host conversations in which conflicts are present and remain present as a source of creativity and life, and not quash them because we are afraid of their energy. That means creating a container in which conflict is productive, in which people feel free to share different opinions, different perspectives, and contribute different gifts. And, of course, being conflict averse, this terrifies me. What if someone gets hurt? What if the space isn’t safe enough? What if something really offensive gets said?
Yup. Those are the questions we have to wrestle with. Because facilitation is needed in this time to ensure that people with vastly different experience and gifts have the chance to use them. Communities and societies contain many different kinds of people, including people whose opinions and ideas I don’t like.
Feel all those questions coming up? All those fears and “what if’s?” Yup. me too. Let’s talk about it below.
That statement will either mean something to you, or it will mean nothing to you. It might mean nothing to you if washy space-y pretentious prog rock wasn’t your bag in the 1980s. But it was mine.
I have always had an eclectic taste in music and back in the early 1980s when I was 15 my friend Aiden, who was a couple of years older than me got me into all the British prog rock bands like Yes and Genesis and Pink Floyd and Emerson Lake and Palmer who had all done their best work in the previous decade. As a devotee of Queen, I was a bit suspicious of synthesizers, but I have also always had a penchant for drones and atmospheric washes and mystical poetry and stuff like that. Bands like Rush were doing all that, even if Queen, until 1981 anyway, was explicitly rejecting it.
Anyway, my love of Jon Anderson’s voice and Vangelis’ notoriety for the Chariots of Fire and Bladerunner soundtracks led me to an album that for a couple of years was a staple in my Walkman. “Private Collection” was bliss to listen to through the headphones. The following year, they released “The Best of Jon and Vangelis” and that was the extent of their discography that I owned on cassette.
Here is “Horizon” from from “Private Collection” in all of its 23 minute long glory.
Headphones on. Bliss out.
It was in this day In 1992 that I started my first real job in an office, beginning work as a policy analyst at the National Association of Friendship Centres in Ottawa.
I can remember that day vividly. It was a lovely warm morning in Ottawa and I even remember wearing a light purple collared shirt (it was the early 1990s) and carrying my lunch in a newly purchased MEC fabric briefcase that served me for many years.
The NAFC was small at that time, just an Executive Director, Jerome Berthelette, a financial guy, Brian Stinson, our office manager Mel Maracle, Molly LaFontaine who was the receptionist and EA to Jerome and Marc Maracle who was in charge of different projects. I think my first day was Jerome’s last and Terry Doxtator started the same day I did as Executive Director.
As a student I worked as a researcher for David Newhouse at Trent University and the NAFC was the subject of a set of case studies we wrote on Indigenous-Government program negotiations. Through the work and the material I used in my honours thesis on organizational development I got to know the staff and when I moved to Ottawa with Caitlin in 1991 Marc gave me a chance to come and work for the organization.
Lots was going on in Ottawa at that time. There were events marking the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s journey with many amazing shows and exhibits and productions on Indigenous resistance. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal People was at work and we contributed research and testimony to that. The Charlottetown Accord negotiations were dominating the policy discussions in the city and the talk of what it means to implement Constitutionally protected Aboriginal rights in Canada was everywhere. The fallout from the Oka crisis was on everybody’s mind and the fading years of the Mulroney government and subsequent transition to the Chrétien government threw up many policy challenges and a few key opportunities to our movement.
I worked there for two and a half years. It formed so much of what I went on to do for the rest of my life. I was grateful for the learning I got in the job in facilitating collaborative policy making processes. It was exciting to be in Ottawa during historic constitutional discussions – watching the first draft of the Charlottetown Accord come over our fax machine! – and I got to contribute to things like the Royal Commission, the establishment of the Aboriginal Head Start Program and the renewal and restructuring of the Friendship Centre core funding program.
Thirty years is a long time. And the blink of an eye. And I’m grateful these many years later for all the guidance and support I received as a young guy starting out. I’m proud to still call myself a Friendship Centre supporter and that movement will always have my heart and thanks for helping me get going in the world.
