The iron fence around the head office of the Canada Life Insurance Company in Toronto. I painted this fence twice during my summer jobs in 1987 and 1988. It was the required shit job of the summer students who came to work on the building maintenance crew, assigned to us by an authoritarian jerk of a boss who made sure the painting happened during the hottest and most humid week of the summer. This was also the company that cruelly fired downsized my father four years later, which I mention below.
Cory Doctorow has a long piece today that centres on the theme of “the world moves on.” it is a survey of how the 21st century has gone, the concentration of wealth, the degradation of products, law, governance, environments and organizations. The rise of a fascist view of the world that divides us into those “born to rule” and those “born to be ruled.” It is a push to acknowledge that the real feelings we are all having that something is fundamentally broken is not just a nostalgic throwback. The idea of “Making * Great Again” is not that we go back to a time when it was great. It is that we go forward to a time which the persona that declares that intention is in charge of everything. And others are not.
I had a lovely call yesterday with a younger colleague, a person whose dreams and aspirations and talent propelled her into a relationship with power that helped to meet her desire to have an impact in the world. But she found herself trying to wrestle with the cost of that. What does it mean to get close to power, to have a hand in the policy that changes lives, to be involved in a tangible way to make the world better for many people? There is a cost to it, and I can relate. One feels as if one is selling a soul for the chance to grab some influence.
It strikes me as an interesting bifurcation. When I worked for the federal government in the 1990s I was part of a team of people that ran a very important third party stakeholder process which brought non-Indigenous voices and interests into the treaty process. I didn’t;t always like or agree with the people that I was working with, but as a representative of the Government of Canada I took my job seriously. We were doing the work of treaty making and not including the voices and intelligence of people who would be affected by those treaties was to do a disservice to the First Nations with whom we were crafting a sustained and historical relationship.
My colleagues all had different interests in our work. Some were generally distrustful of government to be able to represent citizen interests and they were motivated to ensure that third parties, especially business interests, were as involved as possible. Others were motivated by the history we were making and desired to be a part of something that was sustainable over time. Still others were deeply motivated to ensure that First Nations found themselves in a just and reconciling process and that the honour of the Crown was of the utmost importance. And some were just good public servants which meant they did what they were directed to do and did it well.
I left that job when someone senior to me told me that “I cared too much” about the work. I wore my passion on my sleeve which led to a disagreement with a new boss who didn’t have the lofty goals of my former boss and whose inattention to relationships and the historical nature of the work was lost behind her need to establish technocratic credentials. I hung out my shingle and went to work for Indigenouos organizations, non-profits and governments that were committed to the work of building communities and caring for people.
Several of my friends went the other way, into industry or saw out their careers in the public service. We had been held together in the common project of treaty-making, even though we had many different motivations and purposes for being there. I don’t know that anyone ever felt like they were selling their soul to do the work they did after they left. But they made choices to find them places they cared about and aligned them selves with that. There is always a tradeoff.
In speaking to my colleague yesterday we both shared a sense that over time our sense of impact had shrunk, perhaps to a more realistic size. We all have huge desires to make a legacy in the world, and it takes true encounters with power to find out if we have what it takes to do that. I am in awe with my friend who have successfully run for public office and formed important pieces of federal and provincial governments, or those who has started non-profits or advocacy organizations that have pushed the needle on public policy. I have done a little of that in my own way, but the older I get, the more I appreciate the local work I get to do, by which I mean what happens in the encounter with people who are confronting real particular problems, often with no solutions. I love sitting with 80 year olds in church halls talking about the future of their congregations and accompanying them in the transition. I love sitting with leaders who are exploring how to expand their ability to work with multiple voices and multiple perspectives. I love to watch our Bowen Island business community wrestle with what a local economy might look like in THIS decade. Or a social services agency who has the talent and connections to deliver good quality services in new ways becasue the context seems to drive them to impossible situations.
Cory’s piece names a dynamic that he associates with “conservatism” and its worth quoting in detail:
I collect definitions of “conservatism,” and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin’s book, The Reactionary Mind. Robins asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies – various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc – “conservative”? What binds all these views together?
Robin’s answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.
That’s why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That’s why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO.
If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that “diversity hires,” promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that’s just proof that shit happens – it definitely doesn’t prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power.
For conservatives, virtue is “whatever the people who are born to rule desire.” Hence Frank Wilhoit’s definition of conservativism, “exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” It’s not a crime if the president does it. It’s also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It’s not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein Class do it. “Taxes are for the little people”:
Now I don’t think that’s necessarily “conservative” although it certainly captures a big wing of the current American conservative movement. I think it’s a description of fascism. But it nevertheless points to a feature of our current times that derives from the concentration of wealth a power: we are increasingly isolated from he levers of real power such that stuff we CAN is not stuff that can FIX whatever is happening.
Doctorow concludes with a kind of muted optimism that the way to be in this world is to be political. Join a union, join a political party, get political. Put your hands on the levers of power while we still have them:
Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that’s not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can’t save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it’s so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must.
I like his spirit. But I don’t know. I don;t know what to tell younger colleagues and I don’t know what to tell activists. Politics has become thoroughly enshittified. I have great respect for the people that run for office and chose to govern, especially in the local sphere, but the way politics is related to governance is constrained to serve the interests of the market, the “economy” and those that wield power in those places. That doesn’t mean I don;t think we should devote ourselves to one another and the things we believe in. And I do think we need more unions. The law is still somewhat intact which is why First Nations in Canada are coming in for so much attack. The powers that be know that Constitutionally protected rights throw a wrench in the works of global capital interests who wish to be as unfettered as possible to extract, ship and profit from resources that are located in territories in which First Nations exert a legal form of title. The law still matters a bit, at least in Canada. If I was a young person want ting make social change, I might go into law. I found myself donating to organizations like Egale that fight for the protection of human rights.
My father’s world was different to mine. I started my first real job the same week he was downsized from his, from a company where he had spent 26 years, where he had reached to ceiling of promotion and where he was happy to live out his life as a junior executive. He was escorted from the building at 6pm on a Friday night, because he had been working late. His sole piece of advice to me was “don’t give your loyalty away.” That served me well. Perhaps my advice to folks now is “don’t surrender your love, purpose or integrity.” But I done;t know ho you also make money doing that.
I think the world is different than it has been. Maybe you feel the same way. All I was able to offer my friend yesterday was a connection to someone I felt she might resonate with, and a willingness to just stay in the inquiry because she was so genuinely committed to doing good work in a full-hearted way, with incisiveness and discernment.
What kinds of things are you doing to find your way in it? What do YOU tell younger colleagues who want to do the work you do?
Eroding democracy happens with a slow and persistent trickle of cynicism and mistrust of citizens by their governments. In this review of Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public by Peter MacLeod and Richard Johnson, Kyle Wyatt reflects:
Democracy is not an idea, not a value, not a right; it’s a practice.” For far too long, citizens have been discouraged from that practice by duly elected governments on the left and the right?—?and by the civil servants and professional consultants in their employ. “Say as little as possible, as late as possible, in the most positive way possible,” they write of a general modus operandi that shapes Queen’s Park as much as it does Ottawa, Washington, London, and most other Western capitals. “It’s a defensive posture?—?useful for political survival, but corrosive to democratic understanding.”
Inevitably, MacLeod and Johnson argue, such corrosion will “slowly poison the democratic well,” leading to widespread cynicism, strongmen, and extremists?—?and to events like the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. “Populism, resentment, authoritarian nostalgia: These are not fringe forces. They flourish wherever people feel ignored, humiliated, or locked out.”
Every year I teach a course at SFU in Vancouver in the certificate program in Dialogue and Civic Engagement. Amongst the most assertive points I make is that inauthentic consultation and engagement is a betray of the promise of democracy, especially if you are working for government but also if you work in the corporate sector.
We are reaching the point where there is very little imagination in this field. The cult of efficiency and the brute impatience of powerful interests has deprived a generation of public engagement specialists from the knowledge and experience required to do this work right. What happens in its stead is performative consultation – engagement washing, I sometimes call it – and in my course I am certainly not afraid of pointing the fingers squarely at those that work at the frontlines of consultation. If you are actively engaged in this form of performative consultation you bear some personal and collective blame for why citizens are feeling disengaged and unrepresented at every level in Canadian governance.
The solutions are beyond us at the moment because the power that dictates what happens and what standards are applied to it are now writing legislation that essentially eliminates the requirements to meaningfully work with communities or interested groups in the pursuit of public policy initiatives. We are at a final chapter for this practice as neo-liberalism has pushed such engagement to the market. Unless you own a tangible interest in a project you really aren’t a stakeholder.
Perhaps what we need now are community investment coops that buy shares of major projects in order to influence them. Many First Nations are already doing this. It’s a cynical response to the problem but at this point it’s the most influential vector for engagement.
I’ll still teach the ideal because I hope people can find avenues of practice to develop these skills during this era while the public square is being auctioned off. But, inspiring examples aside, I’m not hopeful that the kind of meaningful engagement we built in the 1980s and 1990s will be sustained for much longer.
I’m still delightfully jet lagged from the France trip meaning, early nights and early mornings, which suits me fine. It gives me time to read and reflect and to walk, this morning taking time to make a detailed eBird list of the species around me (about 25 this morning, many new flycatchers on the scene), and sit by the sea and catch up with neighbours and their dogs.
I was walking a bit this morning with Augusto Cugnotti’s post in my mind, “The Container is Borrowed” in which he reflects on a mammoth essay by Mark Downham called “The Geometry of the Vanishing Container.”
Downham’s essay imagines a kind of conservation between Harrison Owen and Patricia Shaw, who is a much more interesting person to read. I have not read much of Shaw’s work, to my shame. She was a collaborator with Ralph Stacy and her book on Changing Conversations in Organizations is an important work, and I’ve made a note to take Augusto’s advice and read it.
At any rate, the Coles Notes version here is that I’m looking at this through my own interest in what a “container” is. Increasingly I think that the way I think about dialogic containers are not really captured in the way folks talk use the word. Harrison’s work, captured in Downham’s essay is that the container (especially the physical container) is prepared as a way to trying to create the conditions for emergence. That was his abiding interest and I think Downham names the liturgical and spiritual elements of that in a way I haven’t really seen others capture. When I’m setting up a room, I sometimes feel like a bower bird, and I won’t pretend that liturgy and ceremony is far from my mind. I get it.
It seems that Shaw’s work is primarily concerned with the idea that a consultant or a host or a facilitator can never really be outside of the field in which they are intervening. This seems elemental to me and I’ve made a point of saying that the Participation aspect of the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting is very much about this. You are a part of the field, as is the container and everything else.
Augusto is naming some of these ideas here and it makes me think about why both actual appeal to me.
I see containers as constraint regimes. They are structures that are catalyzed and emerge from constraints that create boundaries and affordances for meaning and action. They are emergent. They are a part of the field, and when we step into a field (a la Shaw) we create a constraint regime just through our presence. Harrison’s approach is that we create physical space and get out of the way of what happens next. But it seems obvious to me that what happens next is not devoid of power, conflict or all the avoidances and limitations that are rooted in the field as well. It is naive to use Open Space (our any other methods) and believe that somehow everyone has left history and identity at the door, including the host. They have not.
Somehow I might define my work as catalyzing action that moves in a “more like this, less like that” direction by working with constraints to change interactions. All change work is about changing constraints, and finding the ones that are most influential in a given context is what complexity work is about. It is not the work of the facilitator to do that. Complex facilitation is about changing interactions not about changing people. A facilitator is not neutral in this context but is in fact a deeply influential participant.
I’m not defending Harrison’s work per se, but learning Open Space taught me about the essential work of managing process and not getting involved in content. It was the first big move for me away from traditional “get involved in the content” facilitation. Shaw’s work – as I understand it from the papers I’ve read – is about acknowledging that there is no “outside.” This was clear to me as a person who had spent my whole career working in communities and organizations. These ideas flow from a number of streams. Lewin helpfully names fields. Snowden and Juarrero name constraints. Pualani Kanakaole names the importance of the deep layers of context that do the real work of hosting. Snowden and Kurtz name the importance of narrative. Isaacs names the container. All of it conspires and moves together to put a question to the practitioner:
“What are you doing?”
When I enter a field to make change now it is not without attention to the landscape of meaning and affordances that exist. I use narrative capture to do that so that the field itself can talk about its experiences, make sense of them, decide what to do. There is a container for this work, and it is lifted intentionally and deliberately and gently from the field, like pinching a bit of cloth on a table to form a little wrinkle. It is not the One Meeting That Rules Them All. Change work requires staying in intimate contact with the field, the larger context. When the dialogic container loses contact with the field, whatever happens there will fail to make the change. It becomes its own thing. Fun maybe, or frustrating, or a kind of utopia. But you will quickly hear people talk about returning to “the real world.” Understanding the current topography of change and resistance and make that visible with minimal intervention is critical. Keeping the work in contact with the field but intervening in smaller ways more often gives a better chance that affordances will be found for promising action. If you aren’t making change in the “real world,” change isn’t being made.
Containers exist because constraints exist. There is a connection. There is a flow. There is an inside and outside, there is an attractor. Even in the most subtle forms, these precipitate differences that become meaningful. What is happening inside this coffee shop is defined by who is on what side of the counter, which languages are being spoken, what the layout of tables and benches do. Who knows whom. The woman who made my espresso was once a kid on a team I coached. When she appears at her job at the community centre, I don’t order coffee from her. We both own shares in the same soccer team, one for which she also once played. The container emerges, is “borrowed” as Augusto says, from the field.
We cannot pretend otherwise. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t intervene to make change. It means we should be aware of our intervention and the role we play especially if we show up to the field with power and influence. And if we are making change, that work needs to be as deeply embedded in the field itself and not in the briefcases of consultants or the magic spells of method user guides. It’s about practice. I’m a practitioner.
Harrison’s most influential teaching on my life was not Open Space, actually. It was his slogan “Don’t trust the process, trust the people.” Follow that to its deepest implications and one might arrive at the kinds of questions about epistemic justice, colonization, domination, change-making, and democracy that matter. Those implications are ever-present in my work. I have no answers, but the question “What am I doing?” is a dear companion on the journey.
The leadership candidates for the Conservative Party of BC vow to roll back indigenous rights and stop returning land to First Nations. and also object to being called colonizers, which begs the question about what they think colonization is.
Billionaires are colonizing our skies. If you think this is bad, the night skies will soon be populated with a million Starlink satellites and thousands more from other companies and nations. And it gets worse as there are companies like Reflect Orbital prepared to launch satellite grids that will reflect sunlight to the night side of Earth to power solar arrays 24/7. Follow Sam Lawler for more.
The end of Viktor Orban’s reign had all the hallmarks of similar transitions from the authoritarian governments of Eastern Europe thirty years ago: a largely peaceful transition of power because the people finally decided that they would be ungovernable by this particular tyrant.
Autocracy runs on fear—on the assumption that enough people, confronted with sufficient consequences, will decide that compliance is safer than truth. What dismantled Orbán’s operation was the accumulation of individual decisions to the contrary.
Orban is still in parliament as opposition leader and his state apparatus still exists. But his election loss, although not the same as the fall of the former Eastern European Communist governments in the 1990s, put me in mind of the thesis championed by Havel, of living in truth. It seems that the Hungarian people, despite election rigging and gerrymandering, just got sick of being ruled by an illiberal autocrat with deep ties to the insane administrations of both Russia and the United States. My hope is that the people of Hungary have demonstrated the way, even through rigged electoral politics, to depose of a “democratic dictator.” Others may follow.
Another article about what it’s like to teach in the era of LLMs. I’m interested to read these and see how they change over time as the LLMs change, school policies and pedagogy changes and students change. The part that resonates for me about this one is “friction.”
Helen Palmer has collected a number of different voices describing the Cynefin framework and some if it’s underlying theory and practice. It’s a useful primer to where the thinking is on this particular framework