[18] NO, THERE IS NO PRECEDENT for what we are struggling to create. We have to make it up ourselves.
A great set of theses which ends with this one. And therefore the capacities to create what is unprecedented are also unprecedented. Best practices for what will be needed in the future are not available at any scale in the precedent. The call in the world now is to move to discover new ways of being at every scale. Some of this new ways will draw on old ways, some of it will draw on contemporary ways and some of it will draw on ways we haven’t yet discovered. But it will depend on “ways.”
Ways are roads. We travel some of these lineages now and we start new ones all the time. While I was in Los Angeles, I was struck by the evolution of the road system. Some of it is based on very old paths, such as Wilshire Boulevard, which began life as a path cleared through a barley field and gave rise to a fundamental archetype of automobile based commercial space, the Miracle Mile. Henry Wilshire had no idea that his cut through a field would create such a pattern. His pathway far pre-dated the technology that would find its highest expression there.
In creating the unprecedented ways of our future, we need to be attentive to what we are doing but not assume that any great stroke will create the roadway of the future. If a path through a field is needed, cut the path. And see what happens. Many paths die away, but the odd one or two becomes a powerful way when the time is right.
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I continue to learn about the effect of the feminine. Today I was walking with friends by Bridal Falls on Bowen Island where I live and we stopped at the waterfall to reflect on the nature of flow. This standing wave caught our attention and it immediately drew me into thoughts on the complementarity of the masculine and feminine.
For a long time I have been a student of the Tao, understanding the relationship between yang and yin. In Taoist thought, these two conditions exist in everything and are in constant and dynamic relationship. Yang is usually thought of as raw force, flow, life or energy, and yin is idenitfied with receptivity, structure, container. The two are also associated with masculine and feminine but not in a gender way, more in an archetypal fashion.
This video illustrates the power of having these two forces acheive some kind of balanace. You have the strong yang of the water flowing over the strong yin of the rock and it is shaped by what it is flowing over. We are looking at a remarkable thing here: a stable structure in which every element of its composition is changing in every minute. This flow structure perfectly illustrates what happens when yin and yang meet in balance, when the strong masculine is shaped by the contours of the feminine. We are seeing the effect of the feminine on the masculine, but we are looking at a structure that would not exist without a balance between the two.
Think about this in terms of organizations. We are surrounded in our social world by these kinds of flow structures, in which elements move through but the structure remains. Traffic jams, cities, organizations, schools…Notice that the stability in these structures comes not from what is flowing though them – not the people – but by the underlying architecture that shapes people’s behaviour in those moments. The flow of bodies and behaviours is influenced by the yin of the structure.
This is one way the feminine works with power: by being the channel though which power works, influencing it’s outcome. People who seek power with a strictly masculine perspective go for the flow itself: control of the money, people, water, oil. People who seek to stabilize the effect of power know that the contours of the flow channels influence everything, so they run banks and financial systems, management consulting firms, hydro power projects and fossil fuel economics respectively.
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Running an Art of Hosting workshop this week for employees of the City of Edmonton. We are about 30 people all together looking at the art of hosting participatory process, convening and leading in complex environments where certainty is an artifact of the past.
Naturally because these people work for a municipal government, the conversations we are having tend to be about systems. We are working at the level of what it takes a system to shift itself as well as what it takes of an individual to lead when the answers are unclear.
For me, lots of good insights are coming up. A few that cracked in a cafe conversation this morning included these three:
- The fundamental question facing governments is not why or what or who, but HOW. How can we deliver services differently? How do we change to include more public voice in our work without losing our mandate? How do we cope with the scale of change, chaos, interconnection and complexity that is upon us? These questions are powerful because they invite a fundamental shift in how things are done – the same question is being asked of the Aboriginal child welfare system at the moment in British Columbia, which is looking to create a new system from the ground up. Shifting foundations requires the convening of diversity and integrating diverse worldviews and ideas.
- New systems cannot be born with old systems without power struggle. As old ways of dong things die, new ways of doing things arise to take their place. But there isn’t a linear progression between the death of one system and the birth of the new: the new arises within the old. Transformation happens when the new system uses the old to get things done and then stands up to hold work when the old system dies. While old systems are dying, they cling to the outdated ways of doing things, and as long as old systems continue to control the resources and positions of power and privilege, transformation takes place within a struggle between the new and the old. Ignoring power is naive.
- A fundamental leadership capacity is the ability to connect people. This is especially true of people who long for something new but who are disconnected and working alone in the ambiguity and messy confusion of not knowing the answer.
Its just clear to me now that holding a new conversation in a different way with the same people is not itself enough for transformation to occur. That alone is not innovation. The answers to our most perplexing problems come from levels of knowing that are outside of our current level. The answers for a city may come from global voices or may come from the voices of families. Our work in the child welfare system was about bringing the wisdom of how families traditionally organized to create a new framework for child welfare policy and practice, and that work continues. Without a strategic framework for action, for transforming process itself, mere reorganization is not enough.
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This week I am in Kuujjuaq, Quebec, a settlement which lies about 20 miles upriver from Ungava Bay. I am working with government agencies, Inuit claims organizations and Inuit polar bear hunters on a user-to-user meeting between hunters from Nunavut, Nunavik and Nunatsiavut. Nunavut is a Canadian territory, Nunavik and Nunatsiavut are sort of semi-autnomous Inuit regions of Quebce and labrador respectively. All three areas arose from the settlement of land claims with Inuit organizations.
It’s an interesting meeting. All of the hunters are Inuit and they all hunt polar bears in the Davis Strait area, but they have different ways of doing it, and different cultural practices and even their dialects are different. There are a few unilingual hunters who only speak Inuktitut and so we have simultaneous interpretation between Inuktitut and English. Most of the meeting is being conducted in Inuktitut. The reason for the meeting was for the hunters to meet each other and see if there is anything they would like to do together with respect to the polar bear populations in the Davis Strait area. I won’t comment on the content of the meeting as we aren’t finished yet and it’s not for public consumption anyway, but I will make a few observations on the design and the challenges I have had as a facilitator.
I worked with a number of colleagues in designing this meeting using a Theory U framework. We knew that the first day would be much downloading, with some presentations and declarations and political positions. Even though these guys spend a lot of time on the land they are all very active in conferences and planning meetings and several of them are canny politicians. Day two was designed to take us through the bottom of the U, into presencing the emerging future, that which is not yet known. That included getting us out of the meeting room and on to the land where we hoped new insights would be sparked and the hunters in particular would feel able to stretch themselves. And day three was envisioned as a day of relaizing some new plans and ideas for working together. It didn’t break down exactly by days, but that was the gist.
Yesterday we began with the room set up in a cafe style and it quickly became clear that that wasn’t going to work for the participants. I wrote about this a little yesterday in a post that distilled my lessons from the day, but the short for is that they weren’t ready to try something radically new. They wanted a familiar room set up, which meant a hollow square that seated 40 people and a chair for the meeting. My colleague and I were happy to accede to this request. The design of the meeting would otherwise have become a massive distraction for the participants.
Interestingly, even as we changed the room around, and changed our facilitation style, the basic architecture of the flow remained the same, and today the process shifted even more. We spent the morning on the land out of town, on an excursion to a hunting camp. We were perched high above the Koksoak River, away from the tree line on some very rich and abundant tundra. The day was bright and very warm and the land was teeming with berries: crowberries, blueberries, and cranberries mostly. We spread out in smaller groups, some walking, some sitting and talking, others on little solos. We didn’t give any context for the time on the land this morning, but I had said last night as we broke up that we would be out on the land tomorrow, thinking and being in a different way.
After an hour or so of milling around, and picking a few cups of berries, the hunters all headed into to the small hunting cabin. When I went in to get some tea, I found them sitting in a circle, in deep conversation in Inuktitut. They had begun the meeting again and we simply let them go for it. At lunch time, some stew was brought out and someone unveiled a large piece of bowhead whale muktuk which was sliced with an ulu and laid out on the floor on a cardboard box lid. We ate together and then the hunters decided that they wanted to go back to town, to the meeting room and continue meeting there in a caucus.
So we headed back into town and the users hid away in our meeting room for the rest of the day discussing proposals with each other. My colleague and I stayed outside the meeting room and waited for what needed to happen to happen. The participants facilitated their own meeting and the government reps went off and did some business together awaiting an outcome from the users. All afternoon the hunters met and worked on various agreements and resolutions together, sometimes in small groups and other times in a de facto plenary. They have adopted a more traditional Robert’s Rules way of working in order to plan together because that is what is known to them. They are doing their own work and even though I didn’t technically “facilitate” anything today, I held space. Sometimes to wisdom not to intervene is what is required to keep space open. We have kept tabs on what is going on and expect to play a role as facilitators tomorrow as the users present their recommendations to the government reps, but in this meeting, we’ll see how the flow goes. It is a dance between shallow form and deep form, between holding on to the right things and letting other things go, and all while working in a context I know next to nothing about in a language I can’t speak. What is serving to guide me is the deep architecture of the gathering, my constant private checking in with the flow of the U which I know will bring us to some emergent learning. So far, the meeting is going as we planned it – at a deep level. On the surface everything is changing all the time.
A very interesting meeting.
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My twitter friend Durga pointed me to this article from Euan The Potter.on the Japanese aesthetic concept of “Wabi sabi”
Etymologically, “Wabi sabi” is based on the root forms of two adjectives, both of which are generally translated as “Lonely”. “Wabishii” however focuses on the object which is lonely, where as “Sabishii” focuses on the absence which makes the object lonely. The principal of “Wabi sabi” is therefore; Beauty reduced to its simplest form, and that form brought to a peak of focus by its relationship with the space in which it exists. That is to say, the presence of an object and the presence of the space interacting to strengthen each other.
The idea that space has presence is not new. Two and a half thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Parmenides proposed that it is impossible for anything which exists to conceive of anything which does not exist and that therefore even the space between objects “exists”. This remains in modern English as the concept that “I have nothing”. In Japanese however, it is grammatically impossible for “Nothing” (Nanimo) to exist (aru). “Nothing” (Nanimo) must be followed by “Is not” (nai). The idea of the presence of a space was therefore revolutionary.
To take it one step further, a tea bowl, being a vessel, is defined by the space it contains. It is not the pot which is important, but the space. In the tea bowl it is therefore possible to have the object (Wabi) and the space (Sabi) interacting within the same pot.
I think it is fair to say that, as in the art of tea, the art of hosting works with this idea to create both containers and spaces that provide the conditions for generative activity. It’s an elusive concept, the idea of creating beauty from things that aren’t really there, but that is why we call it an art, and when it comes off well, you can feel the strength of a well held container and the quality of the enclosed space.