For the past few weeks I have been trying an interesting experiment in civic dialogue.
Here on Bowen Island we are in the midst of local elections. We are a small community of 3500 living on a liece of land about the same size as Vancouver, with fairly limited resources in terms of being able to fund local services. It is a beautiful and inspiring place to live, a place that almost wills one to dream about it. It inspires people to move here, to build, to steward, to preserve, to write. Folks run for election because deep down they love this place and they want to do something about that.
We are close to each other on Bowen. We are a pretty homogenous place. We live close to the land and the sea, and close to each other’s dreams and frustrations. The major difference between us is our opinions of the way the world should be. And, ike most small communities, I think we suffer from what Freud once called the narcissism of small differences. We project a lot on to each other and it surprises me that some of the vitriol that is produced at keyboards and published online and in print does not translate into real life all that often. I have seen neighbours who seem to be at war with each other online greet each other cordially in the street. Relationship seems, in most cases, to trump things.
This anger and frustration is not surprising. Even in a country like Canada there is an increasing dissociation between citizenship and government. There are massive global entities that operate beyond the influence of many of us, massive blobal issues that affect our daily lives that we have no say over and our democratic governments don’t give us many effective ways to be heard, although we can still cast a vote for them. We seem to be subjected to arbitrary decisions all the time, whether it is what is poured into our land and air and sea or what time the ferry runs. It doesn’t seem to matter what we think.
In that sense, local politics feels like the last place we can actually make a difference. And when it feels like the only way to make a difference is to shout, that’s what we do. We shout at each other. We lose ourselves in the thought that our enemies have to be defeated, that ideas have to be extinguished, that worldviews and ways of seeing and being held by other people are invalid. And maybe by extension that others are invalid. It’s just a little to easy, when you live on an island, to suggest that other people love it or leave it.
And I have been as guilty as others in the past, so I’m nothing special. And I facilitate dialogue for a living. Being human is hard.
So I wondered if this election cycle would be different, because in the past 10 years or so we have had some unbelievably bad civic conversation about major real estate developments, amenities, by-laws and community plans, ferry marshalling, village planning, a proposal to establish a National Park, and suspicions of conspiracies, conflicts of interest and nefarious motives of our neighbours. I wondered if this cycle was to be different. And I wondered if we could do anything to make it different.
For me, when voting for people, I’m not interested in their position. Anyone can write down a list of things that are good and true and ask if others agree with them. What I want to see is how you think about stuff that is not so easy to reduce into a yes/no polarity. I want to see how you confront complexity and how you work with others to figure stuff out. I saw glimpses early on between a few rookie candidates running for office who started engaging in an online discussion about transportation options for our island. I saw people doing two things well: admitting that they didn’t know something and sharing information with each other. It was fascinating. It gave me a glimpse into how these people might act if they were elected to serve with one another.
I wanted to see more, and regretted that I hadn’t set up a forum for this very function, until one of the candidates on his own set up a facebook page and invited me to moderate it. And so I stepped in. Here are the guidelines I posted (if you are on facebook you can see the forum):
1. If you want the candidates to consider a question, either have one of them post it here, or send it by facebook message to me.
2. If your question is a yes/no question, and you send it to me I’m going to ask you to rephrase it because the world is more complicated than that, and dialogue is encouraged by asking questions we don’t know answers to. If you want to see the candidates’ POSITIONS on things, go to their pages. If you want to see them DISCUSSING things together, hang around here. Candidates: please feel free to engage with each other. It’s more interesting to see you discussing things than it is just to read a statement.
3. I’m not sure if we have the setting right, but the intention here is to only have candidates post and respond in the comments. I’m not going to go around deleting comments, but if you are not a candidate and you want your say head over to the Bowen Online Forum. Feel free to “like” things. This space is primarily intended for us to watch candidates working together to figure stuff out.
4. Candidates are allowed to and enouraged to say things like “I don’t know” and “what do you think?” and other admissions of vulnerability, humility and discernment.
5. As things become busier, I’ll prioritize questions from those that haven’t asked any yet. It’s always better to send one great question to get the candidates talking than it is to send a bunch in all at once.
6. Nobody’s perfect. Let these guidelines be good enough to get things going. Message me if this doesn’t work for you.
7. And yes, not everyone is on facebook and there is no way to share this page if you’re not signed on. Perhaps next time we’ll choose a better forum for this conversation. in the meantime, you can certainly cut and paste what you are reading here and email it to others.
Smile. Democracy is more than just voting.
I have to say that it has been a great experience and it has stood in contrast to the Bowen island Forum which is where the rest of the citizenry works out its opinions of one another with a lot of vigour, spontaneity and sometimes quite hurtful attacks. It gives me a clue to what is possible when we change the way we frame conversation in the public sphere. Here’s what I learned:
1. The hardest policy questions do not have yes and no answers and we are not served by reducing them to a binary resolution.
2. We need a public conversation that allows us to be wrong or unsure and allows us to share information with each other to make skillful decisions.
3. Everyone needs help to ask good questions and to get away from “gotcha” politics. (It is interesting how a few people have told me that the facebook page is for “softball” questions because the conversation there has been civil, nuanced and searching. I have responded that this is because we were trying to deal with real issues rather than gather future ammunition for “i told you so” campaigns. There is no shortage of material for those searching for conspiracies and nefarious motives, if that is how you choose to view people.)
4. Radically different opinions can actually add nuance and value to a decision if we are able to see the differences and not dismiss people out of hand. In fact we need this difference. But learning to live WITH this difference is what qualifies you to a position of stewardship in a community. Demanding the elimination of difference either by saying that “we should all get along” or “you are fundamentally wrong” erodes community.
5. Facilitating this middle ground requires a commitment to a process, to principle and to boundaries and it requires working with people kindly and respectfully to help them ask the questions they want answers to in a way that opens them for the possibility that they might not get the simple answer they are looking for. People have responded positively to my private chats with them as we have added more nuance to questions. We all need help to participate well in the public sphere.
6. Local governance is hard. We do well as citizens to remember this. Those who will get elected on Saturday are about to take on a job that is many pay grades above what they are going to earn doing it and they will all be confronting novel situations, problems and ideas and will be required to navigate in a good way through difficult waters. No one knows how to do this perfectly, and I think we owe a little grace and latitude to those who will be entrusted with our future. And I say that even as I have had significant differences in the past with some of the people likely to be elected.
I have a lot of respect for the candidates that were able to show up in the forum over the last couple of weeks and I have enjoyed the process of putting my money where my mouth is. It feels to me like I can trust the folks who WILL get elected to carry this tenor of collaboration across and with differences into their four year terms on Council and I hope we have chances to continue to have these kinds of civic conversations face to face. I am willing to continue exploring forums for better civic dialogue and participating as I can to host and encourage this kind of exploration and collaboration to continue.
Good luck to all on Saturday.
in this video, Organizational practices applied by Tim Merry he talks about an organization that adopts basic practices to restore humanity to its structures. Predicated on the idea that the quality of results are directly dependant on the quality of relationship in the organization, he describes using circle practice as a simply way to activate relational capacities in a team.
The link between relationship and results is well established. It is the basis of relational theory and is a core assumption underlying a whole world of organizational development thinking and practice, including the Art of Hosting.
Good relationships are fundamental but not completely exclusive to getting great results. It is also important that people in the organization are skilled for the work they are doing and that there is a clarity about what we are trying to achieve. Skills include the technical skills needed to do the job as well as adaptive skills needed to be able to respond to changing conditions. Clarity includes personal and collective clarity of purpose.
i find that many organizations excel in a technical skills focus and spend a lot of time on clarifying organizational purpose through strategic plans and the operational plans that are meant to connect everyone in an organization to the central purpose.
And what passes for good management is this technical axis of organizational life. It is privileged by using terms like “hard skills” and when push comes to shove the “softer side” of organizational life is often sacrificed in favour of strict accountability to the plan.
Restoring relational skills is often the first step to stabilizing a team that has lost its way. I have worked with highly skilled team – for example in university professional faculties – where there is no shortage of extremely talented individuals and an audacious but achievable drive to be the best of their kind in their market. But very often highly skilled and committed people get into tough disputes with one another as egos clash and personal purposes become more important tha organizational ones. Over time toxic environments can appear that, when combined with the unskillful use of power and authority, can create pain and trauma in organizations. Almost everyone I know has a story of this. It is absolutely rife in organizational life as we seek to balance self-fulfillment with collective strategic direction.
What Tim points to, and what we cover in the Art of Hosting, including in our offering on Beyond the Basics, is that a restorative approach to human relationships can steady the ship. This means taking time away from strictly strategic objectives in order to attend to relationships. And it is not simply a thing that happens in offsite meetings to deal with organizational conflict. It is about instituting practices – such as week-starting and week-ending circles – to discuss strategic objectives, and to do so in a way that honours and deals with the struggles that naturally occur as we try to do things we’ve never done before.
A weekly practice of PeerSpirit Circle for example becomes a strategic leverage point for better organizational life and more humane working environments. It doesn’t replace technical skills or organizational goals, but it ties those things to personal aspirations and provides a rich ground for creativity, adaptability, cohesion and sustainability
Back in November Janaia Donaldson from Peak Moment TV interviewed Dave Pollard and I about the Art of Hosting, especially as it applies to transition towns, resilience and community leadership. That video was released today along with a lovely 10 minute edit in which Dave maps out some of the essential Art of Hosting elements using the GroupWorks Pattern Language card deck. Enjoy.
I think there is probably nothing new under the sun. Engagement work has been tried, refined and improved all over the world in the last couple of decades that I wonder if there is anything new we can learn? It does seem to fall into “authentic engagement” and “engagement washing” – if I can coin a couple of phrases. But I haven’t seen radically new thinking or practice for a while.
What we are getting instead is some terrific collections of tools, handbooks and harvests of processes. This .pdf of a Handbook for Civic Engagement prepared for a community process in the United States is an excellent example of the kind of harvesting that is useful. It sums up lessons learned from engagement process, proceeds from practice to inform theory and provides some useful invitations for practice and application. This is an artifact which has emerged out of the space of engagement “praxis” – the gap between theory and practice. I’m interested in tis inquiry at the moment, and stumbling across things like this in my quest to understand what is useful in harvesting from initiatives that sustain the capacity and learning begun in real engagement.
“Engagement washing” initiatives don’t usually leave these kinds of documents in the places where the engagement took place. It should be a hall mark of good practice that process learnings are shared and tools are developed as well as results documented.
A long time ago I was an introverted person and over the years that has completely changed. If you know me, you’ll know I love talking to others, being around people and engaging in meaningful social interaction. I still love my solitude but I love hanging anround in my local coffee shop and pub more.
As a process designer, creating good meeting and learning spaces for introverts has long been a blind spot for me. Facilitators by definition bring people together. If we are extroverted, the processes we design can often contain an overwhelming amount of social interaction for introverts which actually alienates them from the group and marginalizes their contributions. Sometimes I have run meetings where the introverts never contributed at all. That wasn’t through their fault – it was the fault of my process design that never took their learning styles into account.
You might call it extrovert privilege.
Back in June I was on the hosting team for an Art of Hosting in northern California. A long time friend was there – Tree Fitzpatrick – one of the most deeply intensive introverts I know. She is also a long time process designer and facilitator nd she knowns her stuff. She left after the first hour of the workshop, but not without having a long conversation with me about what she was experiencing. She later made a beautiful gift of sharing her insights with me in a long email on designing processes for introverts. In the past six months, these insights have been a gorgeous gift to my own practice and have radically shifted the way I design, by actually putting the needs of introverted people at the centre of the work. The core of her message to me was this, quoting:
“Please consider integrating some introvert work into your designs. You don’t have to worry about the extroverts: while you give the group quiet time, which is giving the introverts permission to reflect inwardly, most extroverts will just go on doing whatever they want to do but the introverts will feel better if you give them permission to reflect. It only has to be a minute of reflection before speaking but it can make a huge difference to the introvert’s experience in small group talk.”
In the past six months, I have done several things to attend to this.
- Be aware of your “extrovert privilege.” You will know that you suffer from this if silence and solitude seems anaethma to you in a group setting. You will often find introverts confusing and will lose patience with their demands for personal space. You may harbour thoughts about them that are mean spirited, feeling like they are acting out or making some kind of victimization power play. These are your thoughts, and they are not reality. Work on them and recognize your extrovert privilege. I have been working over the past six months to take long periods of solitude for myself just to build up that capacity. I have come to deeply appreciate it as a learning modality
- Introverts need silence and space. When you are working with silence, make sure you build a strong container for it. Sometimes this means really enforcing the silence, but I do this by explaining why this is important and invite people who are uncomfortable with silence to see it as a challenge worthy of their leadership. It’s fierce hosting work, because extroverts are very dismissive of it, and I haven’t always been successful. In Ireland in September we had a particularly gregarious group of Irish language scholars and activists, and I learned about “Irish silence” which something of a dull roar rather than a raucous buzz! Our hosting team was highly amused at my attempts to get anything better than that in the room!
- Build in long periods of silence before asking people to engage in conversation. A minute sounds good but two minutes is better. For deeper conversations even five minutes of silence is powerful. The extroverts will get fidgety, so invite them to write their thoughts down to give them something to do with their hands.
- Provide a meaningful time for reflection at the end of a day. At Rivendell, one of our local spaces for retreat here on Bowen Island, the whole space goes into an hour of silence at 5pm. Anything happening at the facility must also go into this period of silence – it is one of the conditions for being there. For the core group that maintains the space, this is a spiritual practice, although people working there are free to see it in another way. The first time I encountered it I found it a nuisance because at the end of a day of learning usually the groups I am with are bubbly and excited to chat. But working at Rivendell over the years has exposed me to the deep wisdom of building in long periods of silent and solo reflection. It takes all of the learning from the day and plunges it deep into the heart.
- In larger learning initiatives, build in long periods of reflection time out of doors. In Theory U based change labs, the solo presencing retreat is a crucial part of the work. This is where participants spend time alone on the land reflecting. I have been building in long periods of solo time on the land recently. In Ireland our team there uses half day guided walks in The Burren to deepen relationships between people and immerse them in what the land has to offer. I have brought that approach back to Bowen Island and in recent leadership development work we have been doing here, a half day process including an hour long silent period on the land is a core part of the work. This needs to be hosted very strongly…we invite people to hold the silence together from the time we leave, through the solo time, until the time we return. This is a powerful experience for introverts and extroverts alike.
- In smaller settings, building in reflection activities is easy. The reflection toolkit from the Northwest Service Academy in Portland, Oregon is a fabulous resource to share with groups and to invite groups members to lead one or more of these exercises throughout your process. My colleague Jerry Nagel inserted this kit into a training workbook we used with the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Foundation in Minnesota and was immediately useful.
This has evolved into a really fabulous learning edge for me both personally and professionally and I am grateful to Tree for setting me on the path.