Dry Falls, Washington, which is where the Missoula Flood waters poured over the rim of the Grand Coulee and created lakes from the plunge pools at the bottom of the cliffs.
It’s feeling familiar. After four years of mostly working from home and staying fairly close to my home place, I’m travelling more. The difference is that I’m doing it more with Caitlin, as we are working together with groups and organizations on longer-term projects that we are holding together with others. Much of our work together is around building deeper capacity in hosting and participatory leadership with larger institutional organizations such as universities, human services networks, unions, quasi-government organizations and the like. On top of that, we have been doing some Art of Hosting workshops in Vancouver and Manitoba and I have two more coming up in Ontario this fall.
Last week we were in Central Washington State working with a group called Thriving Together which helps build networks of health care providers for whole person health and health equity. This is the second year we have worked with a cohort of folks from that network. We met in Soap Lake, Washington, which in September is quiet. The kids are back in school, the tourists have all left and the town has very little buzz. Soap Lake, which is known as Smokiam (Healing Waters) in the local nxa?amx?ín language is a small, muddy, and very alkaline lake at the southern end of the Grand Coulee. The mud and waters are said to have healing properties and many visitors, especially from northern Europe and Israel, flock to the tow in the summer to partake.
The town itself is not affluent. Soap Lake does not have the water resources or the connection to the interstate to make it rival the towns in the rest of the county. Quincy, about a half hour to the south, is on the Columbia River and is a hub for big agriculture food processing and data centres, both of which use the river to power and cool their operations. Computing “in the cloud” is a misnomer. The cloud needs to rain, and the rain needs to be captured, and the water needs to be swirled around hundreds of thousands of computers that have a real live footprint on the ground. Cloud computing makes it sound so ephemeral. The reality is much more material.
To the north, in the town of Grand Coulee, also on the Columbia River, stands the great dam built during the 1930s to contribute to the two systems change points everyone needed to haul themselves out of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl: water and cheap electricity. In a country where almost every public service is privatized, the Bonneville Power Authority remains a public utility and sells the electricity generated by the dozen or more dams on the Columbia. These dams did their jobs, immortalized in song by Woody Guthrie, (he wrote these songs in less than a month, keeping in line with massive events that happen in a short period of time in these parts) who placed a limited and naive optimism in the people’s power and water, but they also flooded out dozens of Indigenous communities of the Colville Tribes and destroyed the Columbia River salmon runs. The landscape is stunning and captivating and has been radically changed by human hands.
Those human hands worked upon a foundation that was laid down by catastrophic flooding at the end of the ice age, when somewhere between 40 and 100 megafloods cascaded across central Washington, carving deep canyons from the volcanic basalt that had coated the bedrock millions of years before in thousands of feet of lava. the sheer scale of geological processes in this region are mind-blowing, and I found myself absorbed by YouTube videos of the Missoula Floods that carved out features on the land in as little as 48 hours as hundreds of meters of water flowed across the plains and carved the Columbia River gorge on its way to the sea.
Central Washington is no stranger to catastrophic shifts in fortune in the human time scale either. While Quincy and Wenatchee have done well, the further you get away from the Columbia, the harder it is to make a living. Agriculture held a lot of promise in Woody Guthrie’s time and irrigation canals crisscross the whole landscape. But like most industries, agriculture has been largely concentrated in a few hands, and automation has eliminated the jobs Guthrie was so optimistic about. While we were in Soap Lake, except for a single bottle of local wine, none of the food we ate was locally grown. If it was, it was only because it was part of a Sysco order that threw it together with Florida oranges, California lettuce, and bananas from God knows where. Someone is making a killing in agriculture, but it wasn’t the local folks I saw around me.
Instead, what Soap Lake had in spades was community, although it wasn’t obvious to the visiting eye. After spending a week there, we started to meet folks like Simon, the window washer who was sent by the drinkers at the local pub across the street to come and find out what we were up to. Or Nels Borg, who is the defacto golf pro at the Lava Links golf course, which has to be seen to be believed. Nels was in our workshop and is an undaunted community booster, even long championing the funding and construction of the world’s largest lava lamp, something which has very much remained the concept of a plan for 25 years. Like all small towns, Soap Lake has a long story for every “why?”
It’s political season in America and Grant County is a pretty conservative place in general. While there were plenty of Trump signs up (and a bunch of Harris/Walz signs, too), my experience working in the US during these times is that there is just too much work to do for the large-scale silliness to be top of mind for folks. When you are working with people who are caring for folks with addictions, childcare issues, educational challenges, and access to health care and housing, politics and policy are very real. We aren’t in weird arguments about people eating cats. We’re trying to meet the needs of vulnerable people and build public support and collaboration for health and well-being.
The work is real. Caring for veterans, fair housing policies, providing resources for neurodivergent middle schoolers, inclusive economic development, and peer-based support for people in recovery and active addiction. All of it is real and requires collaboration and multiple approaches to meeting needs. The participatory approaches and practices we are called to teach in these settings help set people up to lead in more open and participatory ways, even in a world where public conversations are coming apart and being subjected to lies, intimidation and ideology.
This group is really drawn to the methods we teach – Open Space, World Cafe, Circle, LImiting Beliefs Inquiry – and the theories and tools that help us think about creating participatory work and responses to really complex challenges that overwhelm people and systems. Sometimes, when the questions are just too big, the answer is – at least in the beginning – community. In our rush to do SOMETHING to respond to urgency, it is very easy to create situations that disempower and degrade connections. Organizations like Thriving Together play an important role in supporting the social infrastructure that builds community resilience. They can convene conversations that help diverse groups of people share knowledge and make sense of their conditions, leading to collaborations and resources. Without organizations like that and practices rooted in participatory work, agencies and organizations become siloed, disconnected and lonely.
Soap Lake is really no different from thousands of other communities around the United States and Canada and the rest of the world. It is a small town looking around for help and not necessarily finding it from higher levels of government or the corporate world that has extracted so much of its wealth and talent. It has to rely on its own resources to keep going, and remember what is essential about being a community: connecting, knowing each other, devoting a bit of time and energy to something a bit bigger than yourself because you know that when some are suffering, all are inhibited from full wellbeing.
I love working with groups like this. I admire their work and their undaunted commitment to solving absolutely diabolical problems. I learn so much about the imperative of participatory work from places like this, and I’m grateful for the reciprocal relationships of learning and change-making that we create together.
I was going through some old emails today and found one from 2020 from my friend Susan Phillips in Minneapolis who shared a really moving message about the closing of an important Youth Leadership Initiative (YLI) back then. It relates to how to end a container.
If you’ve been with me in real life you know that I like to end a gathering in a crisp and decisive way. I think it’s important to know when you are done, when the work is complete and when the next thing happens. So for years I have used a practice that I learned from Tim Merry and which he learned in Soweto, South Africa at the Soweto Mountain of Hope Project. This little ritual to end a time together uses three sets of three claps as little blessings. The first set is to clap for ourselves. The second set is to clap for our communities. The third set is to clap for our work in the world.
Susan introduced this practice to the YLI and when the program closed one of the participants, Nou, led the final claps, and she framed it this way:
“We clap on the inside for ourselves – may we always remember our worth, that we are more that what people say, that we are brilliant, that our voices are powerful, that we have wisdom regardless of our age and that we come from a strong line of ancestors. As we all graduate from YLI tonight, may we walk into the world with courage, confidence, knowing our worth and perseverance through hard times. The world isn’t always kind but know that no matter what happens, no matter where we go, we will always have friends here who believe in the fullness, not of who we were yesterday, but of who we are today and who we will become tomorrow. We clap on the inside to remind ourselves that change starts with us. Let us use our personal power to shine bright, to create, to lead, to heal; and vow never to let anyone take that away from us.
We clap in the middle to celebrate the community we have build here over the last 7 months; to acknowledge each of your leadership journeys, your commitments til the end and the contributions you have made this year and to remember the power of coming together across difference. We also clap in the middle to honor the people in our community who are fighting for justice; and to also commit ourselves as leaders to doing what we can to making our neighborhoods and cities a better place for everyone. We are the ones we have been waiting for y’all.
As we clap on the outside, may the universe hear our dreams, our cries and desires for change and justice. May our actions inspire people around us to listen deeply, fight harder and love more. Lastly, we clap on the outside to send our collective energy rippling throughout the world.”
It’s been four years since I got that email, but Nou, wherever you are, your actions continue to inspire me.
Surfboards inside the museum at Nazaré, Portugal, all of which have ridden the biggest wave in the world.
Things I have found while surfing. Have a look at these, and maybe leave a comment about which link grabbed your attention and what you learned there.
(PS…the headlines are links! Click for more)
John Coltrane’s ideas behind “A Love Supreme.”
I adore this piece of music. I think I first heard it about 20 years after it was recorded, which was nearly 60 years ago now. It is a high form sacred music piece, as important and meaningful as anything that Bach created (it is the season of the Passions, after all) and it so perfectly captures Coltrane’s theology and perhaps every artist’s theology. This article is worth a look for how Coltrane thought about the work and the way he used form as prayer.
Imagining Yourself in Another’s Shoes vs. Extending Your Concern: Empirical and Ethical Differences
An interesting paper about the contrast between The Golden Rule and the idea and practice of what Eric Schweitzgebel calls “extension.” In the paper, Schweitzgebel writes:
“A different approach [to The Golden Rule] treats concern for nearby others as a given and as the seed from which care for more distant others might grow. If you’d care for a nearby child, so also should you care for more distant children. If you’d want something for your sister, so also should you want something similar for other women. This approach to moral expansion differs substantially from others’ shoes / Golden Rule thinking, both in its ethical shape and in its empirical implications.”
This reminds me of the Buddhist practice of Metta, and is food for thought for someone like me who places stock in The Golden Rule.
Every Dr. Johnny Fever DJ break woven into a single show.
If you were a music fan and maybe also if you were involved in radio in the 1970s and 1980s (both of which are true for me), then WKRP in Cincinnati was a must-listen to show. And you had to see the original versions, because the music they played was great but the producers couldn’t afford to syndicate it all, so in re-runs, all the original tracks are just filler tunes and not the originals.
But here is some genius. Someone has taken all of Dr. Johnny Fever’s DJ breaks and announcements and cut them into a three hour show. It contains the live audience laugh track, but it is otherwise a BRILLIANT project and elicits much loving nostalgia for me.
The Implosion of the Retirement Contract
I love a good policy discussion. I admit to being at a loss about how to address inequality and inaccessibility to basics like food, housing and education in a country that thinks of itself as “an advanced economy” and has no political party that is willing or able to make fundamental changes. But policy choices dictate the constraints that create outcomes like unaffordable good food, inaccessible housing and clipping student debt. This paper talks about an interesting underlying assumption that keep property prices high (and therefore also rents).
In nearly all liberal democracies, it is quite normal to treat “property” as “the ideal retirement asset for homeowners, with high house price growth helping downsizers release cash to fund their golden years.”
The Cluetrain Manifesto was a gamechanger for the early web. Those of us that were blogging back at the beginning of the century all knew about it and if your work extended into the organizational world, reading Cluetrain just laid bare how poorly prepared your company or agency or government was to deal with the oncoming onslaught of conversation, creation and disruption to the ways communications, marketing and organizations worked. Cluetrain is 25 years old now and it’s interesting to think about what is different now. Community is largely gone, for one thing.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ritual
Ted Gioia should be a must-read on everyone’s list. He writes on music and culture, and everything he says is thoughtful, skillfully economical, and insightful. He points you to pieces of music you would have never found. He provides takes on culture that you aren’t going to get anywhere else. This piece is so insightful about what it takes to live with boundaries that make our lives meaningful in an era where our attention has been nearly completely colonized.
The Origin of Last Summer’s Maui Wildfire
It’s hard to overstate the impact of the fire that destroyed Lahaina on Maui last summer. Having been there in February and witnessed the destruction myself, it is profoundly sad. To make matters worse, the fires ripped open a wound on Maui that private interests have rushed in to heal. The community is now in serious danger of being lost to outside owners and investment companies who have predatory designs on the land and property that was destroyed by the fire. Locals are in danger of forever losing their home places because there is no public support that can compete with what the wealthy interests are offering. It’s a shit show. In this article, Cliff Mass undertakes an analysis of the causes of the wildfire.
Raise energy and reduce ‘meeting fatigue’ by making meetings optional
My mate Mark McKergow has a research-supported idea for lowering cognitive fatigue for online meetings. It’s simple enough, but it requires managers to let go of control and let the work speak for itself. And it requires organizations to loosen up on the samara of accountability culture that is killing many of the workplaces I am working with.
Evaluation is one of those things that become a massively problematic constraint on a project if one doesn’t understand it, or worse, fears it. My friend Ciaran Camman is offering his course on Evaluation called “Weaving it In” and you should go to that. To get ready for that though, let this whimsical discussion whet your palate.
It occured to me this morning after I posted that piece on affordances last night, I haven’t really blogged about the two loops model of change in living systems. That’s kind of a surprise to me because for the past 15 years or so this is one of the models that has formed a deep part of my practice in working with organizations. Like the Chaordic Path, it is a simple way to grasp deep and complex topics and a good way to introduce groups to concepts that explain more deeply how complex systems work.
(You’ll see me refer to this diagram as a map, model and tool throughout. I suppose it is all of these in different contexts).
So perhaps I’ll make this a series of posts on the two loops. I’ll start with a basic description of the model and then perhaps explore some aspects of application and some stories. If you have been to an Art of Hosting workshop with me, you probably have a version of this description in the workbook, so this won’t be anything new. If you want to see me teaching this online, there is a video here: The Two Loops Model of Change in Churches, which is from a webinar I gave to the Edge Network of the United Church of Canada in 2014. One of my favourite facilitation stories comes from using this map with the United Church, and I promise to share it. We disrupted an intergenerational conflict, and the process was so unexpected and oblique that the Moderator of the time, Gary Paterson, who was in attendance, picked it up and spent the last 18 months of his two-year term doing over 50 workshops using the model to examine the ways the Church is dying (and living). Whenever one uses a model or a map like this, one needs to adopt it for the context, but anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of Churches can see how this is useful on a number of different levels.
At any rate, here’s the basic overview
The two loops model is a map of how change works in living systems. It charts the movement and relationship between systems of influence and emerging systems, and it is a helpful tool that invites leaders to reflect on where their organization is in this lifecycle and what kind of leadership is most useful.
This map was initially created in a swirl of community conversations in and around the Berkana Exchange around the turn of the century. It was first published by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze and called “The LIfe Cycle of Emergence” and is colloquially known as “the two loops model.” Back in the early 2000s when I was doing many Art of Hosting workshops with the Berkana Institute, we incorporated this work in our teaching, especially when we were working with teams embedded in a shared context. As a result, the picture you see above evolved, capturing the many stances and approaches needed to work in different areas of the map.
In living systems, change doesn’t happen in a linear or predictable way. The new forms are born within the old forms and they emerge in the midst of the legacy system. For us to cultivate and work with the life cycle of emergence, leaders need to muster the resources of the legacy system to support the emergence of the new while at the same time navigating the emotional terrain of simultaneous loss, grief, disappointment, creativity, excitement, and rigour.
This map tracks the emergence of new systems at every scale, from the personal through to teams, organizations, communities, societies and the planet.
At the heart of the map is the relationship between the “legacy system” and the “emerging system.” As systems ascend in their power and influence, leaders who can stabilize and structure the system for long-term sustainability are put in place. As long as systems are thriving, these stewards focus on maintaining and managing the long-term health and sustainability of the system.
But change is inevitable, whether it is internally driven or coming from the external context in which a system exists. As changes begin to play against the system, the system loses its fitness and ability to sustain itself and enters a period of decline in its influence. This is a very painful process as many people will try to hold on to what has been lost, and those who wield power unresourcefully can sometimes become more controlling as they use their power to attempt to sustain what is in decline. Without good hospicing of a dying system, this can result in pain and the inability to use the resources of the legacy system to support what is emerging..
The new is always with us, but it is rarely visible to the leaders who maintain the legacy system. It is often championed by outsiders who experiment with new forms and new practices. These outsiders are sometimes people who have left the legacy system to discover something else, and they are often also people who were never included in the legacy system and created new ways of being at the margins of the mainstream.
Leadership in times of fundamental change – whether it is the reorganization of a team or department or whole-scale social changes in demographics, economics, or social systems – requires us to build and foster connections between the legacy and emerging systems. As the emerging system is developing, leaders can support experimentation and safe-to-fail work, allowing for learning about what the new system can look like. Before even naming the new systems we can discover the affordances for change that already exist by seeking patterns in the system that are coherent with a preferred intention for change. There are no guarantees that change will occur down any of these particular affordances, but working with emergence requires us to probe and explore to find out what might work. Often leaders need only go to the margins of their system to learn about promising practices that may later appear in the new iteration of their system. Connecting people into networks and nourishing communities of practice with the resources that are channelled from the dying system can make change work smoother and less conflict-riddled. Many systemic shifts are made worse by the conflict between the two loops, where the legacy system leaders try to hold on to what they have always done, and the leaders of the emerging system, who are shut out of access to the power and resources of the legacy system, organize in opposition to what has gone before.
In living systems like forests, the old nourishes the new and willingly gives itself to the emergence of the next form of life. In human systems where such transitions are accomplished with grace, creativity and energy, it is often due to the leadership that guides the lifecycle of emergence by creating spaces for connection and resourcefulness, which allows the rest of the people affected by these systems to transition seamlessly to the new.
Think of how computers have replaced typewriters as an example of how, over the period of about a decade, users were able to transition to a new way of doing the same things, but with more power. Everything about writing has changed, but we still use the same keyboard, and it became the primary way most people could transition from typewriters to computers.
For leaders, the two loops model helps to begin to understand a non-linear theory of change and helps us to assess where our strengths lie and what connections and capacities we need to develop to work with emergence.
Back in the late 1990s, when Toke Møller and Monica Nissen were mentoring a group of Kaos Pilot students, they went to visit Dee Hock in California to learn about his ideas of the chaordic organization and the chaordic lenses that help organizations stay focused on a minimal necessary structure that allows for coherence and emergence. It was a useful contribution to the budding set of participatory leadership practices that were emerging amongst the early Art of Hosting developers.
After that, Dee Hock’s chaordic lenses got expanded a little and became the “Chaordic Stepping Stones” which we have developed further in the Art of Hosting community, so-called because they slow down the planning conversation and allow one to find secure places to stand in the flow and swirl of planning in complexity. The stepping stones give you places to rest and look around with a little bit of intention and provide you and the people you are working with with a set of conversations that help to make some decisions/ I’ve often described it as a project management tool for the times when “you don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t know where you’re going.”
One of the things that distinguishes it from other planning processes is that we don’t start from vision or purpose; instead, we start from a sense of the current moment, what was called the need, and what I now call “the necessity.” Naming this is critical because current conditions limit what is possible. Too often, strategic planning starts with aspirations, which can either be so abstract that they are useless for guiding concrete action and decisions, or they are aspirations without paying attention to whether it is even possible to move from here to there.
Necessity is embedded in the present moment. When someone feels like “we have to do something,” they are responding to something in the present moment. It is always the first conversation I have with a client: what is happening right now that compels us to do something? In this sense, necessity is truly the mother of intention – a phrase that came to me this morning and is too good not to comment on. Intention – what we mean to do, what we think should happen, and what we want to commit to, provides the affordances that make a purpose concrete and avoids the aspirational aspect of purpose statements that avoid the reality of the situation and take us into a process that is too vague and diffuse to be effective.
PS: I have an online course on chaordic design you can take on-demand that goes into this planning tool in more detail.