Sometimes a line runs right through people and communities, and sometimes that line is in the middle of road we are all travelling on.
…how to address the polarization that is currently plaguing our world.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I have some ideas, maybe only one idea. But I’m not sure that there is much work that can be done in facilitating conversations across political divides. Instead, I think we need to focus on shared work.
This isn’t a new idea to me. I first saw Tuesday Rivera (Ryan-Hart) grapple with this reality back in 2011 when we were working with a group of social justice activists in New York, in the early days of Occupy Wall Street, and back when the Obama Administration was starting to suffer from weird attacks of The Tea Party, the movement that eventually took the US Republican Party off of the edge of rationality and into outrage, delusion and violence. For most of this century, polarized conversations between populists and policy wonks have been a feature of North American politics. It’s happening in Canada right now, and of course, we are all aware of what’s going on in the USA.
But here’s the thing. I think that these weird ideas that have plagued the social discourse for the past 15 years in earnest are down to folks who are doing very little else with their lives other than amplifying propaganda, hatred and inciting violence. In other words trolling. I have recently, finally, left Twitter because their CEO is one of those guys now, and that place, like much of social media, including Facebook, is a cesspool of delusion and hatred and bots and algorithms. There are so many bad-faith actors, bots and algorithms at work in those places that the discourse is now useless for doing anything other than getting populist politicians elected or inciting genocides. We’ve known this since 2016 when it was revealed how much Cambridge Analytica was influencing elections and politics in dozens of countries, and we’ve seen the result in places like the USA, Burma, Trinidad and Tobago and the USA. Other countries are now actively influencing domestic elections by poisoning the discourse between citizens. Canada’s populist right-wing is thoroughly infected by Kremlin-based operations now. There is no polite dialogue that will compete with the misinformation and hormone-fueled rage-baiting of these operations. Facebook and Twitter have built a fortune for their owners on the rage induced by this discourse, and they have used that money to invest deeper and deeper in the kinds of tech tools that continue to fuck us over.
I’m not being polite about this. Facebook, Twitter, and the like have poisoned everything from global policy making about climate change to local politics. These aren’t good places, and they don’t make us into good people.
That’s the preamble. But if you know me, you know I’m a bit of an optimist, and I’m always looking for places where possibility can take root. Lately, I’ve seen it in the work I’ve been supporting in community health care in the USA and practical reconciliation with First Nations in Canada.
Basically, it all comes back to Tuesday’s idea that shared work is more powerful than an abstract purpose or a set of shared values. When there is real work to do and urgency is in play, my experience is that people are much more willing to work together despite their politics and rhetoric. This isn’t to say that hate isn’t an important force to combat in our society; I believe it is. But my experience says that when folks roll their sleeves up to work on something that no one has the faintest idea how to solve, we can create something that transcends the abstract nonsense that social media drives amongst us.
If you’re tired of the rhetoric, get to work on a local need that is stumping your community. You will need to pull together diverse folks. You will have disagreements and arguments. But if you are committed to doing work together, a centre might emerge between you all that holds your efforts together, even if those with nothing better to do try to yank you apart.
There is real suffering in the world right now, and there is a real need to address it. If polarization is getting to you, get out there and do some concrete work with people who also care to alleviate it. They will not be the same as you. You will have deep disagreements about some things and deep commitments about other things. You have to learn to work together. There are no perfect partners.
And a reminder: This is a blog. It’s just a place where I share half-formed thoughts and ideas. Sometimes, they work, and sometimes, they are naive. However you react to this idea, I’d love to hear your affirmation or your alternatives, as long as they don’t require me to go back to Twitter and engage there.
Dry Falls, Washington, which is where the Missoula Flood waters poured over the rim of the Grand Coulee and created lakes from the plunge pools at the bottom of the cliffs.
It’s feeling familiar. After four years of mostly working from home and staying fairly close to my home place, I’m travelling more. The difference is that I’m doing it more with Caitlin, as we are working together with groups and organizations on longer-term projects that we are holding together with others. Much of our work together is around building deeper capacity in hosting and participatory leadership with larger institutional organizations such as universities, human services networks, unions, quasi-government organizations and the like. On top of that, we have been doing some Art of Hosting workshops in Vancouver and Manitoba and I have two more coming up in Ontario this fall.
Last week we were in Central Washington State working with a group called Thriving Together which helps build networks of health care providers for whole person health and health equity. This is the second year we have worked with a cohort of folks from that network. We met in Soap Lake, Washington, which in September is quiet. The kids are back in school, the tourists have all left and the town has very little buzz. Soap Lake, which is known as Smokiam (Healing Waters) in the local nxa?amx?ín language is a small, muddy, and very alkaline lake at the southern end of the Grand Coulee. The mud and waters are said to have healing properties and many visitors, especially from northern Europe and Israel, flock to the tow in the summer to partake.
The town itself is not affluent. Soap Lake does not have the water resources or the connection to the interstate to make it rival the towns in the rest of the county. Quincy, about a half hour to the south, is on the Columbia River and is a hub for big agriculture food processing and data centres, both of which use the river to power and cool their operations. Computing “in the cloud” is a misnomer. The cloud needs to rain, and the rain needs to be captured, and the water needs to be swirled around hundreds of thousands of computers that have a real live footprint on the ground. Cloud computing makes it sound so ephemeral. The reality is much more material.
To the north, in the town of Grand Coulee, also on the Columbia River, stands the great dam built during the 1930s to contribute to the two systems change points everyone needed to haul themselves out of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl: water and cheap electricity. In a country where almost every public service is privatized, the Bonneville Power Authority remains a public utility and sells the electricity generated by the dozen or more dams on the Columbia. These dams did their jobs, immortalized in song by Woody Guthrie, (he wrote these songs in less than a month, keeping in line with massive events that happen in a short period of time in these parts) who placed a limited and naive optimism in the people’s power and water, but they also flooded out dozens of Indigenous communities of the Colville Tribes and destroyed the Columbia River salmon runs. The landscape is stunning and captivating and has been radically changed by human hands.
Those human hands worked upon a foundation that was laid down by catastrophic flooding at the end of the ice age, when somewhere between 40 and 100 megafloods cascaded across central Washington, carving deep canyons from the volcanic basalt that had coated the bedrock millions of years before in thousands of feet of lava. the sheer scale of geological processes in this region are mind-blowing, and I found myself absorbed by YouTube videos of the Missoula Floods that carved out features on the land in as little as 48 hours as hundreds of meters of water flowed across the plains and carved the Columbia River gorge on its way to the sea.
Central Washington is no stranger to catastrophic shifts in fortune in the human time scale either. While Quincy and Wenatchee have done well, the further you get away from the Columbia, the harder it is to make a living. Agriculture held a lot of promise in Woody Guthrie’s time and irrigation canals crisscross the whole landscape. But like most industries, agriculture has been largely concentrated in a few hands, and automation has eliminated the jobs Guthrie was so optimistic about. While we were in Soap Lake, except for a single bottle of local wine, none of the food we ate was locally grown. If it was, it was only because it was part of a Sysco order that threw it together with Florida oranges, California lettuce, and bananas from God knows where. Someone is making a killing in agriculture, but it wasn’t the local folks I saw around me.
Instead, what Soap Lake had in spades was community, although it wasn’t obvious to the visiting eye. After spending a week there, we started to meet folks like Simon, the window washer who was sent by the drinkers at the local pub across the street to come and find out what we were up to. Or Nels Borg, who is the defacto golf pro at the Lava Links golf course, which has to be seen to be believed. Nels was in our workshop and is an undaunted community booster, even long championing the funding and construction of the world’s largest lava lamp, something which has very much remained the concept of a plan for 25 years. Like all small towns, Soap Lake has a long story for every “why?”
It’s political season in America and Grant County is a pretty conservative place in general. While there were plenty of Trump signs up (and a bunch of Harris/Walz signs, too), my experience working in the US during these times is that there is just too much work to do for the large-scale silliness to be top of mind for folks. When you are working with people who are caring for folks with addictions, childcare issues, educational challenges, and access to health care and housing, politics and policy are very real. We aren’t in weird arguments about people eating cats. We’re trying to meet the needs of vulnerable people and build public support and collaboration for health and well-being.
The work is real. Caring for veterans, fair housing policies, providing resources for neurodivergent middle schoolers, inclusive economic development, and peer-based support for people in recovery and active addiction. All of it is real and requires collaboration and multiple approaches to meeting needs. The participatory approaches and practices we are called to teach in these settings help set people up to lead in more open and participatory ways, even in a world where public conversations are coming apart and being subjected to lies, intimidation and ideology.
This group is really drawn to the methods we teach – Open Space, World Cafe, Circle, LImiting Beliefs Inquiry – and the theories and tools that help us think about creating participatory work and responses to really complex challenges that overwhelm people and systems. Sometimes, when the questions are just too big, the answer is – at least in the beginning – community. In our rush to do SOMETHING to respond to urgency, it is very easy to create situations that disempower and degrade connections. Organizations like Thriving Together play an important role in supporting the social infrastructure that builds community resilience. They can convene conversations that help diverse groups of people share knowledge and make sense of their conditions, leading to collaborations and resources. Without organizations like that and practices rooted in participatory work, agencies and organizations become siloed, disconnected and lonely.
Soap Lake is really no different from thousands of other communities around the United States and Canada and the rest of the world. It is a small town looking around for help and not necessarily finding it from higher levels of government or the corporate world that has extracted so much of its wealth and talent. It has to rely on its own resources to keep going, and remember what is essential about being a community: connecting, knowing each other, devoting a bit of time and energy to something a bit bigger than yourself because you know that when some are suffering, all are inhibited from full wellbeing.
I love working with groups like this. I admire their work and their undaunted commitment to solving absolutely diabolical problems. I learn so much about the imperative of participatory work from places like this, and I’m grateful for the reciprocal relationships of learning and change-making that we create together.
Ever since Google repurposed their slide app for Jamboard, I’ve been a heavy user. Jambaord is a stripped down whiteboard that allows you to post sticky notes and add images to slides. It’s very simple and always worked quite well for a basic, low-ish tech way to collaborate online.
As Google is wont to do, however, the app is being discontinued, and as of October 1, it will no longer be available. Your existing Jambaords will be kept around as read-only.
I do use Miro, which works well if I am working with a group over time, and we can take the time to learn it and use it. It can be frustrating for folks with low patience for learning new tech. When we just need a quick and dirty workspace, I want something simple. Zoom has a simple whiteboard feature, which I have also used, which is like a stripped-down version of Miro with some Jamboard features. The advantage of this is that it can be opened directly inside a Zoom meeting, but of course, it doesn’t work if you are using another videoconferencing tool.
My friend Amanda Fenton, who is my go-to partner for hybrid facilitation and large-scale online engagement work, swears by Padlet for her work, and we are currently using it for some engagement work we are doing with the Squamish Nation on developing their Constitution. Padlet is easy to use, is accessible and works well on mobile. Recently, they produced an app called Padlet Sandbox that is a good replacement for Jamboard. While it still can’t export yet (a feature that is coming), and it’s not free beyond a very basic use, it is a really good replacement for Jamboard, and it looks and feels very much like Jamboard does. For people accustomed to using Jamboard, this is a good replacement. It can also accept your exported Jamboards.
Amanda has made a video tutorial exploring Sandbox and comparing it to Jamboard, which is worth watching if you are looking for something to use after October 1.
Watch Amanda’s video here, and check out her list of facilitation resources for in-person and online meetings, with a special emphasis on accessibility.
I was going through some old emails today and found one from 2020 from my friend Susan Phillips in Minneapolis who shared a really moving message about the closing of an important Youth Leadership Initiative (YLI) back then. It relates to how to end a container.
If you’ve been with me in real life you know that I like to end a gathering in a crisp and decisive way. I think it’s important to know when you are done, when the work is complete and when the next thing happens. So for years I have used a practice that I learned from Tim Merry and which he learned in Soweto, South Africa at the Soweto Mountain of Hope Project. This little ritual to end a time together uses three sets of three claps as little blessings. The first set is to clap for ourselves. The second set is to clap for our communities. The third set is to clap for our work in the world.
Susan introduced this practice to the YLI and when the program closed one of the participants, Nou, led the final claps, and she framed it this way:
“We clap on the inside for ourselves – may we always remember our worth, that we are more that what people say, that we are brilliant, that our voices are powerful, that we have wisdom regardless of our age and that we come from a strong line of ancestors. As we all graduate from YLI tonight, may we walk into the world with courage, confidence, knowing our worth and perseverance through hard times. The world isn’t always kind but know that no matter what happens, no matter where we go, we will always have friends here who believe in the fullness, not of who we were yesterday, but of who we are today and who we will become tomorrow. We clap on the inside to remind ourselves that change starts with us. Let us use our personal power to shine bright, to create, to lead, to heal; and vow never to let anyone take that away from us.
We clap in the middle to celebrate the community we have build here over the last 7 months; to acknowledge each of your leadership journeys, your commitments til the end and the contributions you have made this year and to remember the power of coming together across difference. We also clap in the middle to honor the people in our community who are fighting for justice; and to also commit ourselves as leaders to doing what we can to making our neighborhoods and cities a better place for everyone. We are the ones we have been waiting for y’all.
As we clap on the outside, may the universe hear our dreams, our cries and desires for change and justice. May our actions inspire people around us to listen deeply, fight harder and love more. Lastly, we clap on the outside to send our collective energy rippling throughout the world.”
It’s been four years since I got that email, but Nou, wherever you are, your actions continue to inspire me.
One of our TSS Rovers Women’s team players, Sofia Farremo, signing an autograph for a young fan while standing in our supporters section at a TSS Rovers game this summer. Supporter culture at our club is HSL.
About 20 years ago, I first met Dr. Mark R. Jones. It was either at The Practice of Peace gathering or one of the Evolutionary Salons called at the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island, Washington. At any rate, Mark was an interesting presence. He sat in silence for most of the time near the room entrance as a kind of gatekeeper, watching the threshold and seeing what happened there. He occasionally played classical guitar and offered insights and reflections to anyone who sat and talked with him.
At some point, I heard the story about his work. He was a senior corporate executive, working in technology and defence-related companies for most of his career. He was also a long-time Tibetan Buddhist practitioner. He once visited the Dalai Lama and was challenged by him to build a practice of compassion based on the idea that “people need to be seen, heard, and loved, in that order.”
Mark took that work and built an approach to compassionate communication based on that heuristic. He called the work “hizzle” based on how he pronounced the acronym of heard, seen, and loved: HSL. I remember being taken by his description of what happens when people aren’t heard, seen or loved. If they are not heard, they shout and raise their voices. If they are not seen, they make a scene so you notice them, or they engage in bullying and toxic power dynamics. If they are not loved, they play a toxic game of approach and avoid that, which creates and then sabotages relationships and connections.
Mark’s insight was that these behaviours were signs of suffering and that when HSL was missing, “mischief occurs.” In this practice, he connected suffering to fear and offered the antidotes to these behaviours with a very simple and powerful way to let folks know they are heard, seen or loved.
To really hear, see, or love others, Mark insists that we have a practice in which we hear, see and love ourselves and become familiar with all of the ways we personally express fear and suffering when our own HSL is thwarted. It’s a practice.
I’ve used this insight for most of my career in situations where folks are exhibiting these fear-based behaviours. It has been a really useful shortcut and reminder for my own practice.
I was reminded again of how powerful this set of insights is when my friend and colleague Ashley Cooper shared some work she is doing to bring this work into the context of supporting parents of children, something at which she is incredibly gifted.
Mark’s work isn’t that easy to find online. His company, Sunyata Group is where you can find him as he is leading teams in creating Beloved Community. His HSL approach has been adopted and modified by the Liberating Structures crew (I believe Henri Lipmanowicz and Ashley were both at the same gathering I was at when we met Mark and learned about his work). Years ago, Phil Cubeta wrote a bit about Mark’s work and included a workshop handout that Mark must have provided him at some point.