Sunday was one of these magnificent days we get on the south coast of British Columbia at this time of year, where the deep summer makes a preview appearance with warm temperatures, bright sunshine, and the scent of berry blossoms and new grass wafting on the air. It’s just humid enough that it is warm in the shade, and there is no bite in the breeze by the water. So it was a perfect day to launch the kayaks.
Our first paddle of the year took us out of Galbraith Bay on the northwest side of Bowen Island and had us exploring the shoreline around to Grafton Bay and back. The tide was low and there was lots to see, but most remarkable of all was the number of sea stars
Back in 2013, seas stars began dying by the millions. Over 40 species on our coast fell victim to what became known as Sea Star Wasting Disease which causes them to dissolve and die. Our once abundant sea star populations crashed. Our coast was once covered in deep purple ochre sea stars and the bottoms were patrolled by magnificent huge twenty-legged sunflower stars, with another few dozen species thrown in the mix. Overnight, these iconic creatures disappeared and some years it was nearly impossible to find even one.
The cause of the collapse of sea stars was attributed to warmer seawater – an effect of climate change – and the spread of a virus against which the sea stars were helpless. They had their pandemic, and it looked like entire local populations would be completely wiped out.
Last year, whilst paddling in the Gulf Islands, we saw some ochre sea stars in small patches on some of the more isolated islands, like the Secretary Islands in the Trincomali Channel. This was encouraging.
But yesterday, paddling at low low tide, we rounded a point and saw entire shorelines covered with young ochre sea stars. There were hundreds of them crammed into cracks and nooks and crannies. The vast majority of them were young, and clumping together protected them from hungry gulls that like to wolf them down whole. In a year these stars will be big enough to feast on the sea urchins that have cleaned out our local kelp beds, and thereby restore the balance of plants and animals in that little cycle. More kelp means more small fish, and that is good for the seals and sea lions and the salmon and the orcas. And so goes the chain of interrelationships and interdependencies that make up the marine ecosystem of my local fjord.
Seeing these huge groups of sea star survivors was moving, because I’ve missed them for these past seven years. And in a time of the global pandemic, where we are helpless against our own viral threat, it was good to be reminded of cycles, and resilience.
I hope our sea stars make it, and that they adapt to the ocean conditions and that they have somehow developed an immunity to their virus. I’m hoping they are different and no longer as vulnerable to climate change or disease. The threat of a second spike is always just around the corner, as it is with our virus at the moment. Witnessing a mass local extinction of an iconic species is sobering, and the reminder that survival is possible under changed conditions is encouraging.
I have no idea how OUR pandemic will play itself out: I imagine we will survive. But I’m interested in how we will be different too. This virus detests the things that will defeat it: collaboration, sharing of information, care and protection of the vulnerable, gentleness, compassion. Absent these things, the novel coronavirus COVID-19 will thrive and continue to run through us all, taking the vulnerable and randomly selecting from the rest. If we beat it, it will only be with the capacities and capabilities that make us the best of who we can be.
From the time my daughter was born in 1997, my partner and I went hard on studying learning theory to understand how kids learn, what’s good for them and how to support their growth. These little beings don’t come with instruction books. It’s hard enough to learn how to feed and maintain them, let alone figure out how to help their brains and hearts grow.
We studied for a lot of years and gradually landed on the work of John Holt, an educational psychologist who, in the 1960s and 1970s, studied how children fail in the Boston school system. Motivated by that work, he later wrote a book called “How Children Learn” which was a seminal text in what became the movement of “unschooling” or “life learning.” This is, to some, a radical approach to homeschooling children.
In the early 2000s, along with a few other families on Bowen Island, Canada where we live, we created a publically-funded homelearning support community called Island Discovery Learning Community. There, our children could come together with other kids and adults, with teachers and resources, and even with curriculum and assignments, to engage in self-directed learning in the community.
Unschooling is a serious commitment and we did this with our children until they were 13 and 10 respectively, following their leads, and guiding them until they chose to go to school. At that point, we treated their choice as another step in their learning journey and at the end of every year, checked in with them about whether they wanted to keep doing that. They said yes, and have both since made their way into university – our daughter first as a jazz musician and now studying psychology and criminology, and our son going part time to explore subjects that might interest him, currently focusing on economics.
I share with you this history so you know that I have some experience in what many of you are facing right now. Kids at home, not feeling like you are qualified to teach them anything, not knowing what to do and maybe even afraid that without school they will be set up for failure in life. It’s all real.
SO to give you some hope, I want to share a few key principles and practices that work when you are homeschooling kids. Your mileage may vary.
First, relax. Even if your kid took a whole year off school, it is not going to lasting damage to them. You are not falling behind, and your kids isn’t losing an advantage by spending a tremendous amount of time away from a classroom. Things will be fine. Trust me.K
Don’t replicate “school” at home. This is a recipe for failure. Your home is not a school and probably the last thing your kid wants is a full scale conversion of their living and playing space into a school run by a nervous parent who is trying to replicate a mass education institution with no good grounding in theory or practice. Your home needs to be a home, especially now, and it needs to be a place of safety and security and love for your kids. Try to avoid doing things that place pressure on your relationship and that cause the child to become angry, resentful, or distant. If your school district is giving your child work, make sure it doesn’t take up the whole day. Remember that they need time to goof off and let off steam. So do you, probably.
Notice that you are all learning all the time. Leaning always happens best in context. Your kids will have ample opportunity to practice reading, math, epidemiology, art, music, video editing, writing, research, cooking, animal care, mutual aid and support, ideation, design, technical skills acquisition, and life skills right now. Just like they do every day. Just like you do every day. Learning doesn’t stop, especially in a context that is always challenging and offering up new experiences. What you can do is take time to notice what they are learning, collect examples of their work and build a portfolio together. Homeschooling families do this all the time because if you never go to school, this is how universities court you to attend their programs. On your body of work.
Kids learn at different speeds. For busy parents who are not intimately involved in their kids’ education, it might come as a surprise to realize that your kids all learn things at different speeds. Our son taught himself to read at 4 years old. Our daughter didn’t start reading until she was 10. They both learned to read in a couple of weeks when they were ready to. If you are getting homework from the school and it seems to be taking your kid ages to grasp a concept that is because it takes them ages to grasp a concept. They might not even be ready to grasp it. They are not broken. There is not something wrong and they are not “losing.” You might need to put aside that concept and do something else. Don’t forget there is nothing essential for them to learn right now in this moment. You could spend months trying to teach a kid something when they aren’t ready to learn and find out that a year or two later, they get it right away. Don’t force it.
Adopt this simple pedagogy: STREWING AND CONVERSATION. Seriously, these two practices took us through a decade and a half of support our children’s learning. Strewing means that you flood you environment with interesting things – books, websites, podcasts, videos, games, challenges, work, interesting people – and you watch to see what they attach to. When they show some interest in something, engage them in conversation with genuine curiosity. Ask them questions so that they can teach YOU about the topic. Don’t quiz them or judge where their attention goes. Even if they spend hours playing Fortnight, get in there with them and understand what they are doing. Ask them questions about how they make decisions, come up with a strategy and work together. I daresay that you will learn something from having them teach you about situational awareness, rapid-cycle strategic iteration, and real-time collaboration.
Love them above all else. Can I just bluntly say, that being a parent right now is fucking hard. You’re not failing if you’re feeling that. Your kids are anxious, worried, and carrying a lot as they move through this disruption in their lives. They can’t see their friends and they are possibly even beginning to hear stories of people they love who are getting sick. If they can’t focus on schoolwork, don’t force them to. These are traumatizing times. What they need right now is probably a good hug and a cry. I’m not sure that is an age-dependent need, actually. The most important thing of all is to love them and care for them right now. Make them as happy as possible right now, because that is what will help them stay resilient, and that is the most important thing.
My friend Elizabeth Hunt reminded me on twitter of a conversation I had with her in Glasgow a couple of years ago when she attended a complexity workshop I was offering with Bronagh Gallagher. It was a conversation around what is sometimes called the mid-life crisis, and somehow the image that came to mind when Elizabeth told me how she was doing was one of a chrysalis.
This will be a non-scientific post, so if you are an actual entomologist I apologize for appropriating your field here. But chrysalises both inspire and baffle me. The thought that a caterpillar can crawl into a sac made of its own body and dissolve its form and come out as a butterfly is a cliched image of transformation, but holy crap. Stop for a moment and really think about that. Does the caterpillar know this is going to happen? If it does that shows some tremendous trust. If it doesn’t, then that shows some incredible courage. It just hangs out there, isolating itself from the rest of the world and changing in ways it can never understand.
Does a caterpillar see a butterfly and go “that will be me one day?”
So yes, we are all heading into our chrysalises. Over the past few days, I have been on calls and courses with colleagues all over including in Canada, the USA, the UK, Moldova, Denmark, Colombia, The Netherlands, Australia, Italy, and Brazil. Every single one of us is isolating and practicing social distance. We are all doing the same thing. We have never been more unified in action, and never more physically separated from each other. We have all climbed into our cocoons and are waiting for the imaginal discs to come into play and elongate and grow into our new ways of being. We might be here for a long time. We are going to learn some things.
I am struck by how we are learning to let go of policies and rules that are based on punishment and retribution and choosing to govern social relationships a little more on trust. Relaxing the need for doctors’ notes. Forgiving interest on student loans. Preventing evictions if people are sick or recently laid off and can’t make the rent. We are starting to see things happening that are countercultural to brutal capitalism and a society that is governed by the fear of ordinary people taking advantage of the system. Small things, small changes. Still very gooey. Imaginal discs.
Whatever we are in right now is not the final stage. We are entering an interregnum that will be as big a challenge as any that humanity has faced. It is as big as climate change but more present, so we are actually acting like it is a real emergency, instead of rhetorically calling it an emergency and carrying on as before.
Have some empathy for the caterpillar who creates its chrysalis and becomes a pupa. It may believe that this is now how things are, and meanwhile, at an unconscious level, the imaginal discs are swirling about in its corporeal soup, with a different idea about what it is to become.
Inside the chrysalis, your ideas about yourself dissolve and life itself takes over. Watch for the small signals, watch for what happens at the edges. Amplify the acts of kindness and possibility that you see in your community and your personal life. Document and grow the new practices you discover be they helpfulness, attention, curiosity, or competence. Stifle the urge to seek cortisol hits from triggering events and social media that make you angry, or the outrage merchants that still crave a hold on your consciousness. Instead, cocoon yourself and study your imagination. Those of us that are not of any use in the immediate safety effort must use this time to prepare to lift us all into what comes next. The first responders and caregivers will be tired and we will need to take over for them and govern and lead in a way that is informed by their example and by the things we are all now discovering are possible.
Into the goo, friends.
You might think it a little bit late, but here on the in Howe Sound where I live, New Year traditionally begins. In the local language, Sk?wx?wu?7mesh sni?chim, this time of year is known as “tem welhxs” which refers to the time of the last snows and the frogs starting to sing.
Ten days ago here on Bowen Island, we had a massive snow and windstorm, but at lower levels, all that snow has melted, flooding the creeks and wetlands and making the forest bright green in today’s after-rain sunshine. It’s warm – 9 degrees celsius – and it does have the feeling of spring. Walking home today I heard a frog singing in the meadow, signalling the earth beginning to wake up again from the dark and colder weeks that we have just come through. We don’t have harsh or long winters here: more an extended time of rest and rejuvenation for the forests and streams. It gest dark and cloudy with hard rain and strong winds between November and January.
So happy new year to my Squamish friends and colleagues and tomorrow it will be Lunar New Year as well, so gong hei fat choy and saehae bok mani badeuseyo to my Chinese and Korean friends and colleagues too.
One of the core practices in the world of participatory leadership is working closely with others, and staying in relationship. I’ve sometimes said that my business model is friendship, and that feels truer than ever as I move into my fifties and find myself practicing more and more accompaniment and mentorship in my life and work. It has been an important metric for me to have more collaborators than clients in a given year. It is a further metric that I count many of my clients as collaborators and friends.
And so here is a list of the amazing people I have had a chance to work with in 2019. Read this like the acknowledgement pages in a book, full of gratitude and celebration.
First Caitlin Frost, my partner in life, love, and business. We are working more and more together as our children move into their adult years and we’re discovering lots of gifts in how our joint practice is growing. More to come next year, including a deep offering on complexity, sharing basically everything we know.
A year ago I declared 2019 my personal year of learning about evaluation and I got to do that alongside many close colleagues from the evaluation world. Thanks to Ciaran Camman, Trilby Smith, Jara Dean Coffey, Meaghan Sutton, Rita Fierro and Dominica McBride for guiding me on this journey.
The Art of Hosting is core to my practice and I spend a lot of time teaching the practice and stewarding the community. This year I was on teams in New Brunswick, Manitoulin Island, Chiba, Japan, Whitehorse, Yukon, Washington State, Texas, Bowen Island, BC and Tseshaat, BC. I worked with amazing folks on those teams: Samantha Slade, Amanda Hache, Lewis Muirhead, Jason Doiron, Julie Feltham, Joanna Brown, Shawni Beaulieu, Rose Moss, Kim Haxton, Kelly Poirier, Dawn Foxcroft, Teresa Posakony, Kris Archie, Amanda Fenton, and Tenneson Woolf.
The Japan crew gets a special call out, for hosting us for a month in Japan over five workshops, including two Art of Hostings, a complexity workshop, a dialogic OD workshop and a limiting beliefs workshop. We had an amazing time in Japan and were hosted by the hardest working group of people I’ve ever met. Thanks to Yurie Makihara, Aiko Kakehashi, Kumiko Kigawa, Kiyoichiro Sorimachi, Cheiko Azuma, Maiko Iseda, Kayo Fujiwara, So Yoshida, Kazu Nakamura and Mokoto Nagaishi. That’s “the band” who rocked and rolled across Chiba, Tokyo, Nagoya and Hokkaido and I know there were many more in support of our work together.
There were others that made it possible for me to offer workshops in Europe and online. My partners here are the women at Bring on the Zoo in the Netherlands: Lily Martens, Helen Kuyper, and Caroline Rennie and my dear friends at Beehive Productions, Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen.
There are folks in my life who make things easier by drawing and laying out materials in sessions or in preparation. Graphic recorders Sam Bradd, Avril Orloff, Tiare Jung, Lisa Arora and Corinna Keeling are indispensable to our work, Marshall Watson and Anna Namshirin did some top rate design work for us this year, and Peter Czimmerman made a beautiful text to cloud conference tool.
This year we redesigned the Leadership 2020 program for the Federation of Community and Social Services of BC which meant getting another chance to work with our team of Caitlin, Kelly Poirier, and Annemarie Travers with guests like Wedlidi Speck, Bradley Dick, Ecko Aleck and Jennifer Charlesworth.
I want to extend some deep acknowledgements out to my learning partners, folks that I continue to have important conversations with over the years even though we aren’t necessarily working on things together. Shout outs to Bronagh Gallagher, Bhav Patel, Jenn Meilleur, Olive Dempsey, Lieven Calwaert, Sonja Blignault, Mark O’Sullivan, Ray McNeil and the Art of Hosting community of practice who continue to push my practice and help me grow. They join my own mentors Harrison Owen, Toke Møller, Monica Nissen, Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang in guiding my work
And finally, I’d like to acknowledge some of my clients, who have become or continue to be good friends over this year because we have been in some big work together. Khelsílem, Kris Archie, Rebecca Ataya, Phil Cass, Daniella Gunn-Deorge, Claudine Matlo, Mike Mearns, Siân Lewis, Jennifer Charlesworth, Trilby Smith, Kazu Nakamura, Lidia Kemeny, Meseret Taye, Barry Seymour, Ella Barrett, and Mary Letson are the best clients I could ever hope to work with. It is always an honour to serve the work they are doing – some of it super hard, and all of it deeply impactful for the people in their lives.
I’m humbled by this group of folks from all over. They represent an immense capacity for bringing good things to fruition in the world. They are brilliant, kind, funny, and generous and I count myself blessed to have them all in my life.
I’m Heading into a reflective few weeks now, and I may possibly spin out some blog posts as we go. Thank you for being along with me on the journey this year, commenting on what you read here and pointing me in interesting directions. I look forward to what emerges in 2020 and where our paths may intersect along the way.