Sts’úkwi7 is the generic name for salmon in Skwxwú7mesh, and in our second module in the Mi tel’nexw leadership program, Lloyd Attig offered practical grounding in his teachings on the medicine wheel as a way of exploring balance.
My home island is a rock rising out of the fjord that makes up the southern half of Skwxwú7mesh Temíxw. We have a few lakes here and creeks that swell in the fall when the rains return and fill the sea with fresh water infused with the taste of our island. Salmon, who have been living their lives in the Pacific ocean for 2, 3, or 4 years since they hatched in these creeks are able to discern the taste of their home stream in the great mix of waters that fills the Salish Sea. They use all of their senses to find their way home at all costs where they spawn and then die, for their life cycle begins and ends in the same stream, and a powerful drive returns them to their source.
Because of this symmetry in their life cycles, the faithfulness of their return to their places of origin, and their crucial role in the ecology of the Pacific coast, salmon are deeply important animals in both traditional and settler cultures here. They are powerful symbols of active balance and they are essential to the health of coastal forests. Up to 30% of the nitrogen used by the giant trees of our temperate rainforests originates in the ocean and is carried to every part of the land through the capillary network of salmon coming home to spawn and die. In this sense they literally connect land and sea, trees and ocean, erasing the boundaries, mixing nutrients and diversifying the health and wellbeing of the entire ecosystem.
Lloyd Attig, used the salmon as his inspiration to lead us through a series of exercises based on the medicine wheel, to examine interconnection and balance in our own lives. Leadership of all kinds demands that we place ourselves in challenging positions where we are likely to be knocked around, knocked off balance and create damaging dynamics for ourselves and others. I know Lloyd is an accomplished boxer, and so his sense of balance and grounding is born of years of experience in the ring. Tip off balance and the moment you are pushed, you collapse and fall.
For Plains Cree people, and many other indigenous cultures the medicine wheel is a powerful symbol of balance and renewal, just as the salmon is here. Breaking the wholeness of the world into four quadrants, it gives meaning and coherence to the stages of life, the seasons of the year, and the interdependence of the human faculties of spiritual, mental, emotional and physical well being. In our course last week Lloyd led us through an exercise to look at how balanced our every day lives are. Working with the mundane – fine granularity and plenty of examples – helps to reveal patterns of behaviour that indicate where to place our attention to address a current imbalance. This kind of inventory is helpful not as a one time thing, but in an ongoing way, reflection within a framework to see where the attention needs to be.
But the medicine wheel is not simply a tool for personal self-development. Individuals are not solo practitioners in a world without influence. We are embedded in high and higher levels of organization, teams, families, circles of friends, organizations, communities, nations. And we are also embedded in time too, as products of everything we have inherited and living ancestors to the thousands of generations yet to come. For me, practicing the balance and interconnection of salmon is to place oneself in relation to everything upon which I am dependant and which, even in some small way, is dependant on me.
Pacific salmon really are amazing creatures because they embody this teaching so perfectly. All five species that make our coast home exhibit the same circular life cycle of hatching in freshwater, growing and travelling over thousands of kilometres during their short span and then fiercely making their way back to the very gravel bed where they were hatched. Their entire life cycle is in service of the next generation, and becasue they die right after spawning, they never meet their young and never pass on knowledge or guidance. As we say, salmon are born orphans and die childless and yet the cycle of life continues over generations.
As individuals, salmon do everything in their power to grow strong and healthy while they are at sea. Some species, like sockeye, stop eating once they return to freshwater, meaning that they face an upstream journey of sometimes hundreds of kilometres against an autumn freshet with only the fat and muscle in their bodies to power them. Their singular drive and commitment to return assures the survival of their line. When they die, their bodies decay in the river and become food for the tiny creatures upon which their offspring will feast, or are carried away by animals into the forest to feed to soil and provide fresh sources of nitrogen and minerals to the hungry trees of the temperate rainforest.
In terms of a model for living balance and interconnection, there is no better standard than the pacific salmon. Tools like Lloyd’s medicine wheel give us gateways through which we can explore this deep relationship our own self has to all the systems in which we are embedded. Leadership which is in the service of life, at a minimum, requires this perspective and practice.
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.