I was reflecting today with a friend on the nature of the world right now. We were discussing some of the story collections I have from the early part of the pandemic when I was running Participatory Narrative Inquiry projects with organizations seeking to understand the effects of the pandemic on their services. It’s hard to remember that time, and it’s very hard to remember the “before-times,” as people call them. But reading these stories reminded me of what we all did together all of a sudden. It was meant to be a short-term intervention in our lives. It wasn’t.
I think the pandemic has fundamentally altered our reality. I remember the 2010s as a time when we were starting to get some things right, and for me, that positive aspect of the decade really took shape in the way public transportation was developing in the Vancouver region. During the 2010s, Vancouver built a light rail extension to the airport, began building a subway across the Broadway corridor on the west side of the city and rapidly increased the number of express bus routes and connections, even out to the suburbs. This whole era seemed like one where the focus was on connecting people for a larger public good. It symbolized a collective and concrete commitment to our region’s well-being.
But when the pandemic began, much of that progress halted, and we lost many of those public services because people stopped commuting and meeting in person. On our little island, a successful community-operated express bus ceased running downtown. Our late-night water taxi service disappeared. Deep in the city, streets were taken over for patios, and folks started living outside a little more leading to the establishment of more bike infrastructure. But the return to public transit was slow and still hasn’t reached pre-pandemic levels (as of last year, anyway). People are Uber-ing and using car share programs like Evo, but we’re not getting in the bus. We don’t have to. Lots of us work from home now. It is getting more and more individual.
And that’s what seems to have captured the shift for me. I have no data to back this up – maybe you do – but this shift has led to a diminishment of shared public experiences, replaced by individual, isolated realities. Ironically, while we aimed to work together to to protect each other from the virus, the measures we took dissolved the sense of collective public good into fragmented personal experiences. In fact, I think the reason that so many people feel manipulated and react with a strong desire for “freedom from the government” has to do with the fact that the response to the pandemic required us all to participate but left no space for us to co-create, at least not by the second half of 2020. The early weeks and months were full of community effort locally and our skills were all called into action. Being a person with online hosting skills meant that I could offer a weekly zoom call for local businesses here to keep folks apprised of the supports that were available to them and help them connect to efforts that were ongoing to keepbrikcs and morter businesses solvent during the March – June closures.
That began to change towards the end of the year when folks started getting fed up with the restrictions. We longed to be left alone. We resented governments telling us what to do. We started to see a massive rise in the rhetoric of separation, whether it was deeply individualistic calls for action or movements that pointed fingers, blamed others and backed into relationships to form movements, like the Freedom Convoy in Canada.
As we slowly emerge from this period, it’s evident that our minds and ways of thinking have been irrevocably changed. The information we consume through our devices hasn’t helped us make sense of this transformation; instead, it often exacerbates the confusion and sense of disconnection. We don’t want anyone telling us what to do. We are forgetting how to make things together, other than networks of outrage.
On top of the health crisis, we’ve faced a kind of psychological and cultural trauma. This hyper-individual experience of a global event has left many feeling helpless and detached. Change-making, which requires us to act together to serve a public good, often fails to recognize the deeper, collective nature of our challenges. We see many individual actions without much organizing, connection or collective effort to work with power, policy and resources. Outrage is close at hand. This disconnection and frustration manifest because people feel they’re doing something significant, yet it’s hard to see how these actions fit into the larger picture of systemic change.
Moreover, this period’s grief and unresolved emotions linger in our collective psyche. Many of us were forced into self-reflection during the lockdowns, confronted with who we are and what our lives mean. There is a ton of lateral violence out there right now: people taking out anger and aggression at others for small or even presumed transgressions. We can probably all tell stories of being on the end of a tirade from someone, and probably many of us have stories where WE lost it against someone out of proportion to whatever irritation provoked the outbursts. This unresolved grief remains within our systems as we try to “return to normalcy,” highlighting the need for deeper healing and integration of these experiences.
We were never going to return to normalcy, though. We are in a different place than we were and I cannot put my finger on it. I’d love to hear your reflections on what it has been like. Many of us who work with groups as facilitators have noticed a difference in how groups work. I see fear and reluctance to engage. I think lots of us are regressing in our ability to sit face-to-face with one another and have conversations, especially around hard issues. While I have experienced tremendous healing in hosting conversations and participatory initiatives, I have also seen initiatives fizzle. Folks are increasingly asking me to host Open Space meetings because they just need to put ideas out there and talk about them.
I have a growing desire to understand this state of affairs and put my finger on it in a way others recognize. I have been reading novels set in other pandemic times, but it seems that none of the brilliant authors I have read have caught on to the psychological effects of the pandemic on the collective psyche. I’m not seeing it in films or TV shows, either. It’s as if what we went through has been erased or skipped over in our collective history. We aren’t really telling the story of it, nor are we telling stories that acknowledge it. Has anyone read a novel that spans the years 2019 to now? Let me know. How are you seeing what’s happening?
Surfboards inside the museum at Nazaré, Portugal, all of which have ridden the biggest wave in the world.
Things I have found while surfing. Have a look at these, and maybe leave a comment about which link grabbed your attention and what you learned there.
(PS…the headlines are links! Click for more)
John Coltrane’s ideas behind “A Love Supreme.”
I adore this piece of music. I think I first heard it about 20 years after it was recorded, which was nearly 60 years ago now. It is a high form sacred music piece, as important and meaningful as anything that Bach created (it is the season of the Passions, after all) and it so perfectly captures Coltrane’s theology and perhaps every artist’s theology. This article is worth a look for how Coltrane thought about the work and the way he used form as prayer.
Imagining Yourself in Another’s Shoes vs. Extending Your Concern: Empirical and Ethical Differences
An interesting paper about the contrast between The Golden Rule and the idea and practice of what Eric Schweitzgebel calls “extension.” In the paper, Schweitzgebel writes:
“A different approach [to The Golden Rule] treats concern for nearby others as a given and as the seed from which care for more distant others might grow. If you’d care for a nearby child, so also should you care for more distant children. If you’d want something for your sister, so also should you want something similar for other women. This approach to moral expansion differs substantially from others’ shoes / Golden Rule thinking, both in its ethical shape and in its empirical implications.”
This reminds me of the Buddhist practice of Metta, and is food for thought for someone like me who places stock in The Golden Rule.
Every Dr. Johnny Fever DJ break woven into a single show.
If you were a music fan and maybe also if you were involved in radio in the 1970s and 1980s (both of which are true for me), then WKRP in Cincinnati was a must-listen to show. And you had to see the original versions, because the music they played was great but the producers couldn’t afford to syndicate it all, so in re-runs, all the original tracks are just filler tunes and not the originals.
But here is some genius. Someone has taken all of Dr. Johnny Fever’s DJ breaks and announcements and cut them into a three hour show. It contains the live audience laugh track, but it is otherwise a BRILLIANT project and elicits much loving nostalgia for me.
The Implosion of the Retirement Contract
I love a good policy discussion. I admit to being at a loss about how to address inequality and inaccessibility to basics like food, housing and education in a country that thinks of itself as “an advanced economy” and has no political party that is willing or able to make fundamental changes. But policy choices dictate the constraints that create outcomes like unaffordable good food, inaccessible housing and clipping student debt. This paper talks about an interesting underlying assumption that keep property prices high (and therefore also rents).
In nearly all liberal democracies, it is quite normal to treat “property” as “the ideal retirement asset for homeowners, with high house price growth helping downsizers release cash to fund their golden years.”
The Cluetrain Manifesto was a gamechanger for the early web. Those of us that were blogging back at the beginning of the century all knew about it and if your work extended into the organizational world, reading Cluetrain just laid bare how poorly prepared your company or agency or government was to deal with the oncoming onslaught of conversation, creation and disruption to the ways communications, marketing and organizations worked. Cluetrain is 25 years old now and it’s interesting to think about what is different now. Community is largely gone, for one thing.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ritual
Ted Gioia should be a must-read on everyone’s list. He writes on music and culture, and everything he says is thoughtful, skillfully economical, and insightful. He points you to pieces of music you would have never found. He provides takes on culture that you aren’t going to get anywhere else. This piece is so insightful about what it takes to live with boundaries that make our lives meaningful in an era where our attention has been nearly completely colonized.
The Origin of Last Summer’s Maui Wildfire
It’s hard to overstate the impact of the fire that destroyed Lahaina on Maui last summer. Having been there in February and witnessed the destruction myself, it is profoundly sad. To make matters worse, the fires ripped open a wound on Maui that private interests have rushed in to heal. The community is now in serious danger of being lost to outside owners and investment companies who have predatory designs on the land and property that was destroyed by the fire. Locals are in danger of forever losing their home places because there is no public support that can compete with what the wealthy interests are offering. It’s a shit show. In this article, Cliff Mass undertakes an analysis of the causes of the wildfire.
Raise energy and reduce ‘meeting fatigue’ by making meetings optional
My mate Mark McKergow has a research-supported idea for lowering cognitive fatigue for online meetings. It’s simple enough, but it requires managers to let go of control and let the work speak for itself. And it requires organizations to loosen up on the samara of accountability culture that is killing many of the workplaces I am working with.
Evaluation is one of those things that become a massively problematic constraint on a project if one doesn’t understand it, or worse, fears it. My friend Ciaran Camman is offering his course on Evaluation called “Weaving it In” and you should go to that. To get ready for that though, let this whimsical discussion whet your palate.
Me and some friends “villaging” back in 1996 or so at a session at The Irish Heather in Vancouver. That’s me blissed out on the bottom right of this photo. We are playing traditional Irish tunes together.
Barbara Holmes today in a post at the Centre for Action and Contemplation:
It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to survive. For many of us, villages are a thing of the past. We no longer draw our water from the village well or share the chores of barn raising, sowing, and harvesting. We can get … almost everything that we need online. Yet even though our societies are connected by technology, the rule of law, and a global economy, our relationships are deeply rooted in the memory of local spaces.
Villages are organizational spaces that hold our collective beginnings. They’re spaces that we can return to, if only through memory, when we are in need of welcoming and familiar places. What is a village but a local group of folks who share experiences, values, and mutual support in common? I’m using the word “village” to invoke similar spiritual and tribal commitments and obligations.… When there is a crisis, it takes a village to survive.
In each generation, we are tested. Will we love our neighbors as ourselves, or will we measure our responsibilities to one another in accordance with whomever we deem to be in or out of our social circles? And what of those unexpected moments of crisis, those critical events that place an entire village at risk? How do we survive together? How do we resist together? How do we respond to unspeakable brutality and the collective oppression of our neighbors?
Our lifelong efforts to map our uniqueness do not defeat our collective connections. Although I’m an individual with a name, family history, and embodiment as an African American woman, I am also inextricably connected to several villages that reflect my social, cultural, national, spiritual, and generational identifications. These connections require that I respond and resist when any village is under assault.…
— Barbara Holmes. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/a-collective-response/
I like this idea that connection alone doesn’t equal community. Connection alone is not enough to create spaces where we make meaning of our lives or generate meaning and life with and for others. Instead, there is a need to enliven the space of connection with purpose, shared identity, and meaning.
I am working on a book on dialogic containers, and it really comes down to the principle that what is “contained” in these kinds of contexts is “meaning.” I once heard Jennifer Garvey-Berger use the term “life-giving contexts” in a webinar, and it really struck me that THIS is what we are trying to do when we are working with “containers” in dialogue and participatory leadership work. It is not enough to hand each other a business card or place an organization’s pamphlet in the centre of a circle. That does not create a dialogic container; it does not create a life-giving context for action.
Villages, as Barbara Holmes points out, DO. And a village is not merely a collection of uninhabited houses. It is an emergent identity of a place of human life. You may live in an apartment building, but do you live in a village? What is the difference between your building and a village? What can you do to make it more village?
The answer to that question is the essence of dialogic organizational and community development. The answer to that question leads you to meaning-making together.
Folks in Mitchell County, North Carolina, working with stories of substance use to discover patterns and generate ideas for supporting folks in active addiction and recovery and prevention.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on what participatory leadership really looks like. I use the word a lot in my work – teaching participatory leadership and participatory decision-making – and of course, “participation” is one of the four practices of the Art of Hosting. Hosting meetings and contexts for large-scale work means creating the conditions for participation. And it means learning how to be a good participant.
Words like this are always in danger of being overused, but a couple of moments over the past few weeks has reaffirmed the radical nature of truly participatory design and decision-making.
We have just wrapped up a couple of Art of Hosting Participatory Leadership cohorts with in-person retreats followed by online sessions. For both cohorts – one from a group of 35 senior academic leaders at a large US university and one from a coalition of community health organizations – we did a three-hour online session on participatory decision-making. In both cases, what struck me in discussions with participants is where the heart of participatory decision-making actually lies. It is not enough to be “inclusive” in making decisions. The real work – and the real benefit – comes from an actively participatory process. Inclusion, on the face of it, while worthy in itself, has a kind of passive tone to it. I can say I have included you in a decision, and I can even let you have a vote, but have you participated in the decision? Have you had a chance to co-create what we are deciding upon?
In the right context, participatory decision-making is the most powerful way to create shared ownership over decisions. In this respect, the heart of participation lies not just in having a say in the final stages of a decision but in being a part of developing the proposals being voted upon. I was in North Carolina a few weeks ago working on a Participatory Narrative Inquiry project we’ve been running on substance use and opioids. We collected over 130 stories and, as is a key feature of PNI, ran sessions to bring the community in to make sense of what they were seeing and what needed to happen in their rural counties to address patterns of substance use and support recovery. One circle consisted of folks who were all in recovery or still in active addiction. It was immensely moving to witness them in their power, considering other people’s stories, reflecting on their own stories, and working together to not only generate ideas for local governments and health agencies but actually take the initiative to create spaces for young people to learn about addiction and recovery from those with lived experience. Their feedback was that healing and recovery look like THIS: being active participating members of their societies and communities, and yet that is something that is hardly afforded to anyone, let alone people recovering from addiction.
Perhaps I take it for granted, but on reflection, it seems to me that participation – deep, authentic co-creation – is becoming an increasingly radical act. Where I live, we tend to either consume what is offered to us or are passive participants in the social and cultural dynamics going on around us. What would you say if I ask you where you participate in the world, outside of the decisions you make for your own self or family? How many things do you do where your participation is important to the thing’s success?
Me, I make music, play soccer, help sustain supporter culture at a small semi-professional soccer club, help steward two faith-based communities and participate on teams for teaching and supporting organizations and communities. These are good practices because being a participant in the world is an important capability to keep strong. And if you are someone who hosts or leads participatory spaces and processes, it’s important to know what enables good participation and what it feels like to actively co-create.
But even still, I’m not an active participant in politics, for example, where my participation, such as it is, is minimal and even optional and yet the implications of what happens in the governance arena is deeply influential on my life.
Where are the places we can extend the continuum of participation from engagement to inclusion to participation to co-creation?
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A resource: Sam Kaner et. al. wrote perhaps the finest user guide to this work with the Facilitators Guide to Participatory Decision Making. This is a useful and very sparse collection of maps, tools and insights to help facilitators and leaders create the conditions for more and more participation in their work. Sparse is a good thing. The book is full of tools that folks with even a small amount of facilitation experience can put to work. A Fourth Edition of the book is being prepared for the new year.
Matteo Polisi dives into the arms of The Swanguardians after scoring a goal for TSS Rovers in the Voyageurs Cup, April 19, 2023 . I am somewhere at the bottom of that pile. Photo by Maddy Mah
Our friends Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Tim Merry interviewed Caitlin and me for their podcast From the Outside on the subject of community. It’s a really rich conversation.
In the podcast, we cover a lot of ground including really understanding the act and practice of crossing boundaries and thresholds to enter a community. There is a cost to crossing a threshold, a requirement to put something down before we take up the shared identity of community. That act is almost always accompanied by rituals and ceremonies that help to mark the liminal space through which we move when we change from what we are on the outside to what we become when we step inside.
These boundaries are important because there is no community without boundary crossing. Peter Block writes really well about this in “Community: The Structure of Belonging” and I refer to his work in the podcast. He talks about practices for entering and leaving containers, including creating barriers to participation that balance inclusion with commitment and also the practices of leaving a container. He suggests that when people leave a meeting, they let everyone know why they are leaving. Such an act is a kindness as it shows a concern for clarity in the space.
A couple of weeks ago I was reminded how important that practice is. I was having a lovely long coffee with my friend Bob Turner who is a former mayor of Bowen Island and has lived on our island since 1989. We were both sharing our experience as long-time islanders that we don’t recognize so many people anymore and nor are we recognized by as many people as used to. In the times we have lived on the island, the community’s population has turned over many times. In fact, we have probably experienced 50% turnover in the last five years alone. We are both open to change. Having devoted ourselves to living long-term in this community, we have seen it go through phases, epochs, and generational shifts. And while that’s fine there is a lingering sense of something – sadness? nostalgia? grief? – that is hard to put a finger on. And I think we named it
I was telling Bob that I was recently working with the Squamish Nation and their Language and Culture Department and I was very struck by how the Squamish people who work in that department are motivated in their work by the deep family histories they come from, rooted in the villages of the Squamish Nation. There is growth and change in those communities, but there are powerful rituals for acknowledging the losses of people.
Bowen Island is a settler community meaning that, other than a very small handful of descendents from original settler families, most people have only lived here for a maximum of two or three generations. People come and go, with very little tying them to the place. Squamish Nation people can’t do that. Your village is the source of your history and it spans back hundreds of generations out of remembered time. When someone is born or comes home or dies, there are important ceremonies that recognize that connection to the past. You might be given a name that was held by an ancestor or receive songs and responsibilities that are rooted to place. You are inextricably tied to the community
It’s just not like that on Bowen Island. Notably, while Bob and I were trying to put our finger on the melancholy feeling we were having, we decided that it came down to the fact that so many of the people we knew here and had close relationships with have just slipped away into other lives in other places. We don’t really hear from them anymore. They certainly don;t form the background of relationships and conversations that make up community. And unlike those who have died, there was no ceremony to acknowledge their passing out of our community. You just wake up one morning (or one post-pandemic year) and realize that person you played soccer with, or sang with or used to see on your regular walk is just no longer there. You don’t know why they left or where they went. There is just an absence and then a small space where they used to be that closes ever smaller until a person who was an unforgettable part of your life is suddenly “What’s his name, the guy with the brown dog that drove that old work van.”
There are boundaries we cross to join community and I wish for the boundaries to cross to leave it. When folks are leaving Bowen I love it when they tell me. I get to honour them, thank them, share some stories with them and then send them on their way. It gives all of us closure. It always a little sad when folks who have been a part of my life take off for their new chapters, but the ritual of saying goodbye makes it so much easier. Otherwise, we just imagine the slow trickle of voices flowing away into silence and nostalgia.