We have just been through a challenging municipal election here on Bowen Island. At issue was a referendum on whether we wanted to see a National Park established on the Crown Lands on our island. Also in the air was a level of distrust and animosity between some citizens and some of the candidates and the incumbent council.
In the midst of things I made it a practice to see what it would be like to actively facilitate quality of conversation. This meant a number of things for me. It meant finding kindness for those who not only thought differently than me, but who actively took aim at me with ad hominem arguments. It meant finding factual bases for assertions about the past, while paying attention to how speculation about the future could be held in respectful and non-fearful ways. It meant challenging the idea that there was a massive rift in the community (natural considering the use of a yes/no question on a complex topic).
Subsequently, it has meant holding space for grief and outrage from those of my friends who felt hard done by (our Island rejected the Park and elected Councillors that many of us didn’t vote for). It has also meant inviting people to check their gloating, that somehow this was a victory that actually privileged one world view over another. It didn’t. It was really about small differences in the larger scheme of things, which were inflated because the choice we made was one of those that, had we voted yes, would have radically changed the view of our future.
The thing about living on an island is that you know where your boundaries are. Holding space within those boundaries, where differences are exacerbated by our closeness to each other is the most challenging work of hosting. Being an active member of the community, with opinions and thoughts but also equally interested in the meta-level of conversational quality and resourcefulness is challenging, but that was the learning journey I was on for the past few months, and one I continue on. Being active and hosting within the field is fraught with difficulties. What gets me through is a practice and focus on that sweet spot.
For me it comes back to the balance for ensuring that the community is working, learning and tending to relationships in equal measure.
Matt Taibbi gets it:
There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.
But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it’s at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned “democracy,” tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.
via How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests | Politics News | Rolling Stone.
A lot of work I am doing these days centres on supporting activists. Whether it is through the Art of Social Justice, the work of addressing addictions related stigma in the health system, running a pro-action Cafe for the BC Government Employees Union Human Rights and Equity Conference, changing the conversation about immigration in the United States I am surrounded by people both within and outside of systems and corporate structures that are engaged in changing things.
Over the course of the fall I’ve been thinking alot about what I have been learning about action from these folks. I think the model of activist organizing and activity is applicable widely, not just in the fields of social change but in all kinds of change where complexity and new forms of leadership are needed. When I say activism, I mean models of action that are characterized by people working from the power they have, forming alliances, opening up participatory processes and working skillfully within systems to change substance and process. So here are a few insights from travelling the world with people who make things happen.
Pay attention to the process. Ironically, people associate process conversations with a lack of action. But my experience is that that having a focus on process makes action precise, participatory and sustainable and increases the chance of success. Activists who are trying to change systems know that the process is the deep architecture of systems and where systems are stuck, it is because the process is enabling that stuck-ness. You can see this at play in the #Occupy movement worldwide where people are working to learn about and implement new forms of democratic engagement. Skillful focus on process is a way to move innovation forward. At Berkana we say “Slow down to go fast” and this is what that implies. Become skillful with means and radically different ends have a chance.
Look for leadership everywhere. In the social justice movement there is a saying: “check in and step out.” If you come to a change initiative with privilege (ie you have power within the system) the best thing you can do to enable change is to check in with your privilege and step out of the conversation to create space for new leaders and new forms of leadership to come forward. Asserting your privilege closes space down. Becoming an ally to change initiatives is a powerful and important way to support emerging solutions and to allow leadership to come from anywhere. People with power and privilege can open lots of space if we get real about how our power works.
Connect initiatives. Yesterday our addressing stigma initiative had their first champions meeting. Ten people came together and we discussed the 15 action initiatives that were underway. The most important work that we did yesterday was to connect these initiatives together and connect them to existing work within the system so that we could weave a net that lifts the issue through the system. The analogy is similar to weaving a blanket. With single strands you cannot lift anything, but woven together, the strands can form a blanket that can toss people to great heights!
Remember that complex problems require multiple solutions. Using the Cynefin framework for making decisions about process and action has been very useful. The reason is that when we are working in the complex domain, participatory leadership is important and that activist model works well. Creating multiple prototypes and “safe-fail probes” is a powerful way to precipitate change. Relying on analysis and expert leadership is an excellent way to move forward in complicated decision making frameworks. Within organizations, there is a strong bias to defaulting to analysis and expertise. Consultative models are used for complex problems which consult people for ideas, but retreat to expert groups to make decisions based on what they have heard. This is not an appropriate mechanism for addressing complexity. Within organizations, the activist approach can be powerful but it needs to be learned. Wouldn’t it be something for social activists to train people within organizational structures on ways of social innovation?
Become skillful at convening. For me this goes without saying, but Peter Block’s work around emphasizing the competency of convening is an important one. Peter’s redux of this leadership competency is useful here:
– Create a context that nurtures an alternative future, one based on gifts, generosity,accountability, and commitment.
– Initiate and convene conversations that shift people’s experience, which occurs throughthe way people are brought together and the nature of the questions used to engagethem.
– Listen and pay attention
I see these capacities being worked and developed among activists in deep and accelerated ways. When you are working for community change, there is often more at stake than working within organizational settings. Leadership in organizations, especially commercial organizations tends to focus on efficiency, production and increasing revenues. Within communities, change is often precipitated by the threat to lives or livelihoods, addressing violence or inequality and improving complex indicators of health and well-being. Those needs have a way of focusing activist on doing things well, and people who don’t work in this world would do well to learn from those that do. If you are concerned about action, study and learn from those who do it when lives are at stake.
If you are a part of an #Occupy group and are focusing on the facilitation teams, I’d like to offer you some resources from the Art of Hosting community.
On my site are scads of Facilitation Resources for use. All of these are offered free of charge of course. In terms of some of the challenges that #Occupy camps are facing, consensus decision making is one of the big ones. I am amazed at the capacity people are showing in undertaking consensus at the General Assemblies. But there will always be frustrations with these processes. My friend Tree Bressen offers a comprehensive set of consensus decision making resources on her pages and that is well worth a look.
In terms of deeper hosting practice Here is a link to a document i wrote a number of years ago called “Hosting in a Hurry” it can be a useful printout to hand to Occupy Groups to help them think about process. It was written for an indigenous North American audience which explains a few of the context specific stuff. But the essence of it is that it conveys art of hosting practice in a simple and succinct way. It can be used to compliment facilitation or as a discussion document among facilitators at #Occupy events who are learning as they go.
There is some amazing facilitation happening in the #Occupy world and people are learning on the fly. I hope these resources can be useful.
Refugees in U.S. Take Up Farming, as they always have:
At the Saturday farmer’s market in City Heights, a major portal for refugees, Khadija Musame, a (Bantu) Somali, arranges her freshly picked pumpkin leaves and lablab beans amid a United Nations of produce, including water spinach grown by a Cambodian refugee and amaranth, a grain harvested by Sarah Salie, who fled rebels in Liberia. Eaten with a touch of lemon by Africans, and coveted by Southeast Asians for soups, this crop is always a sell-out
Among the regular customers at the New Roots farm stand are Congolese women in flowing dresses, Somali Muslims in headscarves, Latino men wearing broad-brimmed hats and Burundian mothers in brightly patterned textiles who walk home balancing boxes of produce on their heads.
New Roots, with 85 growers from 12 countries, is one of more than 50 community farms dedicated to refugee agriculture, an entrepreneurial movement spreading across the country. American agriculture has historically been forged by newcomers, like the Scandinavians who helped settle the Great Plains; today’s growers are more likely to be rural subsistence farmers from Africa and Asia, resettled in and around cities from New York, Burlington, Vt., and Lowell, Mass., to Minneapolis, Phoenix and San Diego.
In my work these days with migrants and refugees in the United States, it’s stories like this that are a treasure trove of what is really happening on the ground for refugee communities to forge ties of beloning in a culture that is chilly at best and occasionally hostile at worst. Just look at some of the comments attached to this article to get a sense of the uphill battle it is in the US for refugees to get respect, even for a war refugee who is developing opportunities and contributing to the local economy.