I can’t speak for Mexico, but this fall has had a transformative effective on the other 2 countries in North America.
First, Barack Obama. And now here in Canada, the prospect of a progressive coalition unseating the newly elected Conservative minority seems like a more and more likely possibility. So what gives?
First of all, the general mood of both countries has shifted to the progressive side of things, although in Canada, a weak Liberal leader and a screwy representational system left the Conservative party with 37% of the vote and the majority of seats and thus the first shot at forming government. Certainly Obama’s leadership, vision and message has grabbed a hold of the American left in a new and energizing way and it seems like much of the centre right opposition to his leadership has simply vanished, leaving bitter neoconservative right wing idealogues stewing in their jealous regret.
Now both the Obama administration there and the progressive coalition here are trying to do things differently. That begins by reaching out to unlikely friends. In Obama’s case he appoints Clinton and some Republican and bipartisan picks to his Cabinet. Here in Canada, Stephane Dion, the man who penned the Clarity Act which drove a fairly effective stake into the seperatist movement in Quebec, has reached a pact with the NDP to govern (with six NDP Cabinet ministers), assisted by a deal with the seperatist Bloc Quebecois who have agreed to support him on confidence votes at least for the next 18 months.
Three months ago none of this would have seemed possible. Obama’s election seared possibility into the minds of everyone, and in Canada, the Parliament, which had been completely hobbled by Conservative tactics in its last session vowed to bring in new levels of decorum in the new session. Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister, then did a 180 degree turn on that commitment, tabling an economic statement in the House last week to deal with the economic crisis but which contained a slew of ideological poison pills. To adopt it, the Opposition parties would have had to vote against workers rights to strike in the public service, and against the public funding that political parties receive on a per vote basis. That such a statement was made when the Canadian economy is in its worst shape in decades was simply too much for the progressive majority inParliament and they vowed to introduce a non-confidence motion, defeat the government and form their own. All the ground work has been laid for that now and we await the next moves of the Conservatives who may yet suspend Parliament to prevent the change in government. Imagine that. A party forming a minority government suspending Parliament to protect itself from a coalition representing a majority of votes and seats in the middle of an economic crises that needs a new government budget and economic policy. That would truly be the most self-serving of political acts, risking Canada’s economic position for a few months of limited power, for the Consertaives would surely be defeated in the House at the first opportunity.
Now as a progressive minded person, all of this has made me a little giddy and a little nervous. I am truly captured by the notion of politics being done differently (even though on our side the reason for it is much more opportunistic than in the States). I have been imploring my American progressive friends to remember the significance of Obama’s election and remember that what he has set out to do will be hard work and will anger and alienate many people IF people become preoccupied with the day to day struggles and appointments and policy statements. It’s akin to doing major surgery – Obama has the chance to remove a malignant pox on American politics but to do so means making friends with people and ideas that are anaethma to his supporters. But stick by him and have faith that the patient will survive.
My friend Alison made the same prescription this morning for us north of the border too. If we are to have this coalition and we are to make it wotk, we must argue its ideas with conviction but at the end of the day support it at the cost of a disunified progressive poltical sphere, ripe for the splitting by the Conservatives.
If this works, in both countries, the potential benefits are enormous for everyone. The Nothern 2/3 of North America will have a steady, progressive and creative hand on the rudder during this huge economic crises, politics may never look the same and the right wing in both countries will have a chance to reinvent themselves away from the ideological orientation of their previous incarnations, and towards a new conservatism that brings something to the table other than derision and fear mongering.
We have a chance here to seize something. Crisis. Danger. Opportunity. Political leadership will be remade in the next couple of years, and its about time. Hang on.
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Apropos of the fact that Tim Merry, Monica Nissen and I are hosting a module on the Art of Intergernational Hosting at this year’s Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Action, comes this quote from Jack Ricchiuto:
Every aging generation questions whether the generation coming of age has what it takes to learn into maturity as defined by the aging generation. Easy for each to think it knows better than the other. The fact is that they will always know more together than they could in isolation or competition. Hierarchy has the relevance of fossils. In an age of wisdom, life is a circle and we dare to be peers.
We dare to be peers indeed.
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Finally settling into Peter Block’s book, Community: The Structure of Belonging. My partner has been hoarding it since it arrived a couple of months ago.
In the opening chapters, Block takes inspiration from the likes of John McKnight, Robert Putnam, Christopher Alexander and others to crate some basic patterns for collective transformation. These are beautiful and quite in line with the work I do and the things we teach through the Art of Hosting. In fact, I’ll probably add this list to our workshop workbook.
Here is the list, with my thoughts attached.
From John McKnight:
- Focus on gifts. Look at what people are willing to offer rather than what people are in need of.
- Associational life. There is great power in the associations that people form to come together to do good work
- Power in our hands. Who do you think is going to change things? In doing Open Space action planning, I sometimes make reference to the fact that there will not be an angel that parachutes in and saves us. It’s up to us to find the way to make things work.
From Werner Erhard:
- The power of language. What we say about things and people makes a huge difference. Speaking and listening (and therefore conversations) is the basis of changing things.
- The power of context. Contexts are the worldviews which we employ to see things. Powerful contexts enable powerful transformation. For example, in First Nations the context of self-government vs. Indian Act government represents a powerful context for community development.
- The power of possibility. Once a possibility is declared, it comes into being and with skillful invitation, work can organize around it.
From Robert Putnam:
- Work with bridging social capital. Social capital is the relatedness between citizens We express this through bonding social captial, which helps us find others like us, andbridging social capital which helps us find relations across groups. Bridging social capital is the holy grail that takes us from insular groups, to true communities.
From Christopher Alexander:
- Work with aliveness and wholeness. One of my favourite ways to think about work that changes minds is to ask “How does a forest change a mind?” How do you react in a forest? How does it happen so suddenly? Why do old growth forests leave a permanent mark on us? How can we transform minds like a forest does?
- Transformation as unfolding. What is known by the whole of a group or community cannot be exposed all at once. You have to journey to the centre of it, one small step at a time. As you go, you harvest more and more of it, and as it becomes visible, it accelerates the collective consciousness of itself.
From Peter Koestenbaum:
- Appreciating paradox. Paradoxes help us to see the creative tension that lies in complexity. Chaos and Order, Individual and collective, being and doing, work and relationships…all of these contribute to our understanding of the kinds of questions that take us to collective transformation.
- Choosing freedom and accountability. Freedom is not an escape from accountability. “the willigness to care for the whole occurs when we are confronted with our freedom, and when we choose to accepts and act on that freedom.”
- Accountability and committment. What I, and Harrison Owen, calls “passion and responsibility.” Don’t just ask what is important, ask what people are willing to do to make it come to pass.
- Learning from one another. Co-learning rather than experts preaching to students is the way to build the capacity for collective transformation.
- Bias towards the future. We leave the past where it is and focus on now, and the conditions that are arising to produce the futures we want.
- How we engage matters. Or, as we were fond of saying at VIATT, the system is the conversation. How we relate to each other in every instance IS the system.
From David Bornstein:
- Small scale, slow growth. Big things begin from very small ideas. Cultivating the Art of Calling, whereby we learn to issue and embody invitations, and find the people to work with who will bring these into being, is the key practice here.
From Allan Cohen:
- Emergent design. Everything is in flux, and constantly adapting. Ask why the organization hasn’t been moving naturally in the direction that it desires and convene conversations on what you discover. Feed those back to the whole and the course corrects. Cohen also says that he CAN herd cats…by tilting the floor. Deeper contexts often have more leverage.
I realize that I have just provide a precis of Peter’s first chapter, but it is such a cogent summary of all of these ideas, that I couldn’t resist the temptation to add thoughts and links to his synthesis.
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Jon Husband has been threatening to write his book on Wirearchy for as long as I’ve known him, and I can’t wait for it to come out, but in the meantime, he is posting what could well be a chapter from it in two parts over at his blog in a post he calls Perspectives on Designing and Managing Knowledge Work.
(This is me nudging him to get it done so I can add it to my list of books by friends…:-) )
In a synchronous moment, also today George Por, a mutual friend of Jon and I published a nice set of thoughts about collective intellegence and spaces in organizations for the new to emerge.
It’s so interesting to be relationship with people thinking so deeply about organization.
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I’ve suggested that in networks we come together around a purpose and objectives, and then begin to discover appropriate skills sets and motivations amongst members of a given network .. after which we begin to negotiate what we are going to do and why, who’s going to do what,how and by when, and then make this strategic information available, in full view, to all who are participating in the conversations, exchanges of information and the actual work (which often consists of pointing each other to pertinent just-in-time information that will make achieving the negotiated objectives easier or more efficient).
The more I am working with relationships as the essential element with organizational sturctures that work, the more I am coming to realize that the glue that binds structures together is intimacy, friendship and respect. Maturana and Bunnell in their paper on love in organizations note:
There is something peculiar about human beings: We are loving animals. I know that we kill each other and do all those horrible things, but if you lookat any story of corporate transformation where everything begins to go well, innovations appear, and people are happy to be there, you will see that it is a story of love. Most problems in companies are not solved through competition, not through fighting, not through authority. They are solved through the only emotion that expands intelligent behavior. They are solved through the only emotion that expands creativity, as in this emotion there is freedom for creativity. This emotion is love. Love expands intelligence and enables creativity. Love returns autonomy and, as it returns autonomy, it returns responsibility and the experience of freedom.
When we treat each other well, we are capable of being intellegent, creative and free together. When we don;t treat each other well, intellegence, creativity and freedom eludes us. How much traditional organizational development includes love on the menu?
Certainly Jon has been noticing all of this for a long time as an OD practitioner working with the architecture of organizations and communities. His own charting of the shift from hierarchy to wirearchy might be summed up by the watching autonomous individuals be finally recognized as the real part of any organization. As technology advances our ability to work closer together, we find more and more ways to simply operate as companies of friends, making agreements based on the accountability of the heart.
This is not soft stuff I am talking about here. Working this way is what makes major transformations possible in all kinds of fields and sectors. As long as we have energy tied up in defending our small territories and personal fifedoms, we don;t have a full suite of assets to apply to meeting the challenges facing our organizations, communities and world. Being at peace with friends, working side by side with shared purpose, openness and autonomy is what will enable us to become more intellegent than we have ever been, and will provide us with the tools to meet challenges that seem insurmountable any other way.