You might have been following along as I have been playing with this triangle over the past few weeks. This is a version that I think I am happier with for now and it’s already helping me and others to understand a few things. First, what is the influence of a facilitator into the complex system of a group of people. Second, what is a dialogic container thought about in terms of anthro-complexity. And third, what is the role of a facilitator, and what are some of the capacities and moves one can play.
I’ll introduce this in stages, and use language that speaks to facilitators, hosts, participatory leaders. Folks who read this blog, who practice the Art of Hosting, Liberating Structures or other forms facilitation that treats groups as complex. I want this framework to help us inquire into some of things we take for granted such as the role of the host, the helpfulness of methods. the belief in the collective capacity of the group, and in the notion and idea of what a container is and how to work with it.
The title of this post is a nod to Mark Downham’s long treatise The Architecture of Held Space, which is a very generous discussion of these questions too and which deserves a full response on it’s own. But his work and Snowden’s work previously pointed at in this series ask the questions that I am trying to answer here. Here’s a post that links to those writings.
Starting with basics.
Let’s start here. Groups of people are constantly meeting, working, talking and living their lives without the role of a facilitator. Most of human history, historically and in the present day has unfolded without facilitators and consultant working with groups of people to optimize processes, introduce new ways of working together or saving people from the everyday chaos of their lives. I say this in a tongue-in-cheek way, but it’s a serious observation. We – the consulting industry, the hosting world, the facilitation community – are a lot less necessary than we believe.
So we start with the above polarity. There are interactions and there is structure. Pause for a moment and think about where you live. It could be a village, and island, a neighbourhood, a building or a city. Think of ways that people have problems solved together, introduced new ideas, created new things. How neighbours are helped when a new child is born. Or how conflicts arise in the public conversation and how they are resolved or how they cage over time. Novelty in societies and groups springs from interactions between people. They come out of who knows whom, who is connected or not, what gets talked about. Communities and groups are bubbling cauldrons of connections and exchanges. You can never fully understand them, you can never fully see what they are capable of. But beautiful things emerge.
Interactions between people do not happen randomly however. Thing of the place you live and think of the built environment. Think of how folks get around, where they meet and where they don’t meet. Think about the “way we always do things” the traditions, languages, and implicit ways of being that are unique to each place. Think of what it feels like to visit a new place and know that you don’t completely belong there. There are structural elements that shape humans experiences. These structures are physical, psychological, social, and cultural. They are patterns that persist over time that makes some things more likely to happen than other things. These structures can change, but the do so slowly.
The structures and the interactions are continually in relationship. The structure influences what’s easy for people to do wan what is hard for them to do. In complexity, we call these affordances. People who are skilled at working within their own environments often have a good understanding of some of these structures and affordances are are able to work with them in a way that makes things happen. Others might have great ideas, but they always seem to get nowhere. Structures can provide resistance – “that’s not how we do things around here” – or they can provide hard boundaries – “you can’t walk from Bowen Island to the mainland, no matter how much you want to.”
SO the question to ask when learning about a group of people, or when a group of people is learning about themselves is “How do enduring structures shape interactions and how to repeated interactions become structural?”
If you are coming into a community or organization to do work and you don’t start here you are treating each group as a blank canvas upon which your influence can be exerted. This applies especially to consultants but it alos applies to leaders who “drop in” to their teams or departments without any understanding of what is really happening. The field of pre-existing interactions, the ways that people respond to change or generate it, and the pre-existing structures – physical and cultural, immutable and changeable – provide the landscape inside of which any intervention takes place.
Take a breath while I tell you why three is better than two.
Pause here. I’m going to tell you why I’m going to make the next move.
A favoured tool of many consultants is working with polarities. I use them all the time to look at things. Structure and Interaction is a classic polarity. Both exist at the same time, both are helpful, positive states. In the Art of Hosting work we use Chaos and Order. I’ve also used others like Individual and Team, and Organization and Stakeholders. Often conflicts in organizations are about contested ends of a polarity. That’s helpful to see.
But the problem with polarities is that it places a situation on a scale and asks us to maybe balance the upsides of both or do things that will slide the problem more towards on end or the other.
The bigger PROBLEM with pairs like this is that it tends to introduce either/or thinking. Even if we are using a tool like polarity management (which promotes Both/And thinking) we are still highly entrained to see the ends as more important than the middle. That can have the effect of embedding the conflict even deeper and make it feel like maximizing the upsides of one is a compromise or a value tradeoff for people that prefer the other.
And so, what about three?
Snowden has written recently on this, but for decades he has used triads in sense-making in a way that helps us see that a complex situation exists in a space that is influenced by multiple sources of constraints that make some things more possible than others. Triads are a feature of his software, SenseMaker and although they are sometimes hard to understand, I find them helpful for getting beyond simple dichotomies.
And so the next section of this essay will be about the third part of this system, the one that turns a group of people into a facilitated group, a led group, a team, an organization. It is the acknowledgement of an intention, backed with privileged power, that provides an important source of constraints.
The designer
In a recent LinkedIn post responding to an earlier blog post in this series, Natalia Treninya offers a gentle disagreement with my offering of this third source of constraints. She writes: “I find it hard to accept that the design of a dialogue, or of any other creative process, stands as an equal third vertex of the trialectic. Stability and emergence describe the state of the field, whereas design acts upon the field, so to me it belongs to a different level.” (translation from Ukrainian provided by LinkedIn).
I get that, but I don’t agree. The whole point of introducing this third corner is to be honest about the work that intention does when it is coupled with a position of privileged power in a pre-existing field of interactions and structure. Snowden’s constant challenge to the Art of Hosting community, let alone the broader facilitation community as a whole, is to get the facilitator out of the centre of the work. But the facilitator is never removed from the work. That is exactly another problem: cloaking the role of power in good intentions, or a wonderful design, or a set of brilliant exercises.
Even in “complex facilitation“, which is the approach to methods used by the Cynefin community, the role of the facilitator has to be accounted for. Methods are used, each with an intention. Interactions are shaped. Strutures and patterns appear and the facilitator manages the process.
But how and why is the facilitator able to “manage the process?” Because the position comes with the power to do so. That power is accorded by the consent of the group (or not, in which case something else takes over). “Yes, we will do the Future Backwards exercise or the Word Cafe or the Circle or the Paired Walk or the 1-2-4-All” is what the group says to the facilitator, but never completely.. There is always someone in the room who thinks this is bullshit, or who has to suspend their scepticism to go along with the group. We all carry memories of being told what to do that elicit responses ranging from compliance and approval seeking to outright rebellion.
So the unique position of the facilitator influences both the structure of the moment and the interactions. In complex facilitation approaches, the facilitator/host does not get involved in the content of the work, but only manages the interactions between people in the space. That is an important and influential role and so it has to be accounted for.
Time for a break
Let’s watch a video together. Let’s see what happens when the person with the power to shape the process comes into a room ignoring the structures and interactions that are already present in the group and imposes a his own ideas about what should happen. This is a scene from West Side Story where Glad Hand, the community social worker, embodies the bumbling leadership role we have probably all occupied at one time or another. You can read my commentary on this scene here.
Poor Glad Hand. He was convicted that this new method of his would break the group up, introduce new relationships and solve the gang problem. My favourite part of the scene happens after the group rebels and becomes even more entrenched. The police officer makes a bee line for Glad Hand and desperately points out to him how bad he has just made the situation.
Answering the challenge
There are groups interacting in the present moment. There are pre-existing structures that embed and embody the residue and habits of historical practice. And there is the p[ractitioner, the consultant, the teacher, the facilitator, the leader. The one who holds the design that is accompanied by an intention that speaks to a preferred future.
So let’s explore this third point in the triangle in relation to the other two.
Now we are looking at a dynamic space bounded by three sides inside of which dialogic containers exist and move. The Design point can be occupied by a facilitator who brings a method, or a leader, or an authority, or anyone else who has the power and ability to enter the space with intention that can shape the space. The introduction of this third point introduces two new tensions and space in which we can map what emerges from these three tensions.
From a facilitation perspective, the left hand side asks the question of how the method or intention being brought relates to the existing patterns at play. Anyone who has set the chairs up in a circle, while working with an organization used to sitting around a table, will be familiar with this questions. There are ways of doing things. If you are going to be introducing a new intention that results in a new structure, something interesting will happen in contact with the pre-existing structures.
On the other side, the tension is between the intention of the facilitator and what the group is attending to. The group holds the capability for designing and choosing change and a design and intention introduced on top of them runs the risk of being patronizing, disempowering or colonizing in its effect. In complexity, It is not methods or good facilitation or leadership that creates novelty or good responses to the problem at hand but rather the distributed knowledge, capability and capacity of the group itself to address its conditions. This has important implications for what we choose to do. As a facilitator when I am too in love with my method, I impose it in a way that disables the group’s capacity, even while I speak praises to the group’s collective intelligence and capacity.
The space
So this diagram is finally a space represented by three distinct source of constraint that affect and influence the dialogic container. The facilitator’s role then is to constantly attend to the work of the container within this space. In an expert driven process, where for example an engineer is directing a team to install a building system, the interactions of the team members are highly controlled. The engineer might need a detail or two from the front line, but in general, the design and implementation of a knowable system will proceed very close to the left hand edge of the triangle.
On the other hand, a group that is trying to design a new organizational structure for itself might not need any facilitation or design at all beyond an agreement to meet in a pub and kick around answers to the question “how should we make decisions together?” It doesn’t need facilitation, and the intention and design can be entirely co-owned by the group itself. The pub provides a structure, especially if said pub is a part of the ritual space in which the group often decamps to consider the bigger questions in life.
On yet another hand, a consulting intervention for a strategic plan might start with an intention from the Board and quickly move to a narrative capture of the staff, clients and partners of the organization, followed by collective sense-making. This immediately works with the capability of the group to sense opportunities, to name the structural affordances and blockages for development of change and to change the interactions from “working together” to “planning together” which wakes up the latent capacity to a group to make collective decisions and choose pathways forward into the unknown. The consultant becomes responsible for hosting the methods to do that, paying attention all the time to the preferred direction of travel introduced and held by the Board as an intention (“we need a plan to help us move into the future and we need everyone to be involved”). The consultant’s role is to constantly work to attend to and shape the interactions, with consent, with transparency and with accountability.
Dialogic containers arise all the time. As each of the points in the triangle take on great or lesser effect on that container, the container’s life can be mapped in this space. The lifecycle of a container is not linear, it’s not universal and it is context free. Each one appears from the interactions of these constraints and is shifted and influenced over time until it dissolves again. While it exists, the facilitator continually attends to the changing relationship between Design, Structure and Interactions. When the work is done, to put it in Taoist terms, the facilitator disappears along with the container and the people see that they did it themselves.
So play with this a little. Tell me what it evokes in you. I am especially interested in how this challenges your practice, rather than how it validates it? What question for yourself does this open up?
I continue to think through the ideas of containers in dialogic work. Thanks to some conversations with a couple of colleagues I had a thought today about the three-cornered nature of the container.
Inspired by the idea of a trialectic, we can describe containers as occupying a space between three points, depending on what they are, what work they are doing and the nature of the substrate in which they sit. The thee points are Designed, Built, and Emergent. Each of these three has a particular focus. The Designed container channels intention. The Built container provides retention and the Emergent container arises from, and demands, attention.
In facilitation practice, the language tends towards designed and built containers. We talk about holding space, we talk about the boundaries, the physical space, the beautiful question, the method. The role of the facilitator is often defined as a person that designs and holds containers.
Complexity however bids us to pay attention to what is happening. When humans meet, containers emerge, almost instantly. Our attention is directed and held, not with the help of a facilitator, but because the constraints of the situation shape what happens. Some constraints precede the encounter, like physical space, organizational history, culture, and power relations. Others emerge through interaction itself. Some are brought by the designer into the room. Together they constitute the container.
Every actual container is some combination of design, building and emergence. The space between these points is what matters, Asking where a container sits within the triangle tells us what work is being done by intention, what work has been stabilized in material, legal, or social structures, and what work must remain open to emergence.
Different types of containers need to do different work. A storage locker is a kind of built container whose work is only the retention of a space that can be filled. There is very little intention paid to the design of a storage locker, and once one is built, it doesn’t need to be designed again. Not much emerges within it. That’s a feature.
An emergent container is one that arises, for example, when two friends meet on the street. In the moment of encounter, a boundary begins to form and an attractor holds the attention of the interaction. When two friends are actively engaged in a conversation on the street there is stuff going on that an “outsider” would struggle to understand. What is at the centre of their shared attention might not be shared by others. You can feel how this little social space is carved out of the rest of the environment. A conversation between friends relies on attention to proceed, and both bring attention to the moment. No designer. No robust structure that must be held.
A designed container is something like a meeting method. When I am using Open Space for example, I am bringing a deliberate intention to the group. “We should meet this way. The conversations should flow like this. The outcomes can be harvested here.” This can be both helpful and extremely perilous.
When design makes contact with reality is the critical moment. Design is only the beginning. Once people begin interacting, the container inevitably shifts toward emergence. Good facilitation is less about preserving the design than noticing where the design is making contact with reality. If the design is held too tightly, the designer is privileged in the space and the group loses possibilities for true emergence. If the design proceeds from the use of constraints to shape interactions, that can be extremely helpful. If the work is complex, bringing attention to bear into the work is critical. The facilitator role shifts from being the process host to holding attention to what is emerging. Not to name it, or to synthesize, but to inform the next move of shifting constraints, including by enlisting the group in that work: “Should we take a break? Do we need more time? Is this the right question? What’s happening now?”
Design that contacts reality in a built container is one in which intention informs the retention. This is how architecture works. It’s about the deployment of pattern languages (in the Alexandrian sense) to the built environment. A living built environment begins with intention that translates into retention provided by stable structures in the built environment. It alos provides affordances for the attention of the users of space to learn and shape the space afterwards. Think of a community garden, or over longer scales, the built environments of towns and villages that shift and change over the years. Stuart Brand wrote about this in “How Buildings Learn.”
I’m exploring the idea that dialogic containers are spaces and moments (physical and non-physical) in which humans make meaning. Dialogic containers are not things facilitators create or hold. They are patterns of constraint within which meaning-making becomes possible. Good facilitation lies not in holding the container but in learning when to design with constraints, when to rely on built ones, and when to let emergent constraints lead.
The photo for this post was taken on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton last June when the Edmonton Oilers were in the Stanley Cup Finals. Everything in this photo can be mapped in the triangle above.
Back in April at the most recent Art of Hosting we convened, someone asked me “does the Art of Hosting make good faith assumptions about people?” I’ve been thinking about that question ever since, and not satisfied by my answer which, came from a more defensive posture.
I think the short answer is, yes…
We are just about to begin Day Two of our bi-annual Art of Hosting here in Vancouver. Yesterday, we introduced participants to the four-fold practice of the art of hosting (presence, participation, hosting and co-creation) as a generative framework for designing participatory meeting and supporting participatory leadership, and we also taught the Chaordic Path, as a way into confronting the dynamics of self-organization in meetings.
This teaching in particular is a bit of a gateway into complexity theory, as it is intended to help participants confront issues of control and self-organization in facilitation and leadership. For many people coming to the practice of hosting, where we place an emphasis on working with constraints rather than intervening in events, the idea that groups of people can be self-organizing within constraints is sometimes a challenging notion. The idea that we might design dialogic containers thoughtfully to encourage work that is useful, rich, affirming, novel, and full of diversity, difference and novelty is desired, but is tricky in practice.
For me, the dance of chaos and order and the confrontation with the potential of self-organization I found in Open Space in 1995 was mind blowing. It transformed my facilitation practice from being a person whose job was to control conversations, make sure that they “stayed on track” and “dealt with” conflict. My job had been to reframe people’s words and help people listen to each other and write longs lists of things on flip charts. That’s okay I suppose in a communications workshop, but in meetings? Hmm.
At the same time as I had been facilitating groups that way I hated being facilitated in this way. I didn’t want someone reframing things I was saying. I didn’t want differences mediated between myself and another person; I wanted to work those out together. I didn’t need someone else to tell me to listen to another person with curiosity. And if something was to go up on a flip chart, I needed it to be in my own words, especially if the facilitator working with us didn’t know anything about the context they were working in.
After 30 years of hosting conversations very differently, I still get clients calling me to facilitate conversations by, essentially, inserting myself into a set of human dynamics that they are unable or unwilling to participate in. It is not the folks that are excluded or unheard in organizational or community dynamics that are calling me. It is often folks whose agendas are not finding a fast enough route to implementation because there is resistance in the field.
My work is often to help those folks discover what is actually happening. This resistance is information and it tells us a lot about what is possible and what isn’t. Running roughshod over resistance is possible, but unethical. Exploring the nature of the field of relations is a pre-requisite to discovering the affordances for action.
(I once had an employer group contact me to see if I could facilitate the employers’ agenda regarding labour relations issues becasue the unions they worked with were always being unreasonable. When I asked to call the union reps to talk about the issue they told me that wasn’t part of the work and they simply needed me to find a way to get the union to back off their demands and grievances and forward to employers’ agenda. Of course I declined the offer to work with them).
Perhaps it goes without saying, but I think there are a lot of implicit actions of control built into the unexamined role of the facilitator. When folks ask me to deal with difficult people as if I have some magic wand, I’ll often ask them “how would you like to be treated if someone didn’t like what you had to say?” I think in general, most folks are not in favour of being controlled by others, but there is some residual idea out there that facilitation or leadership comes with permission to control conversations, conflict, and dissent. It can be a useful practice for those of us who lead or work with groups to reflect on these questions.
Enabling self-organization and co-creation of a container that can hold conflict is the better – and harder – way. But a group that learns to work with difference and hold conflict generatively while also dealing with harm in a relational way is a resilient group. It becomes a group that can host itself and that doesn’t require a facilitator at all.
To paraphrase Derrida, “the moment of facilitation is a moment of madness.”
We are deep in the rainy season here on the west coast of North America. I’ve been reflecting on my year of work and noticing a few patterns that are coming to mind as I think about the kinds of questions that our clients have been confronting this year. I don’t know that these observations are especially novel, but they do represent patterns that I have seen this year. they also represent places where I think our work can be helpful.
Something of the bigger context.
As it always has been. But that bigger context is currently full of austerity, fear and polarization. Much of our work is within the non-profit and public sector, and our clients have all been facing declines in funding, uncertainty about the future, skyrocketing need from their own clients and a deep questions about using their leadership to confront polarity and division in their organizations and communities.
It used to be that we were confronting a “scarcity mindset” where we feel to recognize the wealth of ideas and leadership that we actually have. This leaves leaders and organizations retreating into their own shells as they try hard to shoulder the responsibility of the work. Often in our organizational development work, we could do things that lift our eyes up a bit and help activate the leadership throughout the organization.
These days, on top of that dynamic, I think we’re facing an “austerity mindset” whereby that wealth of talent, attention and money is still present but it is actually locked away and not available to us. It has been concentrated elsewhere and everyone seems to be preparing to simply do without it.
I’m certainly not 100% sure of this shift, but it feels like the issues leaders are confronting are shifting in ways that we continue to explore with them and their teams, and my colleagues as well. What helps at this time is continued connection and sophisticated situational awareness to see and name what is happening and to be honest about what is available to work with. Maybe, dear readers, you are seeing it too. All work happens in a context and being able to name this context is important, without getting lost in it. I wrote about this back in September.
Five year strategic planning is dead.
The Covid-19 experience seemed to finally put to rest the typical five year strategic planning process. Everyone now has practical and tangible experience of how the best laid plans can be knocked sideways. And in the last year or two, as organizations have been recovering from Covid, they have no been hit with massive uncertainty in the world, including cuts to their funding. And it very much seems irrational, arbitrary and determined by bigger dynamics that are outside of the control of the organizations we get to work with.
In response, the kind of planning I have been asked to do more and more this year is about scenario planning and arriving at a set of practice principles that can help organizations lead towards a variety of futures. I do love this kind of work. It has relational benefits of visioning and dreaming together, but is rooted in deep and practical need for on the ground responses. I’m not an expert at operational planning – and there is always a need for that kind of work – but bringing people together to think about futures and develop some shared resourcefulness about responding to what might happen is useful.
Connection is needed but trust is shaky at the centre.
I have had a blog posts sitting in my drafts for a little while that talks about how we can move from centralized planning and control towards a more networked form of leadership. Ever since I ran across Open Space Technology in 1995 I have seen the need for this, because as Harrison Owen (who we lost in 2025) observed, Open Space activates an organizational structure of shared leadership and responsibility that is latent in any group of people. He called it “The High Performance Organization” and it checks a lot of boxes for what leaders want: engaged staff, ideas and responsibility sprouting up all over, connected and self-organizing teams that are working in a common direction, but meeting challenges where they are at.
The problem is that such networks really depend on the ability and willingness of organizational leaders to open up space for that to happen. We spend a lot of time in our longer engagements working with senior leaders to help them sustain their ability to truly trust the folks in their groups to do the work. It is sometimes a hard thing to bootstrap, but once it gets going, these types of networks can be quite powerful. Central leaders and organizations become conveners rather than resource sinks, and work becomes meaningful. It requires leaders to do the work they are uniquely positioned to do but to release to the community work that can be better done at the edges.
In the little supporter-owned soccer club I am a part of we do this but having our core leadership care for the fiduciary and technical responsibilities or the club and the rest of us live by the principles of “Assume your talents are needed, and proceed until apprehended.” In this way we activate community and true ownership over what we are doing.
And speaking of polarities…
This kind of things means that polarities abound: centralized control and distributed responsibility; continuity of tradition and new responses to emerging conditions; maintaining fiduciary obligations while stretching beyond; focus on the core external offering and building interior connections and development. Every planning process I have been involved in this year seems to hang on one or more of these polarities. Often the conversations about need and purpose start with an acknowledgement that both sides of the polarity are needed and the challenge is to lean into the skills and talent we have to do both. As contextual uncertainty has increased, our clients seem more willing to wrestle with these polarities rather than simply seeing their current conditions as a problem to be solved.
As always, we need to be thoughtful about how we think about change.
We are living in a world which seems to be revelling in ignorance about complexity. Every problem now seems to have a simple answer, with predictable and brutal results. We are fed this line in our civic conversations too, organizational realities and personal lives too. Social media algorithms have shaped our ideas about what is happening in the world and what we should do about it. I think complexity literacy is more important than ever. Just being able to think about the different kinds of change out there TOGETHER helps us to make sense of things in a more useful way and in a way that builds more relationships and therefore more resilience. Some of my go to frameworks for helping folks understand how change happens, the Cynefin framework and the Two Loops framework, continue to be extremely useful for helping people describe the spaces they are in, and chaordic planning has stood the test of time for collaboratively designing responses to these kinds of conditions.
AI is helping us delude ourselves into believing that we don’t need craft, or the ability to confront uncertainty with relationality.
It used to be fairly common that a client would discover that I was a facilitator and hand me an agenda and ask me to facilitate it. Its the reason I wrote the chaordic stepping stones guide in the first places, so that we could explore the possibility space together and design something that was fit to needs instead of simply rolling out a best practice. This year was the first time I received agendas generated by ChatGPT and asked to facilitate those. It took me a moment to figure this out, but I think that many people are probably asking their favourite large language model to give them an agenda for a two day strategic planning process. We are witnessing a massive cultural crises stemming from the destruction of craft across all the arts including music, writing, visual arts and process arts. Designing and facilitating participatory work is a craft. the two go hand in hand. One would never give an accomplished artist a paint-by-numbers set and ask them to use their technique to fill it out the way one wanted. Or hand a musician a piece of music to play that has notes in it, but no sense of development, harmony or rhythm.
Artificial intelligence is excellent at giving one the impression that the uncertainty they are confronting is easily solved. The tools that we currently have access to are extremely powerful aids to help with facilitation work, but they simply cannot replace the craft of relationship building and the time it takes to do work that generates meaningful contribution and ownership and sustainability. Facilitators and participatory leaders need to continue to develop the skills to work with groups of people in increasing complexity, within decreased time frames and a climate of austerity, polarization and uncertainty. Our chatbots are incapable of understanding what we know when we enter a space like that, but those of us that fear the ambiguity of these spaces can find ourselves retreating into the comforting certainty of a set of answers that come from what appears to be a divine and omniscient source. We just have to be careful not to lose the ability to sit together and figure something out. Keep watching sports like soccer and hockey. Keep making music with each other. Exercise the feeling and abilities that we have to make and undo things together without knowing where we are going or what might happen next. Move together, slightly slower than you think you should be, and seeking surprise along the way.
Stories and shared work are helpful.
I had a lovely call the other day with Cynthia Kurtz and Ashley Cooper are some folks Ashley is working with around using Participatory Narrative Inquiry to work with stories in communities and organizations. I continue to use that collection of methods for dealing with difficult and complex situations, including future scenario planning, because my experience has been that making sense of grounded stories together is the best way to engage with the uncertainty and opinionated conversation that passes for civic dialogue. I’m interested in methods and processes of civic deliberation and address conflict with process design. How can we bring difference into governance without confusing it with conflict? How can we work with conflict without confusing it with violence? This is not an area I have ever been comfortable in, but I have found that stories and circle are the best way to have a group of people dive in together on shared work that helps differences become resources and helps conflict become co-discovery. In watching the current kinds of conversations we are having in Canada around things like Aboriginal title, it’s clear that folks with opinions not rooted in actual experience have a hard time even beginning to understand issues, let alone seeing ways in which reconciling differences can be the work of a mature politics, and a potentially defining characteristic of the Canadian project.
So these are some of the things I have seen this year and I expect that these are threads that will continue to grow and bloom in the coming year too. I’m really interested what YOU have noticed?