I live in Squamish traditional territory, Skwxwú7mesh Temíxw, and I have spent the last 19 years of my residency here as an uninvited guest trying to learn a little about the land and sea, and the traditional teachings that have found a home here for tens of thousands of years.
This month I have joined dozens of others in taking a course from my friend Ta7táliya and her family and friends called Mi tel’nexw which in Squamish means “figure it out.” It’s a leadership course that is rooted in Squamish ways of knowing and being (you can join anytime at that link.)
Our first class was last week, listening to the teachings of Skwetsimeltxw, who spoke about Squamish history and teaching from the perspective of sp’ákw’us, the eagle. As part of the course, we are invited to articulate takeaways and giveaways, naming the gifts received and how we will offer gifts as a result. This cycle of reciprocity is essential.
So here are a couple of takeaways and giveaways that are sitting with me.
Everything starts with the land. As obvious as this one seems, it’s important to remember. I take away from this insight the idea that when doesn’t know what to do, stop and see where you are, what is the land or sea saying about this. It is the ultimate source of everything. The other day I was up at Rivendell Retreat Centre, where I am a Board member, and we were talking about the gardens and outdoor space there. People come to Rivendell from all over the world to experience contemplative practice through silence, hospitality, simplicity and prayer. The practice of simplicity invites us into a powerful, open and basic relationship with the natural world, and my friend and I were discussing how we could make the gardens of Rivendell embody the hosting that the land does so that visitors to our centre could practice outside of our beautiful rooms and sanctuary, attuned to the blessing of the natural world. This territory begs to be loved through every expression of the land and the sea and so my giveaway is to put that lens back on the land at Rivendell and to work with folks to help us help spiritual seekers find the simplicity in that teaching.
Ceremony strengthens you so you can stay positive. My takeaway here is how important practice is. Ceremony that ties me to the land and to the community, brings me into a relationship with the natural world, the supernatural world and community in a way that makes me accountable for the way I spend my time in this life. Skwetsimeltxw shared a teaching of revered Squamish Elder Louis Miranda: “Don’t be afraid of death – we are only here camping for a short time. Don’t waste a day while you are here.” Ceremony gives us names, helps us over the transition of life’s markers, through grieving and loss, through celebration and abundance. Daily practices helps us to live well so that we can take care of what we have. My giveaway is to a practice that shares the beauty and goodness of my life and to this end I have deleted my social media apps from my phone to manage my energy and attention.
Take care of the things in your temporary possession. Squamish culture, like most west coast traditional cultures, is heavily based on property and ownership. The myth that indigenous people don’t have concepts of land ownership is patently false everywhere. Here on the west coast where potlatching is the governance system, all of the property of the nation – including land and places, stories, names, responsibilities, and resources – are placed in the care of someone. The laws and the rules are very strict because care for these fundamental things is essential to the survival of a people. (and yes removing these systems is a form of genocide, set on destroying a people through banning potlatching and ceremony, and stealing these possessions). Skwetsimeltxw said that when a person is given a name, it is not theirs to own but theirs to carry for a while and “polish during your life.” The takeaway for me is a teaching about stewardship and how we are to care for the things that come into our possession. For me this means that names I have like “Art of Hosting steward” confer responsibility to ensure that when I no longer carry that title, it has been made better for those who pick it up. My giveaway is to examine the various names and identities I carry – Board member, Bowen Islander (Nexwlélexwm uxwimíuxw), settler, Canadian, father, husband, facilitator, – and to live them in a way that people encountering these identities in others – especially in those I teach, train and raise – will recognize them as honourable. It is my work to transform an identity like “Canadian” conferred by my birth into this colonial land, or to try to live up to the high standards of a word like “father” that has been given to me by my dad and children.
“Prayers and love, once they are put down, stay where they are put.” This is a direct quote from Skwetsimeltxw and it refers to how Squamish people, living in this territory for tens of thousands of years, have prayed and loved every inch of it from time immemorial. The love and prayers of every ancestor lie upon the rocks and mountains and waterways here and my takeaway is that this land is soaked in blessings. Everywhere you walk or sit is a place that has been stewarded since the beginning of time with care and affection and deep spiritual connection. My giveaway is gratitude and an attuned sense of this sacredness. When Skwetsimeltxw uttered this sentence, I felt a complete and overwhelming sense of gratitude for the fact that I live in a place that is literally covered in love and prayer. Open to the sacred appreciatiation of the stewards and owners of this territory, inspired to attune myself ever deeper to what is really here.
James Gleick, the author of the classic book “Chaos: Making a New Science” has written a terrific review of Jill Lepore’s new book “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.”The book covers the origin of data science as applied to democracy, and comes as conversations about social media, algorithms, and electoral manipulation are in full swing due to the US election and the release of The Social Dilemma.
Gleick’s review is worth a read. He covers some basic complexity theory when working with data. He provides a good history of the discovery of how the principles of “work at fine granularity” helps to see patterns that aren’t otherwise there. He also shows how the data companies – Facebook, Google, Amazon – has mastered the principle of “data precedes the framework” that lies at the heart of good sensemaking. For me, both of these principles learned from anthro-complexity, are essential in defining my complexity practice.
Working at fine granularity means that, if you are looking for patterns, you need lots of data points before seeing what those patterns are. You cannot simply stake the temperature in one location and make a general conclusion about what the weather is. You need not only many sites, but many kinds of data, including air pressure, wind speed and direction, humidity and so on – in order to draw a weather map that can then be used to predict what MIGHT happen. The more data you have, the more models you can run, and the closer you can come to a probable prediction of the future state. The data companies are able to work at such a fine level of granularity that they can not only reliably predict the behaviour of individuals, but they can also serve information in a way that results in probable changes to behaviour. AS a result, social media is destroying democracy, as it segments and divides people for the purpose of marketing, but also dividing them into camps that are so disconnected from one another that Facebook has already been responsible for one genocide, in Myanmar.
Data preceding the framework means that you don’t start with a framework and try to fit data to that matrix, but rather, you let the data reveal patterns that can then be used to generate activity. Once you have a ton of data, and you start querying it, you will see stable patterns. If you turn these into a framework for action, you can sometimes catalyze new behaviours or actions. This is useful if you are trying to shift dynamics in a toxic culture. But in the dystopian use of this principle, Facebook for example notices the kinds of behaviours that you demonstrate and then serves you information to get you to buy things in a pattern that is similar to others who share a particular set of connections and experiences and behaviours. Cambridge Analytica used this power in many elections, including the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum as well as elections in Trinidad and Tobago and other places to create divisions that resulted in a particular result being achieved. You can see that story in The Great Hack. Algorithms that were designed to sell products was quickly repurposed to sell ideas, and the result has been the most perilous threat to democracy since the system was invented.
Complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable but using data you can learn about probabilities. If you have a lot of data you gain an advantage over your competitors. If you have all the data you gain an advantage over your customers, turning them from the customer to the product. “If you’re not paying, you are the product” is the adage that signals that customers are now more valuable products to companies that the stuff they are trying to sell to them.
Putting these principles to use for good.
I work with complexity, and that means that I also work with these same principles in helping organizations and communities confront the complex nature of their work. Unlike Facebook though )he says polemically) I try to operate from a moral and ethical standpoint. At any rate, the data we are able to work within our complexity work is pretty fine-grained but not fine-grained enough to provide accurate pictures of what can be manipulated. We work with small pieces of narrative data, collecting them using a variety of methods and using different tools to look for patterns. Tools include NarraFirma, Sensmaker and Spryng, all of which do this work. We work with our clients and their people to look for patterns in these stories and then generate what are called “actionable insights” using methods of complex facilitation and dialogic practice. These insights give us the inspiration to try things and see what happens. When things work, we do more and when they don’t we stop and try something else.
It’s a simple approach derived from a variety of approaches and toolsets. It allows us to sift through hundreds of stories and use them to generate new ideas and actions. It is getting to the point that all my strategic work now is actually just about making sense of data, but doing it in a human way. We don’t use algorithms to generate actions. We use the natural tools of human sensemaking to do it. But instead of starting with a blank slate and a vision statement that is disconnected from reality, we start with a picture of the stories that matter and we ask ourselves, what can we start, stop, stabilize or create to take us where we want to go.
In a world that is becoming increasingly dystopian and where our human facilities are being used against us, it’s immensely satisfying to use the ancient human capacities of telling stories and listening for patterns to create action together. I think in some ways doing work this way is an essential antidote to the way the machines are beginning to determine our next moves. You can use complexity tools like this to look at things like your own patterns of social media use and try to make some small changes to see what happens. Delete the apps from your phone, visit sites incognito, actively seek out warm connections with real humans in your community and look for people that get served very different ads and YouTube videos and recommended search results. Talk to them. They are being made to be very different from you, but away from the digital world, in the slower, warmer world of actual unmediated human interaction, they are not so different.
Postscript
Over the past few years, my work has taken shape from the following bodies of work:
- Dave Snowden’s theories of anthro-complexity, which forms the basis of my understanding of complexity theory and some of the tools for addressing it, including facilitation tools and Sensemaker.
- Cynthia Kurtz’s Participatory Narrative Inquiry, which is a developmental evaluation approach that uses stories and methods of sensemaking that she partly developed with Dave and then subsequently. I use her software, NarraFirma, for most of our narrative work now.
- Glenda Eoyang’s Human System Dynamics is a set of tools and methods for working with complex adaptive systems.
- The facilitation and leadership practices from the Art of Hosting which help us to develop the personal capacity to work dialogically with complexity.
It’s my birthday on Saturday. Join me in donating to:
- Ta7talíya Michelle Nahanee’s work on Decolonizing Practices
- Teara Fraser’s work to fly essential services and goods to indigenous communities during the pandemic
On Saturday it is my 52nd birthday. It seems to be a feature of getting older that birthdays and other gift-giving holidays become less about the stuff and more about the relationships.
For this birthday, I’d like to invite any of my readers, friends, and colleagues to join me in donating funds to two local indigenous women who are doing powerful work for others. We can gift to them and through them to support a better world. For my birthday this year, I’m donating $200 to each of their initiatives and I invite you to join me and give what you can. In these times, and perhaps always, the work of indigenous women is critical to support.
One of the gifts I receive all the time is the gift of living in Squamish territory on a little island called Nexwlélexwem (Bowen Island) in the Squamish language. I am grateful to live here and grateful to have so many friends and colleagues from the Squamish Nation who have schooled me on the cultural landscape that surrounds me.
The word “Chenchénstway” is a Squamish word meaning “to lift each other up” and it’s a key value in Squamish life. It is one of the values that permeate the landscape where I live and it’s the core of the work of one of my friends, Ta7talíya (Michelle Nahanee), who has assembled a powerful collection of teaching and practices in the service of decolonization. Her work is opening eyes and building capacity and she holds it with the energy of a matriarch. Donating to Michelle’s work helps her to develop new resources and grow the impact of her work. You can learn more about her work and offer a donation at the Decolonizing Practices website. You can also sign up for a 4-week online program there, so consider that too.
The other woman I’m donating to this year is Teara Fraser. Teara is a pilot and an entrepreneur who is single-mindedly focused on indigenous women’s leadership development, including her own. She created the first indigenous-women owned airline, Iskwew Air, which flies out of Vancouver. During the pandemic, along with the Indigenous LIFT Collective, she has been raising funds to fly essential goods and services to remote indigenous communities along our coast.
I’ll be donating to that initiative this year too and hope you will join me in supporting this work.
I’m grateful to be living and working on Squamish land, and deeply grateful for the work these two women do in the world.
These sea lions are afraid to be in the ocean, because a small family of orcas are nearby, and they hunt sea-lions for food.
Years ago I was facilitating an Open Space meeting for people working in philanthropy, several of which were self-identified libertarians. They were unfamiliar with the process, and had the common misgivings about it seeming “unstructured.” People often confuse an empty container with a lack of structure, but in truth, Open Space meetings are highly structured. They offer a form and a process to help a group self-organize around issues of importance to the participants themselves. The process invites a radical blending of passion for a subject and responsibility for doing something about it.
Witnessing the empty agenda wall and the circle of chairs, one of the libertarian participants complained that the lack of structure was making him nervous and he needed to be told what we were going to talk about, what the outcomes were going to be and what would be done on the day. I teased him a little about being uncomfortable with freedom, to which he responded “well yes, THIS kind of freedom.”
That was interesting.
Harrison Owen has called this common experience “freedom shock” and it is what happens when people who are used to be told what to do suddenly get the freedom to take responsibility for their own actions. The way to deal with it is to keep asking people what they care about and what they would like to do about it. Fortunately, Open Space provides a mechanism for others who feel the same way to find each other, so that you are not alone, and can connect your ideas to other people’s.
As the restrictions on our societies are lifted gradually, I am seeing examples of “freedom shock.” Although many of us bristle at being contained and constrained, for many of us, the orderliness of structure and rules he’s us to cope with uncertainty and fear. When those rules are loosened, the become principles, and it is up to each person to interpret those principles according to context and need. We go from being confined in our homes with only sanctioned reasons and times for leaving, to being allowed to get out into public while “maintaining social distance and being aware of others.”
Everyone will interpret these new principles differently, and there is conflict and anxiety around whether one is interpreting the order more broadly that another person.
My friend Ciaran Camman observed this morning that we are comfortable when we can feel the boundary. That seems true for me too. When I know what is allowed and what isn’t, I can relax into being in a small space. When the boundary is more permeable and less clear I can get anxious about what is allowed, what I am supposed to be doing and whether others are doing right. And in these times, the consequences of doing it wrong can be devastating, so there is no amount of risk and pressure in doing this.
Whether it’s COVID or working with containers in facilitated sessions or workplaces, the halting anxiety of freedom shock is a natural reaction to loosening constraints. As you become a skillful complexity practitioner and realize that loosening constraints is one way to influence a system, be aware of this emotional rebound.
And on a personal level, remember that you can always shrink your own constraints inside a larger system if you need more comfort and security. The way we handle too much freedom is by choosing limitations that help us make order of all the possibilities. I wear a mask in public, and although I am allowed to be out and about more, I’m choosing to stay home as much as possible, still treating myself as an asymptomatic carrier of COVID, despite not knowing if I have had it. These personal heuristics allow me to be comfortable, confident and live by my principles. I’m glad things are opening up, but aware too that I have come to be comfortable functioning in a small bubble and a part of me is nervous at this moment.
Just a little story about how I lost my assumptions about mask culture.
Here in Vancouver, over the past twenty years, it used to be very common to see people from Asia, specifically China, Japan, and Korea, wearing masks out in public. I have to admit that for a long time I felt it was kind of arrogant like you were wearing a mask because you didn’t want to contract something from me. To the naked eye, it didn’t look like folks were vulnerable. It looked like healthy, mostly young people were wearing masks to send a signal that somehow it wasn’t safe to be around me.
Last year, however, I was in Japan, and one day, crossing the street in Shinagawa, I saw tons of people wearing masks and I turned to my Japanese friend and straight out asked her “what’s the deal with everyone wearing masks?”
And she matter of factly replied “of course…because they are feeling a little bit sick and they don’t want anyone else to get infected.”
This realization hit me so hard that I may have actually stopped in my tracks, halfway across the street, on one of the busiest pedestrian crossings in Tokyo, upsetting the flow of pedestrians moving out from the busy Shinagawa station and causing a bit of grumbling from the folks behind me.
I was simultaneously overcome with gratitude, admiration, and shame. That was the beginning of my education in how key consideration for other people is as a rule in Japan. In general, folks there try to respect each other’s space, not to make noises too loud, to talk on their phones while on a train, to wait in traffic when there is a delay, or patiently line up for a ticket booth or a train. In a culture like that, of course wearing a mask is about consideration for other people.
These days I am wearing a mask when I am in my local village or in the city, and because of this particular epiphany, I find that when doing so I am a lot more conscious of my neighbours and the strangers around me. I wear a mask, because I might be infected with COVID-19 and be asymptomatic, and the kinder thing to do is to try and keep my breath to myself as much as possible.
Now I get why people are a bit put off wearing masks. I understand why people reason that “I’m not vulnerable, I probably won’t catch it, and anyway, the masks don’t protect you…” I get that because we live in a culture that prizes our individuality over consideration for others. We rationalize our behaviour based on our personal good first. And often that’s all the planning we do. The results of this behaviour are evident in things like climate change, or the inability to address the opioid crises, poverty or homelessness with radical solutions. The vast majority of people look at their own circumstances and believe that they are not connected to these problems, or that somehow they are immune to them.
In our culture, it takes an epiphany to change one’s view. It seems that one has to get sick, or become homeless or addicted before suddenly things become problems. We often hear stories of people who suddenly find themselves in dire straits complaining about the levels of service at hospitals for example, while for years they never paid attention as health care budgets were slashed to pieces.
One of the biggest lessons I took away from last year’s trip to Japan was about this culture of consideration, and it’s interdependance between the individual and the group (and yes knowing full well there are exceptions to the rule.) One of the things I am taking away from this pandemic is the same. There is no way out of this through an assertion of the individual over the health of the group. That is not how public health works. We must learn that our collective health is bound up in individual choices that we make and that our individual health and overall wellbeing is directly dependant upon the health and wellbeing of the group, and especially the most vulnerable in the group.
That is the lesson this pandemic is teaching us. Whether we learn this or not will very much determine how this thing will play out and what happens next in our world.