The above is a photo of a great campfire that happened on Saturday night in the forest by a lake in Eastern Ontario. You had to be there. But if you want to do an interesting exercise, take a moment before reading on and make a list of things that you should do to create a great campfire experience.
I’m working away writing a book on dialogic containers and reflecting on the remarkable phenomenon of stability in the midst of change. I remember years ago Dave Snowden sharing a pithy description of the the difference between robust and resilient structures. Using the examples of a sea wall and a salt marsh, he says, essentially, that a robust system is one that survives by not being changed and a resilient system is one that survives by being changed. That description has always stuck with me and as I look at the nature of dialogic containers, ephemeral spaces which produce meaning between people, it’s interesting to me to think about what contributes to their relative stability in the face of change.
This was brought home to me again today while listening to a talk by Gil Fronsdel on the Buddhist practice of “Right View,” (he calls is “Wholesome View”) the first discipline of the Noble Eightfold Path. Fronsdel uses the example of standing in a rive to discuss what mental and spiritual stability looks like, even as a current flow all around you, carry the river over a waterfall. The way to address your fear of floating over a waterfall is to stand up and take a stable stance:
I’ve been in somewhat shallow rivers, maybe that the river was up to my mid?thigh, and I could lay down flat on the surface of the river, and it had a nice current that carried me beautifully down the river.And it was kind of fun and nice to be floating along. It feels really nice until you realize that the river is going right over a waterfall, a big waterfall. So then it’s not so nice anymore.
And so… you turn around, try to swim upstream, but…the river is pulling you down the stream faster than you can swim up. The waterfall is coming, you can hear the roar. And so all you have to do, though, is stand up in the river. Because it’s shallow… it’s just courage, it’s only up to your mid?thigh. And if you stand there, then the current of the river continues. It flows right by you. But you’re still.
You’re not separated from the current, but now you’re free of the current because you have the stability, the strength of standing there, and you’re far from any danger of going over the waterfall. It’s relatively easy now to walk to the shore or walk up river. And so we get swept away sometimes by our thoughts, swept away by our emotions, swept away by the world and concerns that are going on. And we don’t realize how much we’re being carried along, swept away by the current of this momentum of thoughts, momentum of desires, momentum of aversion. We don’t even see the waterfalls that’s going to take us over sometimes. But what mindfulness teaches us is that we could always have the ability to stand up in the current and kind of wake up and kind of be stable and strong.
In dialogue, containers offer a kind of stability to hold emotions and thoughts. Human beings thrive when there is a container in which we can fully participate, be fully human, and be. And they require us to have that overview of process and context, to see that we are in something that is meaningful, or not, and to notice what is contributing to that state of affairs. From there, we might even be able to catch ourselves and offering a slight shift, a slight move, a slight contribution that might catalyze more or less stability. It is a subtle art.
The way a conversation unfolds around a table and deepens and becomes sticky – you don;t want to leave it – is a kind of stability. When it breaks it’s hard to get it back again, and nif you weren’t a part of it “you had to be there” to understand what it is like. Other forms of stability for dialogue are held through rigid physical or protocol constraints so that deliberative chambers like court rooms and legislatures are designed for rational, non-emotional discourse. When feelings erupt in those chambers, the integrity of container fails, and chaos ensues, because those who are responsible for this spaces have no way to cope with the events of the moment but to shut it all down (don’t perform a haka in the New Zealand Parliament!). That can be a form of liberation, but in the end some form of stable container needs to arise in order for human relationships and conversations to unfold. Places like Parliaments and court rooms are structured to assert a particular kind of power relationship, so the physical and procedural stability of those containers is designed to re-establish that state of affairs “once every one has calmed down” and the dour business at hand can be considered again in the desired modality of the system, in these cases, predicated on notions of reason and civility.
But even in highly structured and constrained places, dialogic containers are emergent. You cannot force meaningful dialogue. You can only set some initial conditions and monitor what unfolds. Even though a room may have robust physical restrictions, adjustments to the constraints of the container can still offer a chance at something meaningful happening. I bristle from the idea that a dialogue facilitator’s role is “to create and hold the container.” I prefer instead to think of that role as one of using constraints to increase the probability that a a dialogic container will emerge. The way I have learned to practice facilitation is to be a witness to the capacity of a group to self-organize and manage itself with minimal intervention from a “facilitator.” Instead we work hard to design initial conditions, and pay attention to threshold practices like beginnings and endings to invite human beings into a place in which meaningful work gets done.
For my whole career I’ve been consumed with the mystery of the emergence and stability of dialogic containers, how something so ephemeral can create deeply meaningful experiences, and how we might find the ways to work with containers – through constraints of connection, exchange, attractors and boundaries – to increase the chances for powerful dialogue and meaning making. Everywhere I look, there are examples and lessons to be learned about this.
So, back to that campfire that is pictured above. If you took the time to make the list, think about whether that list will guarantee a great campfire every single time, from the get go. If not, what do you think you will have to do to make that more likely to happen? The answer to that question might be a good way to think about your approach to facilitation.
Here comes community!
I’m on a flight home to Vancouver from Ontario. It has been a mix of family and business on this trip. This past weekend I joined my colleagues Jennifer Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle for our third Reimagining Education Art of Hosting. Thirty-one people in total gathered at the Queens University Biological Station in Elgin Ontario on the most beautiful fall weekend. The leaves were bright yellow and a little red – more muted this year from drought than usual, but still beautiful. The water and air was warm enough for swimming and canoeing. And the skies offered us moments of crystal clarity during the night. The land was – as it always is – the first and final host.
While we were teaching the chaordic stepping stones yesterday, a very powerful conversation broke open in the group about invitation. In my practice the whole point of using the chaordic stepping stones is to slow down the conversation about process design to really name the shared urges necessity and purpose of a meeting. It is from this place that a quality invitation arises. And when a person is deeply and sincerely invited to a meeting, it makes all the difference for how they show up.
The conversation yesterday contained a thread of grief. Participants were sharing how painful it is to have to go through meeting after meeting in their day without any genuine invitation. Many meetings aren’t even necessary and, like weekly staff meetings sometimes, just occupy a regular hour every week on the calendar help with minimal intention. Because so many of these gatherings are on line now it is becoming common practice for participants to divide their attention between what is “mandatory” and what is more interesting or more pressing. My heart breaks when a participant in a meeting says hello and then turns of their camera, mutes their audio and never appears again. What a waste of their time.
This bleeds into community life too, and I was especially moved by one of our participants, an Elder who cares very deeply about her community, who witnesses public meetings, community gatherings and politics as being hurtful, disenfranchising and a place where people come and work out their own pain and trauma often in laterally violent ways. There is no healing, no restoration, no creativity, no sense of shared purpose and no call for people to offer something. The meetings are corrosive and toxic. We talked about the kinds of room set ups in meetings like that – rows of chairs, no one looking at one another, exchanges only between “the people at the front” and “the audience” as if citizens were actually a mix of paying customers and school children.
When this Elder was speaking, she was expressing the grief of this state of affairs. It occurred to me that this grief is everywhere. Very few of us in any public or community setting feel invited to community work. We might go along to a public information session. Or we might go along to a Council meeting and make a presentation. We might take part in a shouting match over a controversial decision or course of action. But I think many people are mourning the fact that we are never invited into active, creative community with one another. Some don’t even believe that is possible. “Oh a community meeting,” they will often say, folding their arms. “That’ll be…interesting.”
(As an aside, “that’ll be…interesting” is one of the most Canadian ways I know of saying “that whole thing is going to be a complete disaster.”)
Communities are full of talent and resources. How many times have you been asked to serve your community with what you know or what you do? Where are the opportunities for people to participate in community work that also builds community? At the very least, can we do this work together without poison relationships and eroding the promise of democratic and community participation.
The erosion of democracies, the professionalization of decision making and the capture of legislative bodies by huge commercial interests has been going on for my whole life. But when I look around my own home community – which has seen its fair share of divisive conflicts – I can see initiatives that were citizen-led that built things that we need. We now have a health centre on our island, a credit union, a recycling depot and second hand store, and playing fields for fast pitch, soccer and ultimate. We have preserved forest and coastline with the Nature Conservancy. We have institutions like the Arts Council and the Fabrc Arts Guild and the Nature Club and community choirs and the Legion and the Food Bank that all bring us closer together and weave our connection to one another and the place.
In small communities the chance for that kind of thing is higher because we know each other a little better and we can put our finger on the folks that can contribute, and ask them to show up. And we can do it in a way that invites the community to come along and be a part of something. Not every small community is this lucky. Some are in terrible moments of division and conflict that are violent, harmful and probably irreconcilable.
Peace and reconciliation at any scale is not possible without people being genuinely invited into it. The dehumanization of our world in conflict, at work, and in governance leaves us mourning for something that we may not ever have experienced: a genuine invitation to form and join a field of belonging that gives our lives meaning and connection.
I think this is why dialogic work is so important. Anywhere people gather is a chance to correct that tyranny of dehumanization that sees persons as cogs in the machine, to be counted, corralled, manipulated, avoided, lied to or disposed of. As Christina Baldwin has said, you treat a person differently once you know their story. You invite them, you get curious with them, you wonder what they have to offer and you might even make something together.
It’s a grey muggy day here on the south coast of BC, and the photo above is from this morning’s ferry ride into Vancouver to begin a trip to Haida Gwaii this week.
Chris Mowles has a good post on the politics of uncertainty and writes about how that is unfolding in health care systems he is working with. I resonate with these words:
My colleagues’ dilemmas also made me think about the anxiety associated with uncertainty and how it is unevenly distributed. In times of crisis and hardship there is often a myth that ‘we are all in this together’, whereas in reality some are more in it than others. In his book The Politics of Uncertainty Peter Marris (1996) explains how group life, particularly in highly individualised and competitive societies, also comprises competition over who gets to sit with the most uncertainty. Your position in the hierarchy will determine how much you can pass on uncertainty to others. And Marris argues that the most marginalised are likely to bear the brunt.
This isn’t just true of inter organizational politics but of social politics as well. If you want to assert power, offload as much uncertainty as possible(and it’s accompanying anxiety) to others. That way you live with at least an illusion of comfort, shielded from the mental health challenges of being on constant stand-by for crisis or emergence.
It’s one of the reasons why I think it’s important to build capacity for working with complexity throughout organizations and societies, and especially deep in the lower middle management parts of these societies, where anxiety and uncertainty (and accountability) has been shifted. Of course, senior executives and government ministers have massive uncertainty to deal with, but typically they are resourced well to do it. Making complexity tools available to everyone helps everyone, becasue everyone is needed to deal with complexity.
If you want to to talk more about this and how we can provide accessible, lower cost training and capacity building to these levels of organizations and community, let me know. I’m constantly developing my practices and tools for doing this. We are doing this through story work and Participatory Narrative Inquiry, through sharing frameworks like Cynefin and the Two Loops, through our own bundle of complexity tools for facilitation and process design, and through facilitation and leadership practices that increase the relationships and participation that is needed to share the burden of living with uncertainty wherever you are at.
If nothing else, the deep divisions and culture wars in the US, and here in Canada too, are providing us with an opportunity to engage in deep practices of listening across difference. It’s harder now that it has ever been Dan Oestrich, who knows a thing or two about this, explains why.
Process artistry also has its place. Arts and well-hosted conversation are at work in Alberta where a group of researchers have initiated the Common Ground project to address stereotypes in the province. It is providing some useful lessons.
Depolarizing conversations is an initiative of my friends and colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum. It arose in 2021 during COVID when social media had divided families and small towns and disagreements had devolved into violence, assaults and the tearing of the social fabric. They have published some really helpful tools and resources on hosting these kinds of conversations. Get them while you can (and support them in continuing their work).
Irreconcilable difference is inevitable in a complex society but not every issue is an irreconcilable difference. Some are just conflicting perspectives. As long as we conflate conflict with war, we will maintain a tendency to want to avoid conflict instead of courting and supporting difference. Conflict transformation has long been the approach used to create a resilient container for what I call conflict preservation. We need this more than ever. And so do the orcas and the salmon.
One of the tools I use for working with polarities where there is a strong both/and situation is polarity mapping. I’ve written about it before but I love the way Kai Cheng Thom weaves it into her Loving Justice framework.
For more tools and training I can recommend Lewis Deep Democracy as one deeper approach to this work. It’s based in Arnold and Amy Mindel’s processwork. In Canada, I can recommend Camille Dumond and her colleagues at the Waterline Co-op. You’ll see my testimonial on their website. It’s accessible and practical training, even for experienced practitioners, and it will take your own practice deeper.
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.