One of the houses I grew up in as a kid in what is now called “Midtown” Toronto, but was known as Chaplain Estates back in my day, named for the farmer who sold the land for houses at the edge of Toronto back in the early 1900s.
On the road again, and this year is starting to feel like my pre-pandemic travel schedule, one that I thought I might try to cut back on. Not happening though! The trade-off for not being at home much is I get to work with with old friends here in Toronto, Ben Wolfe and Violetta Ilkiw. We just finished a three day Art of Hosting with an interesting group of people including a team involved in creating a Poverty Truth Commission in Mississauga, Ontario, some congregational leaders, restorative justice practitioners, community organizers and educators. A real delight.
Today I find myself wandering the neighbourhood where I grew up in Toronto, past houses in which I was raised, places I played as a child and homes where I spent time with my friends. Every so often, when I am visiting the city, I come back and sometimes just hang out in the spaces, letting the time spirits wash over me, trying to remember names and events, always being surprised by some long forgotten memory that will come back. Fifty-six years doesn’t seem like a long time, but being back in these neighbourhoods finds my mind drifting to the oldest stories this body carries. It must be a little odd to see a middle aged man slowly walking these streets, pausing to sense something, and recover something. I don’t know why I do it but there is a part of me that always belongs to this neighbourhood despite how much it has changed. Maybe we need these experiences of rootedness as humans, especially if we come from a people that never stop moving on to the next place, seeking settlement and leaving parts of ourselves behind. I have spent my life in two countries, nine towns, cities and villages, and something like 20 homes. Something in me misses a deeper integration of my life’s stories. Revisiting these old places brings a bit that into play.
Since the mid nineties one of the homes I have also lived in is the online world and ever since I signed up for my first email address at the National Capital Freenet in 1992, I have posted, discussed, argued, published and mused on the net. I’ve been in all the big social media places and seen them grow into places of incredible connection and generosity and then seen each one fall into enshittification, dominated by the needs to satiate the rapacious appetites of the venture capitalists that demand astronomical returns on their investment. Before long, all of that connection and community gets co-opted and used to train algorithms that activate the stickier parts of your brain. The brain I have is particularly susceptible to these machinations, and so it’s a big deal when I can pry myself away from these places. I think I’ve almost done it.
I have abandoned Twitter after something like 17 years, and my Facebook and LinkedIn use is just limited to sharing blog posts from here and some occasional check-ins with the global Art of Hosting pages. I opened an account on Bluesky because I am deeply involved in Canadian soccer and that is where folks meet. Bluesky is that place for now, but I have no doubt it too will go the way of all the others, and like a cloud of moths, the community will find another home.
But I have returned to blogging more often, you might have noticed, and I use my Mastodon account to post links and engage in some conversation with a small group of people. It’s more of a memory hole than an attempt to gain influence in the online world. Mastodon is structurally different from all the other networks, and it is protected from the kinds of inevitable arcs that will face each new attempt to recreate twitter or Facebook. It also brings the brain less frenetic energy. It is truly a microblogging space, and it helps to think of it that way. A blog and an RSS feed combined into one. I never see anything there I didn’t ask for.
I’m not even going to post link to my social media accounts, because you don’t really need to go there. Anything of substance I have to say, remember, reflect upon, or share I do here at my blog. A few hundred of you subscribe by email and others check in from time to time and I appreciate the connections we make and the conversations and observations that flow here. You will never be served an ad from this site and I only accidentally stumble across the numbers that Jetpack reminds of. This place is not here to harvest things about you: It is a place to harvest things about me out in the open. It is a place of open curiosity and open source learning, and half polished drafts of possibly useful ideas. Glad you’re here too.
It does feel very much like coming back to the old neighbourhood.
C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) appearing in the night sky October 17 over Lake Opinion in Ontario. Shot with my iPhone 13
A collection of interesting links I found and posted at my Mastodon account this month. Happy Hallowe’en!
- A really nice overview of Edgar Schien’s book “Humble Inquiry” and his approach to working with clients. Please read this if you are a consultant.
- This is what happens when you privatize a public service. This is no surprise. We absolutely get what we deserve. Don’t want to pay taxes? No problem. Stick your finger in the wind and see what’s what.
- I truly believe that Citizens Assemblies are the way to go now. Public hearings are not helpful, not transparent, and not generative enough. Here in BC, we undertook a significant initiative back in 2004 when we looked at changing our provincial electoral system. It produced a remarkably creative and well-supported result. There is currently one beginning work to examine the amalgamation of Saanich and Victoria.
- The missing people of North Carolina. My heart is constantly breaking for my freinds and colleagues who are mired in disaster that continues. It is nowhere near over, and the trauma and permanent damage to communities, hearts and brains will not abate any time soon
- Dave Winer is one of the guiding lights in the field of #blogging. I discovered him not long after I started my own Parking Lot blog back in 2002 and followed along with some of the folks that helped inspire him to create RSS and podcasting. RSS should be protected as a treasure of the heritage of humanity. It keeps things open. Scripting News is turning 30.
- The Alberta government’s recent legislative actions are deeply troubling. It’s heartbreaking to see a policy based on exclusion rather than inclusion.
- Traditional Waters, Modern Threats: The Gitga’at’s Fight for Humpbacks. First Nations asserting jurisdiction over their lands and waters generally result in good things for life within their territories.
- A nice collection of Complex Systems Frameworks rendered by my friend Sam Bradd for Simon Fraser University .
- LIstening to Rob Piltch and Lorne Lofsky have an intimate conversation on guitar through Cole Porter’s Everything I Love. These two are absolute masters in very different styles and lions on the Canadian jazz scene.
Back in 2015, Caitlin, Tim Merry, Tuesday Rivera, and I were travelling around the world offering a workshop called “Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics,” in which the four of us were sharing our extensions of work that we had developed emerging out of the common root of the Art of Hosting community and our practices. It was a rich experiment, and we met really interesting folks in Canada, the US and the UK. It started some longer-term partnerships and friendships, and from time to time, I ran into folks who were at those workshops.
I met one of them last week again. Dr. Nomusa Mngoma is a health researcher at Queen’s University, where I was last Monday delivering a day-long workshop on the Art of Hosting basics for the Centre for Community Engagement and Social Change. Nomusa saw the invitation and showed up. When I met her, I had a vague recollection of meeting her previously, but I couldn’t place it. We both thought for a while, and of course, it was at our Beyond the Basics retreat in Kingston in 2015, the last time I had taught in that city.
We caught up and went through the day, and as we were leaving, Nomusa handed me her business card, which wasn’t for her job at Queen’s. It was as the owner and instructor of Dansani Dance Company, a local business specializing in Latin Dance and Ballroom Dance lessons. The moment she haded me the card I had a flash of recollection.
“Wait!” I said. “Didn’t you propose this idea as a topic in the Pro Action Cafe at Beyond the Basics?”
She thought for a minute and, with delight, realized that she had indeed! “That conversation changed my life,” she said.
Wow. I love that.
Later, I was talking with my friend Michelle Searle, who brought me to Queen’s, and she wondered how Nomusa had received the invitation to our event. The workshop was open, but the invitation was only sent out through Queen’s and to a few partners. I told Michelle that Nomusa is an Adjunct Assistant Professor and Health Research Scientist. Michelle expressed delighted surprise because, although she didn’t know Dr. Mngoma in that capacity, apparently, Nomusa is famous in Kingston for leading free outdoor dance classes downtown in the summer!
Nine years from a template full of notes in a workshop to joy unleashed in a community and one happy and fulfilled human being.
I’m on the road again, this time back to Ontario where I will be working with Jennifer Williams, Cédric Jamet and Troy Maracle in a reboot of our “Reimagining Education” Art of Hosting on the shores of Lake Opinicon in eastern Ontario. Whenever I work out east I build in time to visit family for a few days. I arrived in Toronto on Monday, and stayed with my brother, visited with one of our TSS Rovers women’s players, Maddy Mah, who plays in the fall season for the University of Toronto, and then caught a train to Belleville. Last night I stayed with Troy and Shoo Shoo at their home on the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory on the shores of Lake Ontario. We head up to the site later today for some last minute design and set up.
There is no time like the fall to connect my soul with this place. I was born and raised in Ontario – and three years in the UK – and this time of year was always my favourite. If you’ve never been in the hardwood forests of the Great Lakes Basin in autumns, you can scarcely believe the transformation that happens as the sunlight grows weaker and the temperatures ease their way towards winter. The maple forests turn bright red and it is one of the true wonders of the natural world to see a brilliant red forest against a calm lake and a blue sky. There is a reason that the Canadian flag features a red maple leaf I think.
Fall is my favourite Ontario season and it is a very different experience than the west coast where I have lived for the past 30 years. Out there, atmospheric rivers and fierce wind storms are the typical pattern of autumn. The storms hit our coast in a chain of wet and wild weather usually from mid October through to the middle of December, when things grow a little calmer. After the calendar turns, and perhaps a bit of sea level snow falls, the rain continues, but gentler and less energetically powered by the residual heat of the summer sea.
Here in Ontario, this is the time of year the forests turn and November brings heavy and cold rains that wash the leaves off the trees providing the forest floor with a rich mulch to protect it against the killing frosts that are on their way. Already the ground grows a bit frosty at night and there might be a skin of ice on the Lake this week if the wind is calm. November in southern Ontario is a dismal mix of cold rain, wind, decaying leaves and increasing darkness. If you love inclement weather, as I do, it’s glorious. If not, it’s a depressing interregnum between the early fall and the snowy winter.
So this morning I find myself in a deeply familiar land and sound-scape, hosted by my old friends at their home in their territory. Orange trees, blue skies, silver sunlight glinting off Lake Ontario, the calls of Blue Jays and Chickadees in the shrubs. In as much as I have lived more than half my life on the islands and coastal edges of the Salish Sea, these sounds, and smells and sight awaken a deep sense of home in me, what the Welsh might call “cynefin,” a habitat of living, one of the places of belonging that has a claim on my soul.
A detail from the monastary at Mont St Michel in Normandy showing a person overwhelmed with ripening fruit. He’s probably rushing off to his next zoom meeting.
So much has changed since the pandemic began, and it is hard to notice what is happening now. I feel like my ability to perceive the major changes that have happened to us since March 2020 is diminished by the fact that there is very little art that has been made about our experience and very few public conversation about the bigger changes that have affected organizational and community life in places like North America and Europe. All I seem able to grasp are fragments of patterns. Because I work with all kinds of clients in all sorts of different sectors and locations and situations, I do find myself getting struck with similar patterns that seem to transcend these differences, and it makes me wonder a bit about what is creating these patterns.
One of those repeated patterns is “we don’t have time” or “I’m too busy.” The effect of this is that convening people together is becoming increasingly difficult. I used to do lots of three-day planning sessions or organizational retreats where folks would come together and relax in each other’s company and open up a space for dreaming and visioning and building relationships. It was not uncommon for three or four-day courses to take place. Between 2011 and 2019, When we ran the nine-month Leadership 2020 program for the BC Federation of Community Social Services, we began and ended with five-day residential retreats on Bowen Island. We had two-hour webinars every fortnight. While some organizations found it hard to give up that amount of time (10 days away from the office on professional development training in a year!), we nevertheless put nearly 400 people through that program. Nowadays, when we do similar programs, the most we can get are three-day in-person retreats, and usually only one throughout the time together.
This is costing us big time. I am working with organizations where folks are meeting constantly but only spending time together a couple of times a year. The pandemic threw us into an emergency stop-gap approach to remote work that served the purpose of the times: to keep things going while we remained isolated. However, much of what happened throughout 2020 and 2021 was just stabilizing and concretizing these emergency measures. There wasn’t much thoughtfulness to how to make remote work and schooling work well. As a result, I think that many organizations made an over-compensation to being back together in person, and we are seeing some of that backlash now. Some people are six and seven years into their working careers who have only ever really known remote work. Their engagement patterns are radically different from those of us who came up in the days of long off-sites, of days spent in offices and work sites developing relationships and figuring things out together. And that isn’t even to mention schooling. Before the pandemic, there were some excellent programs in BC to support distance education for elementary and high school students, thoughtfully prepared and designed. When the pandemic began, teachers and professors were thrown into a completely new pedagogical context, and very, very few had any practiced ability to work in these contexts.
Of course, what makes this even worse is that we did a terrible job of managing the pandemic. Had we been able to return to office in the summer of 2020, with the virus squashed by a good public health response, it would have been an interesting time. We would have been equipped with experiences of different ways of being, what it felt like to work from home or support communities with a universal basic income. We would have run an experiment without entrenching structural constraints that made it hard to un-run the experiment. Instead, as the pandemic dragged on, temporary structural changes took hold. People moved away from their homes near their offices into cheaper and more distant communities. Public transportation funding shifted as ridership disappeared, and office leases were let go as companies and organizations realized that they could save on overhead and facilities costs. It is now far too late to be thoughtful about integrating the lessons of a global three or four month experiement into an existing society.
It feels to me that the urgency hasn’t gone away. Every day is a slew of online meetings, stacked back to back and on top of each other without any rest between sessions. Work hours are extended beyond a reasonable day, and those of us who are neuro-divergent are tipped into a world of near-constant distraction and dysregulation from the various and persistent demands on our time and attention. My first wide open day on my calendar for which I have no work committments at all is November 27, two months away. Since I turned 55 I have started taking Fridays off which means that I occasionally book full day sessions for that day. And I can move calls around and make time and space when I need to, but in general, I think my calendar probably reflects yours.
Our time and attention has been divided into hour long units, largely dictated by the default setting on our videoconferencing software. A half hour meeting feels like a blessing, as does a three hour session when we can take breaks and slow down.
My relationship to time is changing. Our relationship is changing.
I’m lamenting the loss of deep long engagement. Pre-pandemic we used to even have great online meetings that were rich and deep. People saw them as special and treated them like face to face meetings, giving the work it’s full attention. Cameras were always on.
Nowadays I bet there are heardly any meetings where everyone is focused on the task at hand. There are browser tabs open, phones to play with, tasks to accomplish while the meeting is going on. In some cases when we are doing workshops in organizations, and people have simply accepted the calendar invitation without giving any thought to how participatory it is, folks will just ghost the whole meeting. We have presented to zoom rooms full of black boxes with names in them, every camera off, every mic muted. One meeting I was involved – with elected officials no less, on the subject of engagement – I simply cut it short. No one was paying attention, no one was participating. There was nothing to do. Clearly the work wasn’t important enough, and so I just said something like “Instead of pulling teeth, I’m just going to suggest we finish this session.” A couple of people took a moment to say goodbye, and most just blinked off. I billed them my full rate.
I reallize that my life history as a facilitator has left me ill equipped for these kinds of meetings where attention is splintered into shards and no one seems to have the time to prepare or follow up becasue the next task is coming right up. Instead what I end up doing is focusing deeply on the invitation to the gathering so that everyone who comes has placed the time we have together at the top of their list. Sometimes this means shortening the meeting from two days to one day, or a half day to an hour and a half. I always warn clients that we can’t do the same quality work in half the time, so we make do. If we need a large amount of time together, we will plan something for a few months out so folks can clear their schedules. It’s now all about invitation and preparation, even more so than it ever was.
So…how are you with time and attention? What adjustments are you making to deliver quality in the meetings in which you are participating?
PS. If you want to read a good literature review on this stuff, check out “Remote work burnout, professional job stress, and employee emotional exhaustion during the COVID-19 pandemic.” i need not remind you that we are still in the pandemic; we are just pretending we aren’t.