My friend Robert Oetjen was a key member of our hosting team at Altmoisa. He brings a lovely capacity to the work, being the head of an environmental learning centre in southern Estonia, he understands the deep connection between human and world, and is a practitioner of the most ancient arts of human kind: tracking and fire building. He is a man who is a beautiful learner from his environment. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, he moved here in the early 1990s as a Peace Corps worker, teaching English in the days in which Estonia was hungry to claim it’s relationship to the west. But like all good improvisers, he allowed the climate to change him, and he began deeply intimate with Estonian culture and language, married and Estonian woman and moved into becoming a steward of Estonian natural places. He speaks the language fluently and beautifully and Estonians, who are normally wary of outsiders, embrace him and respect him, and always forget that he wasn’t born of this land. I can imagine, after being here for only a week, how it must have happened that he became so quickly embraced here. The land and the people are reserved but when they open to you and you open to them, the embrace is deep and multi-layered.
Robert brought this consciousness to the beginning of our third day, leading us in a check in exercise on the land that taught so many things on so many levels. We simply stood for a while in the cold gloom of an early Estonian autumn morning. The air was very still, but an occasional light breeze reminded one that one still has bones. Robert invited us to first of all become aware of the extent of our vision, noticing how wide it extended on either side of us, and how high and low a soft gaze can perceive. From there we closed our eyes and let our ears open to the subtle soundscape around us. For me this was wonderful because this is my morning practice at home. here the soundscape is similar, but the sounds are totally different. Many birds were quietly moving in the trees and shrubs around us, among them bullfinches, bushtits, creepers and hooded crows. A raven called far away and a dog barked softly across the fields. Deepening into this sense of place, Robert invited us to smell the mud, and the leaves on the ground, the apples that had fallen from nearby trees and were slowly decaying, turning sweet and pungent on the ground. Our senses fully awakened, Robert then taught us how to walk again.
One foot softly in front of the other, gaze open, like a hunter becoming aware of every sound and movement around us. Each foot develops eyes of its own, feel its way on the land, so sensitive to what is underfoot that it’s is possible to walk without making a sound . You become a part of the landscape, joining it completely, becoming enmeshed within it, so that everything that happens happens WITH you rather than as a RESULT of you being there. This is a huge and important teaching about harvesting. As you learn to walk in this way – Robert called it “foxwalking” – you become a little quicker, a little more sure footed, you are able to move deliberately and yet not disturb anything around you. It was a powerful way to experience hosting and being hosted, joining the field and harvesting in the moment, becoming fully present.
And it was just the first of two morning acts. Following a walk on the land in this way, Robert invited us inside and proceeded to make a fire, using his tools of a fireboard, a firestick, a bow, a handhold and some dry moss tinder. He gave a beautiful teaching about the archetypal elements of this practice, the fundamental unity of male and female with the firestick and fireboard, the notch that allows dust to come into the space that is created by the friction to birth the spark, the notch is the womb and the spark emerges from the union, the bow that turns the stick through the four directions, gathering the energy of the circle to create powerful life. Such a rich practice, such a beautiful fundamental teaching about application. It continued to resonate through our final day. As I left Estonia this morning, Robert gifted me a set of these tools for my own, a deep invitation into practice and learning this ancient art, the first act of survival to build a fire out of nothing, and the primal act of community building. the spark begins the possibility of coming together.
The rest of the day flowed. Toke and I gave very simple teachings on application. I talked a little about the improv principle of “notice more and change less” speaking about the fact that what we had experienced is a more profound way to open to possibility than feeling that we need to change all the time. the world changes enough as it is. If we can simply stay still long enough in one place, everything we need will flow past, timing will present itself and pass away, the possibilities for action become expansive.
The group went into Open Space to work through their design questions for projects that they are deep within. We rolled and flowed and talked and drew and at the end of the day, ran a little intention grounding exercise that involved milling around and collecting questions on our next steps, and then we checked out with voices of appreciation and gratitude and an eager commitment to meet again in February when this cohort of learners will assemble for their final co-learning journey.
It has been a great pleasure to spend time with this group, to make many new friends who are cracking good work in Estonia, exploring the leading edges of participatory leadership in a country that is slowly coming back to life, and to remembering its deepest gifts and resources. Many stories, practices and inspiring thoughts are coming home with me, right into work with First Nations on the west coast of Vancouver who are reclaiming their own resources of cultural strength and the renewed use and management of the marine ecosystems on which they depend. My big learning is that the skills and practices of participatory leadership are all around us, deep in the ground of the cultural legacies we have inherited as humans on this planet. And when we can talk and learn and share between traditional indigenous peoples, we discover so many modalities that are from the same root.
Sad to be leaving, but happy to be coming home from four days of teaching, fuller than when I left.
From How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic:
I was intrigued by this line from a new paper by John N. Ivan, Norman W. Garrick, and Gilbert Hanson titled “Designing Roads That Guide Drivers to Choose Safer Speeds”:
The aesthetics or “beauty” of a road environment has also been investigated in relation to traffic safety. Drottenborg (1999) studied the impact of speed on streets that appear as “beautiful” due to the blossoming of cherry trees along the streets in Lund during springtime, and similar streets that lack such beautification. She found that the free-flow mean speed decreased by about 5 percent and the number of vehicles traveling at high speeds between 50-60 km/h decreased by about 12 percent during the cherry blossom period.
One imagines a whole new sub-field of traffic engineering, with myriad questions: Do certain buildings or even architectural styles affect driver behavior? Can beautiful people literally “stop traffic”?
This is a lovely observation.
Lately I have been working as much as possible with graphic recorders who bring a level of beauty into a meeting that has a similar effect. When people work with graphic recorders, they approach the wall reflectively, take care to choose their words and make sure that what they are adding to the record is somehow commensurate with the aesthetic experience being captured.
People want more effective meetings and gatherings and I think a key way to get to effectiveness is to slow down. Slowing down can only happen in a physical environment where there is beauty that can catch our eye, catch ahold of the flow of conversations and cause little swirls and eddies that invite it to loop back on itself, become reflective and therefore effective.
Today John Inman had a great post on using the world cafe for a five hour strategic planning session with a non-profit. His process works as follows:
First I asked that the whole system be in the retreat. We had board members, a customer, grant writer, community member, and contractors.
1. Introduction in group setting
2. Introduce the process
3. Pose the question
4. Three cafe tables with three people each, start the cafe
5. Three rounds of conversation each 20 minutes
6. Returned people to original table and asked them to capture the main themes at each table. 20 minutes
7. Harvested main themes in group
8. Group process for prioritization and assessing performance on each focus
9. Opportunity map outcomes
10. Group process to explore opportunities to work on and time frames
11. Assign teams to develop tactical plans to address opportunities
12. Used affinity process to capture everyone’s values, and group into value titles
13. Developed the values for the non-profit from this harvest
14. From conversation developed mission for the non-profit
15. Created list of what the non-profit is and is not for them to develop a story about their organization and it role in the community
16. Provided a foundation for a vision statement to be drafted.
17. Reflection session and adjournAnd all of this in 5 hours. It was the most productive planning session I have ever had and I believe that is in no small part due to driving them into conversation early and the power of conversation transformed the session.
Years ago I developed a process for doing something similar in Open Space. the challenge was how to hold an open planning conversation on the future of the organization, but address key areas without being controlling. We designed a day and a half strategic planning retreat with a non-profit by first identifying the key areas which the plan needed to cover. In this case the organization needed to plan in five basic areas: services, funding, human resources, government relations and labour relations. We then issued an invitation to everyone who needed to come. Our process ran like this:
- Prepare a harvest wall with five blank spots for reporting, each with one of the five topic headings.
- Open Space and invite any conversations to take place but point out that only those conversations that touch on the five planning topics will go forward into the plan.
- Open Space as usual with convenors hosting sessions and taking notes. Convenors type notes up on laptops and print them out, placing the printed copy in one of the five topic areas (or outside the five topic areas, if the conversation was not relevant to planning).
- Overnight, compile the reports from each of the five groups and print a copy for each participant.
- In the morning, there are five breakout spaces in the meeting room each one focusing on one of the five topics.
- People self-organize their participation in a 1.5 to 2 hour conversation on each of these five areas. I think we asked them to undertake specific tasks such as identifying key priorities, and planning action (including preliminary resource estimates and communications implications). Also we asked them to identify initial implementation steps. Rules of Open Space applied, especially the law of two feet.
- Groups met and then reported back. Their initial plans were then sent to the executive of the organization for refining and more detailed resource costing (everyone knew that going in).
Like John, my experience of the process was incredibly productive and the plans were excellent, and sustainable over the long term because there was a huge amount of buy-in from the co-creation process.
These participatory processes are far more than “just talk” and with wise planning and focussed harvests, they are a very fast way to make headway on what can otherwise be tedious planning processes.
Adopting change as the point of working together. When so many efforts seemed aimed at preserving the status quo and mitigating the results of things that change and are not the same as before, what would happen if we adopted change as the point of things?
Jack Ricchiuto on working with a group using this principle:
As usual they are amazed at the pragmatism, efficiency, and wisdom of treating change as a tool of project success rather than a risk, liability, and cost. When change becomes key to how we design future projects, we work with an infinitely greater sense of joy and innovation. When action learning is THE point of projects, change – not compliance -is the key to our success.
via jack/zen ” zenext » Blog Archive » Change as design principle.
It is hard to remember that in fact things are always changing and that the point of getting together is most often to create that change. Why not just put it upfront: if we are not changing we are not alive.
“My grandmother was the one that inspired me,” said my friend Liz over lunch at the Valley Inn in Bella Coola. “She said that the world was once all together, and then it came apart and one day it will be all together again. So I just try to bring things together.”
Liz is a pretty remarkable woman. She worked for years in family reunification in Vancouver, bringing together First Nations kids with their birth families, reconnecting them to their culture and communities. She is at home now in Bella Coola on council, working for the Ministry as a social worker, but always about bringing people together. The reason I am here, for these two days of community conversations, is simply to be a part of designing and hosting community meetings that do that.
The Nuxalk Nation reserves sit in this stunning valley, at the mouth of the Bella Coola River, where it meets the ocean at North Bentinck Arm, still nearly 150 kilometres inland from the open Pacific coast. At the Bella Coola town site is an old cannery, an icehouse and a wharf. There are a couple of hotels and restaurants, a Coop store, some repair shops and and RCMP station. Across the street from that is one of the Nuxalk communities, an old part of the reserve called “Downtown.” It mostly consists of old Department of Indian Affairs Housing, never designed for the wet climate of the Pacific coast, some trailers that house the band office and a couple of community buildings and a playground. Yards are full of mullein, plantain and blackberry bushes and the occasional carved headstone can be seen in a yard. A small creek winds through the reserve and joins the river on the north side of the community. At this time of year there are people out on the river, drift netting their food fish, gathering coho for canning and smoking. The Nuxalk fisheries personnel are trying to find some sockeye to take eggs from so they can stock some of the streams and lakes around the territory. Like everywhere the fish are dwindling. In the past, oolichans ran through here in the millions, but now only a handful return in the early spring and the once rich Nuxalk grease, one of the healthiest human produced foods in the world, is now gone.
Up the river from here is the newer community of Four Mile, a subdivision of larger lots and larger houses. Kids roam around on their bikes and young families are out walking. The houses look like any rural subdivision but there are telltale signs you are still on Nuxalk lands. Poles dote the neighbourhood, carving studios take up garage space, and the occasional lawn has a fish boat parked on it.
As the Bella Coola valley winds eastward, a few more communities dot the landscape – Hagensborg is the biggest, another 10 kilometres along highway 20. It is an old Norwegian settlement, and here the houses look bigger, more durable, and on large lots featuring manicured lawns and gardens. No one is outside, the kids get dropped off from the school bus and head right inside in contrast to the reserves, where the kids scatter in all directions after school. As highway 20 heads up towards Williams Lake, it climbs the “hill” a steep grade of narrow switch backs with no guard rail, that is said by some to be the most terrifying drive in Canada. If you don’t fly out, or leave for Vancouver Island far to the south by ferry, this is the only way to go.
This is the valley in which I have been working this week. A place of stunning natural beauty and deep social alienation. Liz and the Nuxalk elected chief, Spencer, were both fed up with the kinds of community meetings that have been going on for years, where people come and yell at one another, where anger becomes unbottled rage and questions are asked that have no answers that will ever satisfy. Both realized that how we talk to one another is important, so we agreed to try an experiment, and see what might happen if we ran meetings using participatory methodologies.
The first day was a World Cafe, which I wrote about earlier, and yesterday we tried an Open Space meeting for a general community meeting. As is not uncommon, we started very late, once people had arrived, and a pot of moose stew appeared and everyone was settled, it was 5:00 – 90 minutes past the posted opening. We had about 20 people sitting in a circle wondering what would happen, and I was wondering the same. Most folks were Band employees, present to give information and participate in conversations as best they could. A number had been reluctant to come because they had no idea what would happen, and feared community members being out of control. “How are you going to stop people from getting on their high horses?” one man had asked me. “I’m not,” I replied. “But the way we do this will lessen the chance of that happening.” He wasn’t convinced. It was as if I had just described the concept of magic to him. I clearly knew my stuff, but that didn’t make me any more in touch with reality.
After a prayer and a quiet opening welcome, I stepped into the circle, with really nothing but an invitation to talk differently. We had not been able to do very much planning, and the notices for the meeting had only gone out to the community a couple of days before. Still, the invitation was to move from some visioning that the community had been doing for an Indian Affairs mandated planning process, to something more based in what the people wanted. I walked the circle, explained the process, reminded them that they had the power to set the agenda, and waited for what might happen.
Always in Open Space meetings, there is this moment of being on the edge of the complete unknown. All of the preparation and time spent building the invitation and the theme and the question usually pay off in that moment. If we have done all of that right and produced a strong social field, the ideas flood into the centre. But there are times when the conditions don’t tap the passion of the community, when people just remain confused about why they are there and what they are supposed to do. When they haven’t seen through their cynicism far enough to even listen to the instructions. Those times only happen if there has been little preparation in the community or organization. Open Space is not a magic wand – it does not automatically generate participation. Invitation is the magic wand and Open Space is the place where the magic can happen. Yesterday, I feared that the wand had not been well used. That we would be staring at the floor between our feet for a while.
But sometimes passion trumps preparation. It turns out that in Nuxalk, there are plenty of things to talk about. Life is hard for most people. There is 90% unemployment, the fish are disappearing, huge scale land rights issues loom over the heads of 1600 people, the language and culture is hanging by a thread, youth are drinking and drugging and getting pregnant. It’s no wonder really that people shout at community meetings. It’s the last place to rail against the morass of conditions that keeps these communities poor and out of the loop. The last place where people can feel their power, even if it comes at the expense of others.
So last night, as I sat down, four people rose up and we were off. One Elder who had been a vocal critic of how bad the Council was at communicating with the people convened a session on how she wanted to see it done It felt at some level like there was some forgiveness buried in her question. Let’s move on, she seemed to be saying. Let’s figure out how to do this better.
There were similar sentiments around jobs and youth and culture and language. Ten small groups were formed, and there was lots of visiting over the next hour as we did all the sessions in one time slot. Laughter broke out all around the room. More community members, who had been hanging around the outside of the hall, joined us. Liz picked up a conversation that she had started two years ago when I had been here before working with her. She introduced people to her idea of a community house – an intergenerational space where people could gather and be with one another.
As we gathered in the circle at the end, we talked about what it felt like to be working like this. People had a good feeling towards one another. I asked when was the last time people had left a community meeting feeling good. There was hearty laughter. “Never!” said one Elder, her eyes wide with the absurdity of the question. “Feels good now though,” she said.
We have a choice. We can meet in ways that get nothing done in the name of “information sharing” and “accountability” or we can meet in ways which allow our hearts to set the agenda, and our hands and feet to see it through to action. We didn’t begin massive amounts of work last night, but we cracked open something – a possibility that it could be different. Hopefully we opened a jar out of which choice flowed. As Thomas King once said, you can’t pretend not to have heard the story If you were there last night, you would have seen and felt something different. You can spin it to say some guy came up from the south and ran this kooky meeting and we talked in small groups. But no one who was there can deny that it DID feel good at the end. We felt like something was accomplished.
What do we dare choose now?
Liz reminded me that when we worked together two years ago, a young woman uttered a phrase that is stark in it’s power and implication for communities like Nuxalk: Leadership is seeing the beauty in others. It’s to draw together the world again, as Liz’s grandmother says. To heal by making whole, which is not to say fixing everything, but rather to bring things closer together.
As we left the hall last night, Spencer, the chief, waved at a man coming across the playground. He was a “trooper” one of the small number of chronic alcoholics in the community who have the hardest time of all. “What’s happening Spence?” the trooper cried out. “Community meeting,” replied the young chief getting into his truck. “We were just talking.”
“Oh, mmmhmm,” said the trooper. “That’s good.”