I’m back in Johannesburg after three days on the veld west of the city running an Art of Participatory Leadership workshop with my friend from REOS Social Innovation. The weather here has been crazy – constant rain showers and thunderstorms for the whole time we were away, and there is flooding locally here. Driving back into the city we went fender deep through many intersections; major thoroughfares were rendered into fords, water coloured with deep red soil flowing everywhere.
Usually its easy for me to write about these kinds of workshops, but I have to say that South Africa is an overwhelming context. It does not at all lend itself to a simple set of observations. In many ways it is the quintessential study in contrasts: squatter camps next to luxury suburban malls, torrential rains in Joburg and 30 minutes away, lovely summer weather on the safari. Somehow these things have much in common. You are always taken by surprise by the contrast while at the same time struck by how normal it all seems.
REOS Partners is working with two major teams right now, both of which are present at this training. One is Kago Ya Bana (Building together for our children), which is a program that works in the municipality of Midvaal, aimed at ensuring that every child is cared for. The other is a team of people who work with distance learning at the University of South Africa (UNISA). On the face of it, these tow teams have nothing really in common, but in mixing together over the past three days they discovered much in common about moving towards a culture of participatory leadership with stakeholders, funders, learners, parents and children. One project even got started that uses KYB leadership with some support from UNISA folks to build it and see it off.
I think South Africa is a country that exists only because of partnerships and particiption. But much like Estonia, two dynamics are at play. First of all, with the struggle against apartheid now over, a creeping complacency has set in. There has long been extraordinary expectations on the ANC government, but what is catching people by surprise is the decreasing impulse for people to take charge in their communities. I heard this often over the course of the workshop – that there is a hunger for the kind of community leadership that was present in the struggle days, but which has seemed to have waned in the past 15 years. And secondly, like Estonia, South Africa is an emerging country and as such it is trying to perform well on the world stage. To do this, it makes a point of meeting the world’s expectations of it, trying to prove that things are going well and that progress is being made, and I notice that some people re reaching the breaking point in encountering the culture of management by measurement. This was another frustration spoken by many.
Participatory leadership is simply the application of what we have learned from hosting participatory meetings to bigger and bigger contexts. It asks the question what if we applied these principles to ongoing team, organizational and social contexts. To that end participatory leadership offers some relevant antidotes to groups that are suffering from the apathy of a surfeit of chaos or control. This week we found that out in spades I think. People are just quite open and interested in a way of doing things that involves others, that engages that somehow returns humanity to work.
In our work we shared models of hosting participatory meetings, described maps and practices that help us stay grounded and open, and explored ways of harvesting that were inclusive and holistic. In the end, several people stepped forward to crack open and lead projects within their workplaces to make work more inclusive, to work more with clients and learners, and to explore ways to apply some of these ideas and skills. One thing that I love about this work is how REOS is offering it as a part of an ongoing capacity building initiative with their clients. In doing that it continues a shift of seeing in ways that one participant described as “Changing the way change works.” With an ongoing relationship, coaching, and real work at hand, those that take up the practices and explore them in their own contexts will embark on a cool learning journey together, and my sense is that people will begin seeing the results they are looking for as their projects become more inclusive and co-owned by the people with whom they are working. And that is the whole point.
So far my favourite expression here at the Art of Participatory Leadership is “listen loudly.” People use it to describe a quality of attention where your ears are filled with sound and meaning, even if the person you are listening to is whispering.
Good riddance to this decade.
I hadn’t meant to make a post about the past ten years, but a comment from my friend Doug Germann, who is a lawyer by the way, prompted me to write a response that became a little manifesto for action in this next ten years. Here is Doug’s comment:
Chris–
The opposite of love is fear; conversely, the opposite of fear is love. Chris, you have named it well.
We are in a cycle of fear–an attack is made, we become fearful, hunker down, do something however ineffectual. We could somehow accept that there is a certain level of danger past which we can do nothing except be vigilant. But making people sit for an hour with nothing in their laps but their freezing hands will do nothing but make us all more fearful. And fear does not watch very well.
How do we help us to break out of this circle of fear?
Love is somehow the answer, but I do not have the way to apply it. Should we love the terror? I don’t think so: the very attempt was successful in increasing the level of terror in the United States–just touch the fear already there in any way, and the victim will crank up the terror willingly and quickly. Do we love the perpetrator? Somewhere it is written to do so. But we can also and more quickly love the victims–us–by realizing that we cannot stop all attempts.
We must calm ourselves first. We must love ourselves first.
Right now, we do not love ourselves, we fear ourselves–we fear all of us, the other of us. How do we move from there to loving us?
:- Doug.
And in my response I pick up on this notion of victimhood. Here it is in full, withe some further amendments:
One thing about your comment Doug: this notion of the victim. I recall this starting in earnest on 9/11 when everyone declared “we are all New Yorkers” or something to that effect. We conflated concern and empathy for the families of those that died that day with an affront against US personally. We claimed the ground of “victim” and all the attendant outrage that goes along with that.
Victims are not always the best people to decide on response to their wrongs. This is why we have a justice system, and especially why we have a restorative justice system in some places.
The fact is that, I think it’s not a stretch to say that this latest attempt was actually a victimless crime. Sure it inconvenienced a lot of people, and no doubt there were some minor injuries but no one was victimized by this failed attempt. No one killed, no one irreparably harmed. Yet the desire for revenge burns and now Yemen is talked about as “tomorrow’s war.” Wow.
The response is unbridled outrage and everyone and their dog claiming the moral high ground of victimhood. This is why victimhood is so powerful. We build up victims in this culture to the status of martyrs for whatever cause we project on them. We give them a few wishes and nod solemnly in doing their bidding. And it’s one thing to do that with genuine victims like someone who has been disabled by a physical assault (it’s a good thing: comes from our compassionate desire to ask “can I help you?” Is there anything I can do?”), but another to do it with people who claim “an assault on you is an assault on me.” That faulty logic has led the globe in a worldwide war against it’s own paranoia in which millions of people are becoming real victims of confused egos run amuck. That is probably the legacy of this insane decade: that American politicians (and some other, eh Blair?) got to claim the story of 9/11 as “an attack on our freedom, which must be defended at all costs.” From that, a borderline psychopathic President was allowed to divide the world into two camps, manufacture it into a rationale for two open wars and a bunch of nasty, nasty covert operations and medieval law enforcement, and the result is that Americans are less free today than they were at the beginning of 2000.
That was not due to those that committed the crimes on 9/11: it was entirely due to the response. but people who were not victims failing to love themselves enough that they lost their ground. Let’s let this next decade be one where we train together in clarity and love. The fierce love of courage and maturity that it takes to bring peace in the world, in our collective and individual realms.
Happy New Year.
I was watching the Cop15 conference at a distance and I have been thinking that big conferences are maybe not what it will take to shift things. Bigger and more may not be what is needed, or what works. One of the problems is the pressure and expectation that comes from big gatherings – it tends to result in a level of planning and pre-ordained outcomes that actually suppresses emergent behaviour, and emergent behaviour is the mechanism I believe we need to evolve our next level of being, if we are to have a next level as a species.
An exception to my mind has always been the Open Space conference which is built on self-oganization as a mechanism for fostering emergent understanding and work. In fact, recently I have been returning more and more to Open Space in its most pure and extended forms to generate emergent results embedded in sustainable relationships. I find that as a designer I am maybe sometimes a little guilty of frankly pandering to the fears of clients who want me to design results rather than process. The inclination to control is a strong one, to feel like there is much at stake and so therefore everything must be tightly scripted. And yet the reality is that in the world outside of conference, innovation and emergence is happening all the time in fact most conferences, even conferences of amazing and talented people, are a let down because a small group of people – the organizers – seek to control what happens, making sure everyone has a good experience, as if people aren’t perfectly capable of a good experience on their own. It’s a bummer, and real life, where people get to make their own decisions and take responsibility for what they care for, is a whole lot more exciting and productive.
Of course a sole four day Open Space, powerful as it is for fostering surprising levels of emergence and action, still requires much skillful design. I place a great deal of emphasis on the quality and mode of the invitation. How we invite people – how we ACT when we invite people – often says more about the invitation than the text of the invitation itself. Assembling the right people around the right call is a deep art, and in fact might be the deepest art of all the arts of hosting. But once they are in the room, I think most folks, and especially thoroughbreds, like to have the space to run. To be scripted and moved around, have conversations prematurely cut off or started around false or half guessed-at topics, is a travesty. To see a group of highly talented and motivated people create their own emergent agenda and go to work offering everything they can is a truly inspiring sight and to see them doing so over two, three and four days is to watch a community get born. I have experienced three and four day Open Space gatherings a handful of times, both as a facilitator and as a participant and without exception powerful, enduring and totally unexpected results have emerged. And these results have lasted, evolved and morphed into amazing things. I have never seen those kinds of results from other kinds of tightly scripted conferences.
I have been thinking about this for a while, and the missed opportunity in Copenhagen combined with some other observations about over the top conference planning has led me to really question whether the ONE ALL PURPOSE GATHERING has not seen better days. We are so muich more able to work in local and disbursed ways that we don’t need to wait for the big conference to do good work. We can just get on Skype and start going at it. In fact I’m surprised how few people actually do do this. Instead they wait for the big gathering to start something. Having said that, Open Space offers the nearest conference based analogue to this marketplace of life. As designers and conveners, we simply need a powerful invitation, the influence to connect to the right people, and then stand aside as skillful and motivated people connect with one another and find the work they are meant to do together.
Today, the new moon rises, a time of aupicious beginnings, especially coming so close to the winter solstice. These are important moments in Nuu-Cha-Nulth culture, and the times are important in Nuu-Chah-Nulth history. Last month, five Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribes won a landmark court case that gave them the right to sell the fish that they catch. Not on an industrial scale mind you, but on a scale big enough to create small local commercially viable fisheries for communities that desperately need both the work and the reconnection to the sea. Moreover, the courta case declared this as an Aboriginal right, a significant ruling for coastal First Nations in general but for the Nuu-Chah-Nulth in particular.
All of this leads to a time when participatory leadership is needed to seize the opportunity of building culture and community back and doing real, powerful and grounded marine use planning. So today was a good day to get to work.
We begun with 20 minutes of Warrior of the Heart practice, introducing the concept of irime, entering in, joining energies with an attacker and helping them lead a situation to peace. This check in this morning was a powerful reminder to some about the way their work as hosts needs to change, to be able to stand in the fire of aggressive energy and work with it. Fisheries and marine use planning is full of passion and the work these folks will be doing will not be easy. But the passion that drives the aggressive fight for rights and allocations can be used also to build and heal community, and if we enter into that space well, grounded and ready and knowing a little bit, we can do something with that energy.
So today we heard a little about the court case and then we spent some time learning about the seven helpers with this harvest as a result:
From this morning’s sessionshort piece on designing meetings: Four groups of questions to ask before conducting any meeting, to help you choose a good way to get what you need:
BE PRESENT* How will we bring people together in a way that invites them to be present? * How do we make people comfortable to share from their heart and listen together for wisdom and learning?
KNOW YOUR HARVEST * What do we want to take away from this meeting? In what form? (notes? graphics? photos? video? audio?) * How will we use what we gather from the meeting?
HAVE A GOOD QUESTION * What question(s) could we ask that would invite contributions from everyone?
LISTENING PIECE * What is a listening tool that helps us have enough time for people to make their contributions and hear each other? * What kinds of activities and exercises can we use for people to explore content together and provide their own thoughts on our question?
If you use this checklist as a way of organizing your thoughts before a meeting, it will help you to stay focused and to ensure that everything you do is tied to the purpose of the meeting.
Nice…a basic set of planning guidelines for any conversation that keeps us focused on the harvest, and keeps us conscious about process.
After lunch we took the advice of our Elder Levi and the participants went out on the land to think about their work going into the community. This was the time to do a little oosumich, connecting with themselves and presencing the future that starts next week when they return to their communities. When they returned, we went into a really beautiful World Cafe around two questions that Laura and Norinne cracked. The first question was an appreciative question about a time when community was truly engaged. The second question, which we did two rounds on, was on question we could ask to bring community together around marine use planning.
The harvest from this was great, a real set of tools and ideas for them to use when they go home to start the conversation.
And sweet practice this evening. Bruce Lucas put on a potlatch DVD and some of us played Scrabble while Nuu-chah-Nulth tunes echoed through our dining space. Two or three kids played while we feasted on chicken, salmon and some great vegetable dishes prepared by our local caterer. This groups is really gelling, and becoming fast friends. They are tooling up on facebook and Skype to stay together as they move into this work seperately.
Tonight I can hear some geese flying overhead, moving south on the warm winds that have come in. The rain has stopped and the surf still pounds, the ever present sound of sae and land meeting, creating one another out of their shared conversation.
Tsawalk indeed.