One of the hallmarks of a complex problem is the fact that we are confronted by paradox and polarity everywhere we turn. When a situation has a both/and in it, it is dynamic and unresolvable to one choice or the other. It needs to be managed, lived with, coaxed into a place where the positive aspects of both can coexist.
These polarities exist everywhere in human systems. On my home island right now we are going through one of our periodic confrontations of the polarities that define our place. Fundamentally this polarity comes down to an age old struggle between change and stability.
It is well captured by my friend Ron Woodall, our local cartoonist who never fails to hit issues like this square on the nose.
In island communities, there is a palpable sense of identity liked to the boundaries that encompass us, the history and culture that unfolds in a small, tightly connected community, and the state of the place when we first arrived and formed our earliest, most idealistic, and most lasting impressions. From that moment on, change continues, and longing for what was intensifies. It may grow so strong that one no longer recognizes the place and disappointment, sadness and despair takes over. “This is not the Bowen I knew.” That realization makes some changes feel existential in nature, and they are. They are a kind of evaporation of the identity that we construct and cling to. Over time, one needs to seek meaning in the changes, helping to shape them or surrendering to them so that one’s connection to the place remains meaningful. Or one leaves, either physically or emotionally.
We have many polarities active on Bowen Island. Some of the ones we live with include:
- Affordable housing and high property values
- Attracting visitors and managing the crowds
- Isloation from Vancouver and proximity to Vancouver
- Public access and private property.
- Individual and community
- Accessibility and privacy.
Polarization in communities happens when people get locked in to one side or another of a polarity and try to influence policy in their favour. Populism can easily play on this sentiment. “Vote for me and I will protect you from those people who want everything to change. Stability. Tradition. Security.” versus “It’s time to do away with the old guard. Vote for me and I will drain the swamp, get rid of the deadwood and bring us into a shiny new world.”
The reality of governance is something like “Vote for me and I will aim to preserve what’s working for us while considering changes to the way our community works that may be hard to swallow, but might take us in a positive direction, while still preserving everything we’ve been that makes us unique.” Good luck running on that platform in this age. And yet the reality of governance, and especially local governance, is that this is actually the job.
Managing polarities is a critical aspect of leadership in a community. Local government folks and the other stewards of our community have to manage these polarities constantly. The change versus stability polarity is an important case in point..Change happens and we need to respond to it so that it is beneficial as a whole, to the land, to the local economy, to the citizens and residents. But preserving traditions and identity is important too, especially in small communities where social connections are important, and where a shared sense of who we are is helpful for doing shared things, like building infrastructure, helping those in need, and fostering good relationships that can be relied upon in a crisis such as a fire or an earthquake.
There are ways of working with polarities that help folks become nuanced and strategic and adaptable to the changing nature of the environment in which the polarity exists. Barry Johnson’s Polarity Management tool is one of those tried and true frameworks that I use to help folks think through the polarities that they face. It’s a very accessible tool too, and using it allows you to see a fuller picture of what is happening. Here are some steps to follow:
- Begin by identifying a polarity. Often if there is a conflict with two sides in a community, there is a polarity at its heart. Sometimes several positions can be concentrated into an overall polarity. If you have a Ron Woodall in your community, get them to capture it in a diabolical cartoon. Lay these out on a map like the one I depict below.
- Start with identifying the highest ideal or state that both sides of the pole are trying to reach. Then identify the biggest fear or the pit of despair that both are trying to avoid. These should be broad and abstract states, captured only in a few words.
- Identify the upsides of both pole. What’s GOOD and positive about making changes? What is the benefit of stability? You are looking to identify a positive direction of travel. If you are working with a group of people who carry different opinions but are willing to consider other positions, you can even have them identify the positive aspects of the OTHER side.
- Next, identify the downsides that will happen if we tip to one side or another. It can be valuable here if people championing one side are able to identify the downsides to their position. But if they can’t, have no fear. Those who disagree with them will have lots to offer!
- Once you’ve filled out the map, the next step is to find indicators for the down sides that you can use as early warning signs of a situation that is falling too far to one side or the other. These indicators should be fairly obvious and they can be used to monitor the situation. An important skill to managing in complexity is rigorously looking for the early signs of failure. A bias towards positive outcomes will almost always create a situation of inattentional blindness, whereby the early signs of failure are ignored because mostly things are going well. With a co-created polarity map, you can put everyone’s attention to use looking for these early signs.
- Finally, identify strategies to maximize the UPSIDES of each pole. What are things we could do today that would take us in THAT direction. Deliberately focus on each upside separately. You will find that these simple strategies help right the ship when the early signs point to you tipping too far to one side or the other.
Here is the polarity map I completed around the change versus stability polarity. Click here to see a higher res version on miro.
It’s easy for local governments, committees and even citizens to complete polarity maps on their own. A completed polarity map gives you a broad strategic canvas on which to operate. For volatile situations, it’s worth reviewing the map frequently and making sure that indicators and strategies remain relevant to the context. The process of making a map can also be a very valuable exercise to build your team and enlist everyone in helping to manage the polarity. It can also be used as a process to put conflict to work for a community. For those whose job it is to actually govern, polarity maps can make visible the challenge they face as they try to meet everyone’s needs well. They can provide a degree of transparency and complexity that helps keep populism at bay and enlists more people in the very real, very thorny and very political realities of policy and governance.
I’m curious if you have used this tool in local governance and what you have learned.
In Those Years
In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I -- Adrienne Rich, 1992, hat tip to Jim
My favourite scene from the Life of Brian starts with Brian appearing at a window, trying to get his crowd of misinformed followers to leave him alone. He is, in fact, not the Messiah, and exasperated, he tries to tell them that they have it all wrong.
“You’re all individuals!” he cries, to which the crowd responds, in unison, “Yes! We’re all individuals!”
“You’re all different!” cries Brian. “Yes! We are all different!” the crowd replies again.
And then a single voice, with a slightly melancholy edge, quietly says, “I’m not.”
He is shushed.
This diabolical twisting of the Individual — Collective polarity has been on my mind over the past few years. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had the briefest moment of hope that the world would suddenly wake up to pulling together and looking after our public good. We created universal basic incomes, which made the most significant difference in poverty alleviation in my lifetime. We undertook mass public health campaigns to keep vulnerable people safe and not allow our medical and health systems to get too overwhelmed. We even briefly saw our planet’s health rebound as cars and airplanes, and industry generally slowed down or stopped, and the skies cleared.
But it wasn’t sustainable. It was a temporary fix to a global problem and didn’t address the underlying causes of poverty, public health crises and climate change. Within a year, we had splintered and fractured. “We lost track of the meaning of we,” as Adrienne Rich wrote in 1992, “we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible.”
I have been on holiday these past two weeks, on Maui, and I’ve had time to read and think and rest. One of the books I took with me is Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, a recent book that traces how our attention has been stolen by social media, schooling and the workplace. Deirdre, who recommended it to me at Jessica’s Book Store in Thornbury, Ontario, last month, said it made her quit social media.
The book isn’t entirely about social media – it’s much more extensive than that – but the history of social media’s colonization of our attention forms a big part of the book. Hari traces the rise of surveillance capitalism, delivered through the toxic and amoral algorithms that drive us into deeper and deeper echo chambers at a pace and a way that steals our attention before we are aware of it. The need to keep eyeballs on the app instead of the world around us drives us apart. At one point, he asks the provocative question about why Facebook can’t help us connect physically with friends and like-minded folks nearby so that we can make something together or enjoy an evening together. Why does it not recommend amazing projects and activities we could do with friends? It could easily do all of this. It could quickly help us build community, have a good time together, and make a lasting impact. But it doesn’t, and it won’t because the idea is to keep eyes on the app and keep people out of the physical world, which requires them to put down their phones and play.
Hari traces the origins of the psychology of social media back to the behaviouralist researchers and teachers who taught the cabal of engineer-capitalists that built this world in Silicon Valley. Nothing new there, perhaps, but what is different is that one can see how it works on one’s own mind. It is a chilling read because it lays bare capitalism’s unapologetic agenda that uses everything it can to generate wealth regardless of the impact.
Our attention is a battleground and a landscape that surveillance capitalists will exploit as readily as an oil company will exploit a shale play. The difference is that oil companies are subject to government regulation about what they can and cannot do, and surveillance capitalists are not. There is no environmental protection for the pristine nature of our creative minds. The predators have been given free rein to exploit it all.
The result is that we have become radically disconnected from each other. And the pandemic made it much worse as we retreated into our bubbles and became more reliant on social media for connection while at the same time being fed a steady stream of the stuff that is guaranteed to keep us engaged with apps and not each other. I think I first heard the term “doom scroll” in 2020. I recognize it in myself as the embarrassing desire to read one more stupid thread of misinformed comments. It makes me feel self-righteous. I can take on a few transphobes or racists from the safety of my own house. But that doesn’t make a change in the world. Half the time, I might even be arguing with robots.
But of course, this is precisely the cognitive-chemical loop that creates deep attractor basins that keeps us at home, on our devices, facing a massive barrier of inertia to get up and do something. Hari points out that this is not simply a problem that can be addressed by individual actions and habits, like putting away the phone at night in another room. While those are essential strategies for reclaiming attention, Hari clearly points out how attention-stealing is systemically enabled.
I can feel it in my work with TSS Rovers FC as we build this football club and enlist volunteers, spectators, and fans. To try to make a culture around something positive that requires people to come out and participate is to buck the forces of the entire world of surveillance capitalism that wants us on our phones and not in the stands singing and supporting young men and women, co-creating community, having fun together.
A couple of weeks ago, I was having dinner with a friend, and we discussed the crisis of belonging in our world. This has been an important concern in her research and advocacy work over several decades, which has led to all manner of crises, including mental health, development for young people, and our general tenor of social relations at the moment. I think it even contributes to the most significant issues like climate change, which arise from disconnection from each other, our natural world and the community of living things threatened by the actions of our species.
This affects all of us. Our phones and laptops have handy apps that can tell us how much time we spend on our screens, particularly on our social media apps. It is way more than you think. Thinking about places where you spend MORE time than on your social media apps is helpful. To which community do you really belong? WHOSE community do you really belong to? And, do you REALLY belong?
At the moment, I have a few activities outside of work that activates flow in my life: playing music, cooking, volunteering with both TSS Rovers FC and the Rivendell Retreat Centre, writing, gardening, and hanging out with my beloved and my kids. And altogether, I wonder if I STILL spend more time on my phone than doing these things, WHICH GIVE ME JOY. Even as I am typing this, my little tracker tells me that, on holiday, I averaged almost 4 hours of screen time daily.
These past two weeks, combined with Lent, have given me a welcome respite to reconsider my relationship with the thieves of attention who rule my life. Social media is an important part of my life and is probably how you and I are connected.
But Hari points out that the stealing of attention has existential impacts. It might be what prevents us from concentrating enough and spending the time we need together to address and move past existential crises like climate change, populism, and the threat of nuclear war. Suppose we cannot give more time to the collective problems of now because we are instead tilting at the AI-generated windmills of Facebook and Twitter. In that case, we will not be able to find one another, collaborate and perform out of our skins in the service of a viable future for this planet, its creatures, and its people.
Richard Rohr has been an important and influential presence in my own spiritual journey over these past 10 or 15 years and although I have never met the man, I have visited the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, and every day I reflect on his teachings and practice through daily blog posts from the Center and through the vast library of Rohr’s works.
After several years of transition, Richard Rohr now seems to be fully released from his duties at the Center as he nears the end of his life, and this little video series is a lovely testament to how a leader-founder can let go into community with grace and trust.
Nuu-Chah-Nulth and Kwakw’kwa’kwa’kw Elders and youth teaching together in the Kwagiulth big house at Fort Rupert in 2005.
Once a month, in our little United Church here on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) I fill in for our not-quite-full-time minister by leading the service and offering a sermon. I’ve never published those sermons here, but why not? Here is today’s.
Reading: Matthew 4:12-25
We are well into the season of Epiphany and so this is the time of year that we contemplate Jesus’ ministry in the world and his early life. We get to witness a Jesus who is called from his work as a carpenter and who becomes an important and radical spiritual leader in his time. For the first 28 or 30 years of his life, things are somewhat uneventful, and although he shows some talent for interpreting scripture as a precocious child , he isn’t doing much else of note.
To set the stage, Matthew, whose terse words we will be studying this year, offers this text from chapter 4, which is the first time he writes about Jesus as a spiritual leader. The first few chapters of his book concern Jesus’ birth, the visit of the magi and the story of John the Baptist. With chapter 4 we get two important stories. The first, which we will hear in the first week of Lent, is the story of Jesus retiring to the wilderness of a 40 day retreat in which he meets the devil and wrestles with temptation. It is a story of a spiritual coming of age that echoes that of other great spiritual leaders, including Buddha, who sits under the bodhi tree struggling with his mind in the form of the temptress Mara as he approaches the great insights and liberation of Nirvana. Somewhere in this story of baptism, retreat and now calling, Jesus has gone through a similar transformation. He is not longer a carpenter.
Now these events are often told in a breezy narrative of what Jesus is up to, but as I read and meditated on the readings this week I was struck by how the simple structure of the story that Mark just read mirrors four deeper callings that I think are part of our work as Christians.
A calling is just something that one cannot ignore. It is a movement of Spirit that reaches deep inside and changes a person. It hits you like, well, like an Epiphany, which is to say that a calling is a manifestation of Spirit inside of oneself that changes behaviour. It can draw us towards a life mission, and an identity. It has the power to surprise, to give insight, to change one’s ways, and to ultimately align one’ purpose in life with the needs of the world.
What I also love about the way that this little story is told is that it also provides some simple guidance for ourselves, to act in tune with Spirit.
The first calling is to withdrawal and contemplation and alignment with the light of God that shines through the soul of a person and turns their heart and mind and hands to acts of justice and compassion, the words of the prophet Isaiah. This comes on the heels of news that John the Baptist has been arrested, and will soon be killed. John is very much the pre-cursor of Jesus and this news provides the gravitas for Jesus’s choice. He knows that choosing to reveal himself will result in his death. His choice to act has a consequence from which he cannot escape and so he withdraws to rest and wait before responding to the call. Like the morning sky waiting for the sun to rise, Jesus withdraws to cultivate his light. It does not good to burn too brightly right out of the gate.
Discernment is a critical part of responding to a calling. A calling changes lives. Even on the micro-scale if we realize that we are about to confront a major decision in our lives, even burdened by urgency and overwhelming need, the first act should be to withdraw and consider the consequences. It’s not second thoughts so much as it is deeper thoughts.
The second calling is revealed in the simple statement ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ With these modest words, Jesus’ entire message of spiritual liberation is embodied and in saying it he has become a spiritual teacher. As we’ve learned before the word “repent” is the English translation for the Greek word “metanoia” and it is a terrible translation. “Repent” means to feel guilt, remorse and shame for something and it’s as far as you can get fro Jesus’ message of compassion and forgiveness. “Metanoia” means to change one’s life, literally to turn around. Jesus offers this as an instruction: if you have done something wrong, go back to that point and take a different tack, apologize, heal yourself, and you will find forgiveness because the “kindom” of heaven wants you to belong, wants you to be in relationship and wants you to be connected and whole. Like the Buddha, Jesus knows that life is hard and that we all walk around with shame and guilt and regret. He is not interested in doubling down on that, pressing on teh bruise and making you feel like shit. He is about liberation, and he is about giving you a simple pathway to addressing the burdens you are carrying. Simple in concept, tricky to execute. But to be left riddled with shame and guilt is literally NOT what Jesus said. So, “Change your life: stopping harming yourself and others and the forgiveness and love you seek – which is always there – will fill you with joy and healing.” That’s a better translation of the phrase.
The third calling is to community and movement-building, gathering the disciples around him in a core team to activate the mission of love and justice. The phrase “become fishers of people” is a reference to the sayings of multiple prophets who point to the rich and unjust people in the world who rule with cruelty. Jesus’ mission is to rally a group of people together to transform the society they are all living in. To practice radical love and forgiveness, to gather people together, to heal and feed, to support and care for one another. Once he is committed to this call, Jesus’s mission becomes gathering many people into a movement to make change.
Justice is not the work of a single person. We have just passed the annual commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and when I think about him, and Indigenous rights leaders here in Canada like Delbert Guerin and Simon Baker and Marge White and Khelsilem and George Manuel and Gisda’wa and Wedlidi Speck, I can see that the project of becoming a prophet, literally a social justice warrior, is not work to do alone, nor is it work that one can do part time. Jesus asks his disciples to leave their professions and engage in the work of world transformation alongside him.
A life’s calling has that effect on a person. Suddenly you know what you are made for and whatever you were doing before falls by the wayside as you fully commit yourself to the work of Spirit.
And finally we come to the fourth calling: the work of healing people and the world. It is not just enough to advocate for a more just world. The world cries out for healing and reparations and repair and reconciliation. We have damaged social relations, our connection to the planet and to our selves. In order to make change in the world, we need to heal and restore. You can see that no matter how you have healed – cooled your anger, broken your addictions, restored an ecosystem formerly devoid of whales, life floods back in. Joy and Spirit and wellness fills you. The “Kindom of God” surrounds you. Being healed is the name we give the way from guilt and disconnection to wholeness and life.
And so the readings give us a map of our calling, a checklist of things to do if we are to follow in the footsteps of Jesus as his followers. May we have ears to hear how our callings can contribute to a just and kind world.
A box of donuts that Joanna Vervoza-Dolezal, the starting centre back for TSS Rovers, brought for the Swanguardians on the last game of the season. Reciprocity in support.
Yesterday I had an informal call with a person who is leading up customer relationships for a large local company. The company is both a profit-making venture but also is a community institution and has a profile and responsibility beyond just the bottom line. We were talking about how the organization was stuck and the different approaches that the organization was taking towards customer relations when we stumbled onto an untapped area that may help to get the organization unstuck.
For organizations with double or triple bottom lines, the moment your focus moves beyond a financial return on investment, your customers and clients stop becoming ATMs and start becoming friends. Yes. Friends. The lines between your organizational life and the community become blurred. Social license becomes a reality, and that means that customers suddenly make decisions out of love and loyalty to the bigger vision which they can help co-create. They become non-material investors and shareholders in what you are doing. Your sustainability does not solely rely on making a profit. It relies on how those people that buy your services AND how they help shape and co-create your mission.
Where we got to in this conversation was that the organization needed to find ways to allow customers and clients to offer something back. Rather than going out and catering to their needs constantly and trying traditional marketing methods of giving the illusion of being a part of something, customers and clients of the organization need to have a chance to be meaningfully involved. In fact there are probably at present lots of people who are trying to give back and be involved but haven’t been seen because the organization has no way to receive their gifts. This is a real shift for how this organization has grown to see its customers. As the connection to social license fades away, customers increasingly get seen as people to be catered to, responded to and served. On the surface that seems a noble customer relations strategy, but when challenges are met, there are very few people with a meaningful investment in the organization to help repair it and set it back on track. Customers can just walk away at any time. And if you have customers who have bought into the social bottom line but you are only chasing the dollar, those ones will feel the lack of reciprocity first. When they leave its hard to get them back.
Why? Because people want to give. They want to be a part of something. They want to do something meaningful with their lives, their time and their money. We love a good product, but we also crave being a part of making it. Witness the way Apple for example has created a Distinguished Educator network. This is a way that educators in schools who love Apple products can help create new applications for these products in their schools. These folks are often cutting edge front-line teachers who are exploring pedagogy and using technology in a way that supports good learning theory. They are no longer customers. They are helping the company grow its brand, for sure, by working with schools but they also helping Apple find new ways to use their technology in service of education and learning.
As the Chair of the Board of Rivendell, a non-profit spiritual retreat centre, we’ve been exploring this angle through fundraising. We are an organization that has been generously supported by a Foundation throughout our whole existence and we have decided that we want to start doing fundraising not because we need financial resources, but because we want to create a different relationship with the community of people who love and support us and for whom our organization has made a deep impact in their lives. None of us on the Board are skilled at fundraising, and for all of us the prospect of doing it is terrifying. So we decided to learn together. We worked with a friend of mine who specializes in fundraising in these kinds of situations and he said his job is not parting people from their money but rather “helping people with money them heal by giving them a way to make meaning.”
Heal from what? Partly from a world that has completely commodified us either as a customer or as a unit of productivity. I think humans have a deep need to give and to be a part of something, but those of us who live in capitalist market-based societies are primarily valued as transactions. Everything we do is tracked for the benefit of dominating our attention and ultimately our wallets. But when I am offered an opportunity to provide a gift of time or money because it enters me into reciprocity and relationship, suddenly my life has the meaning I have been seeking. It is truly healing to give a gift and have that gift received.
To refuse an authentic gift is dehumanizing to both the giver and the receiver. Over time, losing the opportunities to provide gifts causes us to lose touch with what fundamentally makes community.
You cannot build communities around transactions. If your organization has a social bottom line at all and your entire customer relations strategy is transactional, I reckon you will always fail on this score. I think many companies who start out with a social bottom line leave it behind if they can’t figure out how to do it and revert to the single financial bottom line. That is enabled with customer management systems and managers who are trained in this type of work. Through our Art of Participatory Leadership training, we seek to teach leadership practices that enable social sustainability through enabling contribution. I’d love to know if folks are seeing this meaningfully taught in MBA programs or inside other institutional management and business programs.
The sustainability of an enterprise with an implicit or explicit community mandate rests in the ability of the enterprise to create spaces for people to give and co-create. That leads to co-ownership which can be material – like with our TSS Rovers FC community-ownership model – or more intangible, like the feeling of connection people have to helping create a space for spiritual renewal at our Rivendell retreat centre. Our sustainability depends on financial security and community. TSS Rovers FC needs to make a profit to survive, but we cannot do that without a community of people investing their time and talent over the long term to create an organization that is about developing humans, whether on or off the pitch. We encourage folks to offer what they can to the enterprise with two principles:
- Assume your talents are needed and;
- Proceed until apprehended.
The result at Rovers is that we have a happy patchwork of folks who offer expertise, enthusiasm, money and sometimes just an extra body to move things around. We even have a tradition of our players helping to set up the stadium and prepare the supporters section before they begin their warm up routines. We try to provide opportunities for everyone to experience gifting, because that is fundamental to the game of football anyway. Giving, receiving, offering space and time, and enabling your team mates to succeed is what secure victory on a football pitch and so we try to bring that ethos into our lives off the field too. That is how we go from being a successful football club to being a place that makes better humans and builds community whether you come to a match, in cleats, boots, shoes, sandals or bare feet.
Think about that. In the place where you are involved as a formal or informal leader, how are you enabling people to give? How are you receiving and holding the gifts and intentions of those in your orbit who are already giving to you? How are you enabling reciprocity to build community and sustainability?