
A couple of days I ago I shared a link on twitter from Rob Hopkins about a community meeting held in Totnes in the UK which brought together the community to discuss what to do now that the town had declared a climate emergency. The design of the meeting was highly participatory and I’m grateful that the organizers took time to document and share the results.
The design had all the hallmarks of an effective participatory gathering, including having a well thought through harvest strategy so that the gathering was in service of the work and that it left people engaged, enthusiastic about participating in community work and more importantly trusting one another.
These kinds of gatherings are not uncommon, but it’s unlikely that you’ve ever been to one in your town or city. I’ve been lucky enough over the years to do a few really interesting gatherings in my home community of Bowen Island, including a nearly year long series of monthly Open Space events which ran parallel to our Official Community Plan update and a participatory design session for the future of some of our community lands.
This morning, when asked on twitter what I though contributed to building trust in community meeting I answered with a few thoughts. I’ve written a lot about this before, but it’s always interesting to see what I would say differently at any given time.
So here’s today’s version. As design principles, I think these should be at the centre of design for participatory processes if you want to do things that increase trust:
- Trust the people. Invite them because they care about the issues and they have something to say, and invite them to engage in questions you don’t have answers to. Don’t spend a lot of time lecturing at them. You invited them, treat them like honoured guests.
- Let them host and harvest their own conversations. My core practice here is “never touch the people’s data.” If they are recording insights and clustering themes and writing session reports simply give them the tools or the process for that and let them get on with it. Provide a clear question for them to work on, and let them use their own words to rerecord the answers and insights. Be very careful if you find yourself synthesizing or sense making on behalf of a group. Those are your insights, not theirs.
- Use small groups and mix them up. Put people in proximity to many different ideas and perspectives and let them struggle with difference and diversity. Mix them up. Not every conversation will be great. Let people move on and discover better things in different conversations.
- Work from stories and not opinions. If you want to know about the future of a community ask people to tell stories that somehow capture the change they are seeing, rather than “what do you think is going to happen?” try not to have abstract or aspirational conversations without first grounding the participants in a process that helps them to also see what’s happening in the system.
- Ask people to act within the scope of their agency. Be careful asking for recommendations for other people to do things if you don’t have the resources to undertake those recommendations. Be clear with participants about what you can support at the end of the meeting and what is theirs to do, and don’t ask them for actions that they have no ability to undertake.
If you ask me again in a few months what I would say, it would probably be different, but this is a pretty reliable set of principles to guide design.
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It’s a beautiful day on the south coast of British Columbia. A strong northwesterly breeze is pushing wind driven swell down the Strait of Georgia onto the southwestern shore of Bowen Island. There is snow on the mountain tops, but down here at sea level, it’s 7 degrees. The sun is shining and everything points to a clear evening to watch the lunar eclipse.
The rest of North America is locked into a cold freeze, and next week I’ll be tasting a bit of it with a two week trip to New Brunswick, Ohio and Ontario. This is the time of year people on the west coast write to their friends and relatives in the east and show pictures of the daffodils coming up. It doesn’t feel like winter here anymore, and that’s not unusual for late January. Saying it’s winter until March 21 really has no bearing to what teh rest of the continent is going through. I’ve lived on this island for more than 17 years and I long ago decided that there needs to be a different way to talk about seasons here.
For various reason I identify much more with the Celtic calendar, which marks the year into six week blocks, like this:
- February 1 – Imbolc (“In the belly of the ewes”) which is the first day of spring and the new year.
- March 21 – Spring equinox
- May 1 – Bealtaine (“bright May Day”) marking the beginning of summer and the flourishing of life
- June 21 – Summer solstice and mid-summer day
- August 1 – Lughnasadh (“assembly to honour Lugh, the god of light”) which is the beginning of the fall harvest season
- September 21 – Fall equinox
- November 1 – Samhain (“the end of summer harvest”) which is really the beginning of winter and marked by commemorating ancestors and death.
- December 21 – Winter solstice and mid-winter day.
These markers line up much more with the feeling of seasons on Bowen Island. We mark some of these days locally, with a May Day festival, and a huge community celebration on Hallowe’en as well as its solstice celebrations. And it usually feels very much like winter is over by February 1.
Of course there is an ancient calendar in this part of the world, which from time immemorial has been known as Skwxwú7mesh temíxw. Today I spent time going through the amazing Squamish-English dictionary, reading and thinking about the seasons. The Squamish traditional calendar is focused on activities related to ceremonial and food gathering rhythms. It makes sense that the word for season is “tem” which means “the time of.” Instead of experiencing disconnection (like “it doesn’t feel like winter”), in Squamish the name of the season is based on what is happening on the land and sea, bound up in activities upon which the lives of human beings and communities depend. The season changes when life says it changes.
Traditionally Squamish seasonal names therefore aren’t generally tied to moons or the length of days. Looking at the names for seasons gives you an idea of where the attention of people is in any given time of year. The Squamish version of the European calendar uses names from seasons that roughly correspond to each month. Squamish new year begins in February, when the frogs start singing again, which signifies the end of winter. Of course this happens much earlier in the year on Bowen Island than it does up in the Cheakamus, Elaho and Squamish River valleys. Here on Bowen Island (Nexwlélexwm in Squamish), the frogs will usually start singing during late February.
The calendar is such a clumsy way of describing the rhythms in this territory. It creates arbitrary names and times for what is happening. That clumsiness is the result of the colonization that separated people from the rhythms of the lands and waters and, if you know the way things happen in the territory, you can tell reading through these names how clumsy the fit is between the Squamish times and the calendar months:
- February – tem welhxs (time of the last snow, or when the frogs come to life)
- March – tem slhawt’ (herring time)
- April – tem tsá7tskay (time when the salmonberry shoots are collected)
- May – tem yetwán (time when the salmonberries ripen)
- June – tem kw’eskw’ás (warm time, also used as a word for “summer”)
- July – tem ?w’élemexw (when the blackberries are ripe)
- August – tem t’aka7 (time when the salad berries are ripe)
- September – tem cháyilhen (salmon run time)
- October – tem p’i7tway (time when the deer mate)
- November – tem ekwáyanexw (fall time)
- December – etl’im lhkaych’ (short days month)
- January – mina lhkaych’ (small or child month)
So it makes sense to talk about seasons, especially on the south coast where lunar calendars are hard to use given how cloudy it is during much of the year. There are may other seasons that didn’t make the cut for translation to the calendar, during which the primary activity of the people is described:
- Tem mílha7 – “Winter dancing season,” when ceremonies take place in the longhouse.
- Tem t’ixw – “Winter,” meaning the time to go down, possibly from the idea that people would go down into pit houses in this time of year, or come down into the low parts of the land.
- Tem s7áynixw – “Time of the eulachon”, a small oily smelt that arrives in rivers in April, although these fish are almost completely extirpated from Squamish rivers now. This happens for a short time right after herring season in late March and early April.
- Tem kwu7s – “Spring salmon harvest time” which begins in early summer.
- Tem achcháwem – “Salmon spawning time,” from late August through to late November during which all the focus is on harvesting fish for the winter and spring. This is when the biggest runs of salmon come back to the territory, mainly chum and coho. This is also the time of the heaviest rains and storms on the coast, which fill the rivers, enabling the fish to find there way back to their home streams.
- Tem p’í7tway ta sxwi7shen – “Time when the deer are mating.”
- Tem kwáxnis – “Time when the chum salmon run.”
So living on Bowen Island in a community of settlers anchored in the rhythms of the land and sea, and the cultural traditions of newcomers, I’d say we could develop a calendar of sorts that relates to the way the we live here. We aren’t a big time ocean people, and are without a fishing fleet so our rhythms are much more dictated by what is happening in the forests around us. Inspired by the Squamish tradition of letting the frogs mark the new year, my first draft of such a calendar might look like this:
- Forest music time – in which the frogs wake up and the dawn chorus of songbirds starts to sing.
- New shoots time – when the skunk cabbage and salmon berry shoots begin to appear.
- Blossoms time – first flowers on the berry bushes and the cherry and plum trees around the island.
- Salmonberry time – Late May and into June, when the salmon berries ripen. Time to order firewood.
- Huckleberry time – Following the salmon berries, time of the first swims in the sea
- Salal berry time – the heart of summer when the salal berries are at their ripest.
- Blackberry time – August, when the blackberries are weighing down their bushes.
- Storm season – lasts about two and a half months, from the end of September to the middle of December and begins after the tourists have left and during which we hunker down and celebrate Hallowe’en, Remembrance Day, Light up the Cove and the traditional Christmas season. This time of year is dark and the predominant winds are the southeasterlies that bring rain and power outages.
- Winter – when the major wind storms are gone and we get snow at sea level and the Squamish winds are most dominant. This usually lasts from December to the end of January.
Sitting by my fire, I’m totally enchanted by the poetry of our place and time here on our little rocky island.
Note: the typeface on my blog does not render all the Skwxú7mesh characters correctly. In this post the underlined “k” and “x” characters are replaced with regular k and x’s. You can find the correct spellings for many of these words at this link.
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Bowen Island is where I live and work. Since 2004 there has been an annual Art of Hosting learning event offered by a really solid team of my most deeply experienced and connected friends and colleagues.
Last year Scott Macklin came and made a beautiful video capturing the experience we craft here. Enjoy it and if you would like to experience it for yourself, please join us this November.
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Another two friends died yesterday. They were well known men in our community and both part of the hosting world on our little Bowen Island, integral to providing experiences for visitors that allow us to provide well hosted learning experiences for people here. They didn’t always do it loudly, but they left legacies that are so important to what we are able to do here.
It has been a really strange few months with 9 deaths of people I know to various degrees; from close friends to intimate strangers. Two from suicide, one from a heart attack, the rest from cancer. Several “before their time.” It’s numbing. There are moments I’ve lost count of who has died since July.
I have been thinking lately – especially reflecting on the suicides – that perhaps my job might be to pick up the unclaimed portion of joy that my friends left in the world. It is a crazy world. There is suffering all around us and I understand the idea that “remaining normal in an insane world is insane.” Yet I feel strongly how life moves in me and through my friendships, and communities. I feel immense gratitude for fleeting moments and I realize that I am at times a fierce practitioner of play. Whether I’m playing soccer with my son in our local recreational league, playing music with my daughter and friends, creating workshops, supporting my local soccer teams by singing with hundreds in support of our players – I feel the intense surge of life that comes with the portion of joy that is left to me to claim.
These days I sing for Kay and Dan, the two Shannons, Kieran and Chris, Matthew and the three others (wow, I just remembered one more.) I sing and play for me, find sensemaking in a crazy world in the presence of connections with friends and strangers over the long cadence of lives intertwined or the fleeting moment of random encounters on the buses, sidewalks and trails.
Bernie de Koeven, a master practitioner of play, who himself is dying publically, shared this quote from a comment on his blog followed by his own reflection:
“Speaking of the very end, I recently read a modern classic, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. It explains culture (which I think includes play) as an outcome of this denial. In a sense then, we should not “be calm and carry on” to the very end, but arbitrarily, playfully, insistently dedicate ourselves to the never-ending. I think this is what many people mean by “love” and maybe what Bernie means by play.”
So we have on one side love and play; and on the other, the dead and dying; the somber and despairing. We mustn’t let ourselves get confused by any of these. Love and life, after all, are manifestations of each other. Love is the invitation to life. As is play. It’s all a matter of perspective, don’t you know. From this side, it’s all so obvious: love, play, life. Fear. Dread. Death.
You stand here. The rest there.
Feel the embrace.
So that’s where I am these days. I know the world is crazy right now. I know it’s hard to find the good in the news but you won’t find it there because the news asks you to be only a passive consumer of the world’s pain and joy. What we need to do is rise from our seats and participate in the world as fully as possible. Life is the ultimate infinite game. The joy we seek is located in the little interactions and small kindnesses initiated or received; in play.
My wish for all of us is that we can claim the portion of unclaimed joy that others have left for us, and especially those who rode who claimed more than their share of suffering and rode it to their their end. I know clearly what they want for us, those they loved and whom they left behind. It is to continue living.
I’m here, playing, hunting joy, embracing it when it comes. Not always finding it, but cultivating the eye that sees it in the small and subtle currents of living. And you’re there too, doing your thing, but now reading this and playing along, at least in this moment.
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Where I live, on a small island off the west coast of Canada, the traditional Celtic season markers make more sense for our community rhythms and the cycles of our landscape than the solar seasonal calendar, and I’m not as versed in the Skwxwu7mesh seasons well enough to relate to those.
Today is Lughnasa, the traditional commencement of the harvest season. The province of British Columbia is burning in many places, and today the winds have brought us smoke from the interior to colour the sun pink in a grey and orange sky.
The produce in our local markets is showing tremendous diversity, as the brassicas and squashes and fruits that were planted in the spring join the early harvest of greens and peas. On the land and sea, salmon are returning, the deer have dropped their fawns, and already there are signs up for shares in pigs and turkey’s and sheep for the winter.
It’s also a time of harvest for me from a year that has seen much in the way of professional and personal growth. I am moving from a deep study of theory to a deeper informed approach to practice, wanting now to focus my professional craft on simplicity while beginning to think about how to share everything I’ve been learning over the past 8 years or so for the benefit of other practitioners, especially those who are starting out. I am also looking deeply into my own life and where I am on this journey that has delivered 49 years of living and still confounds me.
There are some new learning offerings being planned for this year, including a session on using complexity for social change that I’m doing with Bronagh Gallagher here in Vancouver and over in Glasgow. I’m also preparing an online course with my friends at Beehive Productions on Chaordic Design. Add to that two Art of Hosting workshops in November: our 14th annual offering here on Bowen Island and one in Amsterdam with old friends. These are all harvests for me.