For as long as I have been working in the non-profit and government worlds, since 1991, I have been confronted with the idea that somehow we always must do more with less. When I began work at the National Association of Friendship Centres in 1992, my first real job after leaving university, the organization was coming to the end of a five-year cycle of funding for urban Indigenous programs and core capacity that had grown steadily since 1972. Over twenty years, the federal government had increased funding in the Friendship Centres in Canada’s towns and cities, and the movement had grown to over 100 communities with between three and five core funded positions in each centre, offering a myriad of services to urban Indigenous populations from Halifax to Port Alberni and Red Lake to Inuvik.
In 1993, the Liberals were elected to power after ten years of Progressive Conservative government, and they committed to tackling the federal deficit. The did this by actually continuing a series of budget reductions that the last Tory finance Minister Ray Hnatyshyn had proposed in his election budget. Paul Martin got credit for it, but it was a PC plan.
The upshot of these across-the-board spending reductions was that we “had to do more with less,” or “become more efficient” or “get creative” or “innovate” or “tighten belts and find redundancies.” With very, very, few exceptions almost every organization I have worked with since then has had to face the same problem. The neo-liberal economic revolution of Regan and Thatcher and Mulroney delivered massive amounts of money to the richest people in the world and starved government of revenues and marginalized communities of funding and material support, even as they picked up the work of addressing the increasing social problems externalized by the private sector.
We went through periods of funding freezes, cuts, occasional bumps (“investment” it is sometimes called) but there has in general been a growing trend of increasing social problems and complexity, decreasing government support and increasing wealth inequality in Canada leading to massively underfunded non-profits. We are now seeing core government services shredded too. When the word “austerity” is used it seems to signal that direct government services such as health and education and income security are in for a tough time.
Ideology drives all of this. For most of the past 45 years that ideology has been the market-based economic liberalism that has privatized and financialized everything. In the past 20 years it has included ideologies of the culture war that has tied government funding to strange ideas that are put out there to stoke outrage, fuel algorithms, divide citizens and achieve razor thin electoral margins. In places like Alberta a bewildering set of strange ideas about public health, energy independence and education has meant that the public purse is weaponized against people who are trying to provide vaccines against fatal and preventable illnesses, or create sustainable and low-cost energy technologies, or build education systems that create welcoming and inclusive learning environments. These were things we used to fund, plan for and organize around.
In talking with a colleague today we were noticing how this moment of austerity is showing up in the work we do to support organizations and facilitate dialogue, and engagement, especially in this moment when we are confronted by nearly overwhelming confusion and complexity. It used to be that the conversations we were hosting suffered at times from a scarcity mindset, meaning that we weren’t aware of the actual richness that was around us. Participatory leadership and process opens up access to that richness.
Today we are suffering from an austerity mindset, which can be thought of as a realization that the richness we need has been taken away from us. It is harder and harder to find diverse groups of people and voices to work on issues of staggering complexity. People have had their time and material resources privatized, colonized, and taken from them.
We were noticing that coming out of the pandemic, people have welcomed the chance to be together in person again, but how we show up has changed. Every face-to-face meeting is high stakes and there is decreasing trust in opening up and letting go into a participatory process. While in the past it seemed easier to coach leaders and organizations to find solutions at the margins of their work with authentic and creative engagement with their people and communities, these days it seems like our work is to keep leaders from becoming autocratic. With so few hands willing and able to do the work of addressing huge systemic issues, most organizations and networks seem to have only a few key people who are close to the work. This creates a fear that if the leader doesn’t directly influence and shift everyone to their way of thinking, we won’t get the chance to do the work properly.
To be honest some of this worry is warranted. We know from the ways in which Cynefin advises us to act in crisis, that applying tight constraints is the best way to establish safety. But what you do with that safety once you have it is what’s at stake. These days it seems that many leaders are drifting towards consolidating that power by offering to sustain the work of maintaining safety at the expense of other ideas, diverse thinking, or even a challenge to their plans. We see this in national leadership. Trump is the obvious example, but it has been interesting to see Prime Minister Carney stumbling in the House of Commons as Pierre Poilievre looks his seat and provided the first testing challenges of Carney’s leadership. Carney has had it easy since he was elected.
There are lots of implications here for facilitating participatory work and supporting leaders in this time, and to me they come from our lessons in complexity and dialogic practice. Here’s a few, and maybe you can add to them:
The work of the world is teetering on the edge of chaos AND is deeply complex. So that means that yes, leaders and facilitators and Board chairs need to consolidate decision making and create safety. But it also means that this is EXACT time to open up leadership to people who have differing view points and perspectives and experiences. That diversity is what provides the sophisticated situational awareness needed to address the challenges we are in. Polarity management is coming back into my practice in a big way as we help groups to see the tensions they are working with and engage with them productively.
Avoid premature convergence. One of my favourite Dave Snowden slogans implores us to not choose the first good idea and go with it. Even if thing seems to be moving fast, committing too early to a course of action can send you on a path from which return is very tricky. Use scenario planning to keep a view on possibilities, and adjust plans as you go. COVID killed the five-year plan, but you can still set longer-view directions of travel and think about the different landscapes you will confront to get there.
Leave more community than you found. In times of crisis it is impossible to build the social connectivity and relational fields that help sustain us. We need to be doing that in the moments when we can take a breath and think. And meetings are what those moments look like in organizational life. If you are using meetings to preach to the masses, you are missing this chance. Every conversation in the organization right now has the chance to build community while also doing good work, including conversations about how to be together. And if you are a leader with a good idea that you want others to take up, you need to build trust and relational capacity if that idea is to be supported and improved upon. Participatory work does this. It also does this much better if we are physically n the same room.
Big messy conversations are a feature, not a bug. Since the pandemic, I have been doing A LOT of Open Space meetings. Open Space just creates the kind of agenda that is impossible if only one person is in charge. When participants begin posting sessions in Open Space everyone gets to see the real texture of need and capacity in the organization, and we are given the chance to dive in and work on them. Same with Pro Action Cafe, which helps individuals in large gatherings get the help they need with the many different projects and programs they are running. We don’t need alignment on everything right now. We do need much more activity happening in plain view, co-created and co-supported. Like Harrison Owne used to say “Trust the people.”
We need to look after ourselves. This time is taking a real toll on many people. Caring for oneself is not greedy. It is essential. If we are all to stay resourceful in the messy chaos of the present moment we need to be taking our time to be grounded, become familiar with our own patterns of reactivity and do the world a favour and work on them. Yesterday, in talking with a colleague who works right at the coalface of social change and community organizing, I asked her how she was keeping it together. Her morning practice of prayer and meditation has never been more essential, and in fact she had to remind herself to get back to it. I can relate.
I’m sure this list could go on, and I invite you to add to it. Leave a comment about what you are noticing and how you are working with others to cope with the realities of this moment. We are living in a thin time when the macro currents of war and conflict and austerity and hatred are seeping into each of our special places. We need to work within these contexts and find islands of meaning and respite so good work can continue and people can be looked after.
Twelve days ago we left Vancouver for a couple of weeks of guided travel in the central coast of British Columbia. This is the region of the coast that is north of Vancouver Island and south of Kitimat. Specifically we were visiting the homelands of the Heiltsuk, Gitga’at and Kitasoo/Xai xais Nations. For decades these Nations (along with others) have worked to protect this coast from harmful logging, hunting, and fishing practices. As long as I have lived in BC the campaign and the work to protect what is now known as the Great Bear Rainforest has been ongoing. The land and sea In this region is the largest tract of temperate rainforest in the world. When you read the history of the place you encounter a story of collaboration, advocacy and recognition that is profound in its implications for how Canada can be. And when you visit the place, you can be touched by the profound impact that such places have in reminding us of our place in the world.
We were chartering with a guiding company called Mothership Adventures, started by my old friends the Campbell family 20 years ago. They own the Columbia III, a beautiful custom built mission ship. You should read Ross’s blog to get a sense of the incredible care and affection they have for the Columbia III, and for some of the stories about what it takes to keep the ship in order. Mothership provides a crew of a captain, a cook, two guides and ten guests, all of us connected to one another through work, life, or kids. This is our second trip with them and these crew are like family to each other and to us. They are incredible human beings, and we bonded together very quickly, as you do with 14 good people on a small ship together.
W spent 10 days of travelling essentially around Princess Royal Island, poking in and out of coastal fjords, salmon streams, and out to the west coast of Campania Island and its white sand beaches. We spent several hours a day gently paddling pristine waters, with exceptionally great weather, including the two days of Pineapple Express rain which we enjoyed from protected bays around Milbanke Sound. We saw grizzly bears in Khutze Inlet, dozens of humpback whales and Dall’s porpoises and we spent a half an hour in Wright Sound surrounded by 15 fin whales who were surfacing all around us. This trip was full of life changing experiences.
The most profound one happened last Tuesday. We spent a day on a bear platform sitting mostly in silence with Marvin Robinson, a Gitga’at guide who stewards his hereditary chief’s territory on Grebbell Island along a salmon stream. We sat and watch pinks running up the stream, dippers fishing for their food and were rewarded with a profound encounter with the spirit bear pictured above, Tlaiya, named for the red stripe along his back. This bear, fixated on the salmon at his feet wandered up the creek slowly, sniffing the air, loping at one point about 4 meters away from me. He had a calm demeanour, a slow cadence and a wary awareness of our presence. We stood silently on the riverbank watching, barely breathing, overwhelmed with the encounter. As the bear approached, I was flooded with feelings of humility, profound gratitude, of a deep awareness of my small nature as a creature on a planet with myriad other creatures, just being here.
The bear walked on, up the stream and around the corner, half-heartedly swiping at salmon, sniffing the air. After a period of deep silence, tears and floods of emotions, even from Marvin himself who loves these bears like no one else, we decided to stay in the forest for another hour or so. During that time five wolves appeared on the river and walked down towards us through the water, eating salmon heads (they avoid the bodies becasue of parasites). Even Marvin stood riveted filming on his phone. We watched them circle around behind us, and Marvin checked his watch and said he had to leave, inviting us to stay longer if we wished. Then he made a series of howls, and the wolves all through the little river valley starting howling. We were completely wrapped in sound, the plaintive rises and falls of the wolves sharing the story of their territory at that moment. And as that chorus was happening, a mother black bear and her cub walked up the stream, also pawing at the pinks.
It seemed impossible to leave. None of us could believe what we had experienced. When you sit in silence for hours in the forest, you become part of the place, you become absorbed in it. You become slowly aware of your place in the scheme of things. And when the animals especially get a sense of where you are, they flow around you. The FEELING of that, especially around these large animals, is so deeply profound that it feels like it comes from a deep part of our human essence, the part that never transcended our identity as animals, as parts of the world instead of something that lifts itself up and out of its surroundings as if we could somehow exercise a dominion over the uiniverse of which we are a flimsily dependant part.
Belonging is not a choice one makes. It is a status granted upon you by the people and places and creatures that you share the planet with. Even though I live in a beautiful place, surrounded by forest and sea, I am rarely aware of this feeling. It takes silence, stillness and a lowering of the mental, physical and spiritual rpms to find this feeling of openness which, if the environment consents, leads to belonging, becasue you become a part of something, of everything.
This morning I walked to Tell Your Friends, my local coffee shop to write and reflect in the late summer sunlight. I wanted to capture that feeling that was seeded in me last week in the Great Bear Rainforest so I first sat by the lagoon, watching some chickadees flit in the alder trees, watching the crows pulling mussels from the rocks and a flock of short-bill gulls resting on the tidal flats. Nothing profound, no spirit bear or whales or charismatic mega-flora. But that feeling. It’s there. To sit and rest and be remembered by the land that chooses you because you have decided not to move over it so quickly. That you have sat and opened your eyes to see what is always there and have the world reveal itself to you as kin, not as performance. You are related. You belong to everything. Human life, so abstract and far above the rhythms of the tide and sunlight and season and epoch, fall away. Rather than observing and processing, you become observed and processed by everything.
I know this. We all know this. But I think most of the humans I know, including, and maybe especially, me, need to remember this, in the animal bodies that we have, in the landscapes that sustain us, on a planet which produces life in a myriad of uncounted forms, playfully exploring how a universe might populate itlself with creatures and plants that reproduce themselves from within, and fill every available niche life can find.
The older I get the more I realize that as people get older they witness changes and pine for the good old days. It’s cliche for a reason, because it seems nearly universal. I get it. Things aren’t what they used to be. Younger generations than me (and they are plural at this point) have a language and experience that I cannot be a part of. I occasionally break through with folks where we are enjoined in common cause, like in our supporter-owned football club, or in some of the workshops and courses I deliver. But mostly, I can my peers living in increasingly agitated nostalgia. Things are not as good as they were before.
Is this the default setting? Nostalgia is practically a genre in art, culture, and fashion. But what is it called when a person of middle or advanced age writes or paints or composes about how THIS moment is amazing. How things that he or she wanted in the past have finally come to fruition and the new people in the world and teethings they are making and the places they are building or protecting are awesome? I remember when I got my first iPhone. It was like a childhood dream come true. Finally, the device of my dreams was here in my lifetime! I made the above image the lock screen. If you know, you know.
It’s not a pollyanna-ish sentiment I’m after. It’s not a carpe diem, or affirmation-based gratitude practice. There isn’t a word for it in English, which is why I’m reaching. Is there art to be made that features characters who grow old feeling like their experiences are the ones they have been hoping to have, that the demographics and the culture and the things that are happening are what they wanted all along?
There is a lack of this, eh? We all pine for a future we can’t have yet, an alternative we will never have, or a past that is gone. It’s hard to listen for the good things in the present in the monotonous moan of complaint in all that.
(Yes there is suffering. There always was. The “good old days” my generation pine for featured apartheid in South Africa, death squads in Central America, a hole burning in the ozone layer, residential schools in Canada, acid rain, and famine. I’m not naive.)
Spent the day in Vancouver visiting family and heading to the Bard on the Beach matinee performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Bard is the Vancouver summer Shakespeare festival, and is known for their cheeky mountings of the Bard’s plays. For whatever reason I think we’ve mostly seen comedies over the past number years, so my take on their repertoire may lean more towards “excellent masters of farce.” But I love the ethic of this company and even with well known plays, there is often a twist that sends a message, whether it is the setting, or some topical asides, some clowning, or some casting or editorial decisions. My impression of the production principle here is that Shakespeare is presented faithful to the experience that the original audiences might have had, and that means not sparing the sacred cows of the day. The commentary is cutting and contemporary, and I often leave feeling what I imagine Shakespeare’s original audiences felt in the 16th and 17th centuries watching these plays, entertained by a production that spoke to them, and that spoke a little truth to power.
Today it was The Two Gentlemen of Verona which is a play I have never seen or read. It’s one of Shakespeare’s earliest and weakest plays, and has been performed only sporadically over the centuries. We did some pre-game research on the play, just because these romantic comedies tend to twist and flail and it’s easy to get lost. This one features the foibles of Proteus and Valentine, two buddies from Verona who head to Milan for some adventure. Proteus, true to his namesake, is a shape shifter, falling in and out of love depending on the circumstance. Valentine has more integrity, although that observation has to be tempered by the fact that these two are consummate boneheaded bros The setting of this production was the 1980s and as a result. each of these characters evoked people from my own high school days, which made for an interesting personal experience.
The lead characters are semi-loveable idiots. In this production they occupy a kind of anti-hero character arc. As the play progresses and they twist themselves into more and more ridiculous and narcissistic situations. It gradually dawns on the audience how reprehensible these guys actually are. They treat romantic love as an inferior form of relationship to the bro code and that has been a knock on the play through its history. It has some truly troublesome misogyny in it, not the least of which is how the play ends. Throughout history critics have wrestled with how to interpret the ending of the play. Directors have rewritten it, edited it or just ignored it altogether. I think rather than dancing around the problem of the ending, director Dean Paul Gibson learned into it and SOLVED it. He adds no dialogue to the play, adds nothing to change the ending at all except a shifted perspective that melts the fourth wall. It’s brilliant. It’s very moving. It becomes immensely real for every single person who has aged out of that immature world of superficial high school relationships. You should go and see it, and maybe after the festival is over, I’ll spoil it.
Apart from the ending, there was an added level of brilliance having the play set in the 1980s. To me it made it feel like I was watching a high school play from my own era. The play becomes even more funny when one remembers that these characters are basically all teenagers (in maturity levels if not actual age) and the company play them with a remarkable take. These actors appear to me not to be earnestly occupying the characters, but rather earnestly occupying the character of teenage actors staging this play. You know the way that high school theatre sometimes tends to typecast the actors into characters that resemble them in real life? It felt like that. These are actors playing actors playing Shakespearian characters. The detachment and the 80s setting lends a layer post-modern irony to the whole thing made it even funnier. And it’s probably the best way to handle the fundamental weakness of the play in general: lean into it. I loved it.
One of the things Shakespeare’s characters often do is to reason themselves into tragic or comedic situations. The reasoning itself is such a device of the age. It’s as if Shakespeare, writing on the edges of of modernity, was trying out these new forms of thought: a scientific reasoning of how one’s passions are at work and what it means. His soliloquies are full of this stuff. You see the origin of the characters’ limiting beliefs, you see the mental gymnastics they are doing to justify and rationalize absurd beliefs that give legitimacy to the emotional lives. It’s immensely relatable.
Part of the fun of Two Gentlemen of Verona is watching these dudes try to reason their way into abominably stupid situations and the more they do so the more respect they lose. By the end of the play they are so convinced of their rightness in the world that their triumphant and confident exit is easily turned to a complete mockery. As a former teenage boy, I found myself staring into a pretty brutal mirror at times. Simultaneously guffawing at these idiots and then slapping my brow with uncomfortable recognition.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona runs until September 19.
Rob, from a recent Facebook of his which he captioned “The new me.”
My friend Rob Paterson is dying. I found out on Facebook today as he shared a remarkable thing that his daughter is doing.
Rob was one of those bloggers that you’d meet sometimes in the early 2000s who posted tons of interesting stuff, and thoughtful, place based and personal posts. At his blog you’d learn about PEI, and finance and management, British history (which was essentially his own personal history), and food and health and all the things that his brain and heart were driven to explore. And he was one of those bloggers from those early that, when I met him in person for the first time in about 2006 or something, I connected with instantly. It was like that with Johnnie Moore and Euan Semple and Lila Efimova and Harold Jarche and so many others. In 2009 we visited Rob and his family in PEI and we even made a little video about living systems together.
Rob was always really interested in my work and in 2005 he and Johnnie Moore and I had a conversation about some new idea we called “unconferencing.” We talked about Open Space Technology and ways that people really do want to meet if only people who think they know better would get out of the way. That is such an interesting conversation because Rob described what might be one solid thread of the origin story of podcasting which happened at a conference hosted by Peter Rukavina in 2003 at which Dave Winer and John Muir met and discussed how to use RSS to broadcast radio shows.
That was how it was blogging back in the day. I feel like those of us still doing this or returning to this are keepers of some arcane traditional knowledge. We know what it’s for, what it does, how it changes people. We know how it brings people into our lives in surprisingly deep ways. It is not social media. It is slower than that. More relational. More real.
Rob has left an incredible legacy of writing and musing and conversation and his daughter Hope has embarked on a project to upload all of this to an AI. It’s an intriguing proposition, and perfectly suited to Rob’s penchant for using technology to feed wisdom and connection.
So much love and fondness goes out to Rob and family. My hope for you, my friend, is that your transition is soft and beautiful and that you are carried away on the stories we all hold of you.
Thank you for being in my life, and thank you for inviting me into yours.
Update: Rob died on August 24.