A cafe today, with littler preparation on the ground and a tricky issue in a community, but a good result today and some good learnings about harvesting. Here are my notes:
Before we began the chief invited us to stand in a circle to pray and to have some introductions. I was introduced and invited the group to find beauty in the work here, identifying what they really cared about for the education of their young people. We stayed standing in the circle for a half hour while some of the Elders talked about how hurt they had been over the past several years as the work the community had done to set up and govern the education system had gone sideways. They expressed frustration at the lack of communication and transparency and a perceived lack of respect for the community’s voice and the hard work that the community had done over the years. They talked about having more meetings, and more process to include people deep in the work of building support for the education system.
When people are stuck, you cannot move forward without acknowledging where they hurt. You cannot sweep pain and feelings of injustice under the carpet. People who are willing to stand for principles and stand for their beliefs need to be heard and acknowledged. No amount of defending or apologizing for the past will always do the trick either. In fact defending leads to more stuckness and no one ends up getting what they want. Concerns need to be heard as interests and as rooted in deeply held views about how things should work. The Elders in this gathering are talking about a process that they can be involved in and an education system that they can be involved in. It’s clear and to avoid that or design a system that does not makes space for their voice or passion does not transcend the pain and bad feelings that are the residue of the catastrophic collapse of the education board in years past.
To get through messes, simply listen, acknowledge, suspend beliefs and assumptions and make sure you hear people clearly and that they are heard clearly.
What do we want for education in this community?
We began with this question. The first two rounds of conversation focused on it. From there we asked: In a perfect world, how would our community be involved in education? We then finished in a circle again.
Part of the art of hosting is dealing with fear. I am so sure of the importance of a strong field being in place that when I work in a place where the field is weak or wobbly I fear that nothing will take root. But good questions are like weed seeds. The can thrive in some of the most depleted environments. And those first seeds that fall and sprout in depleted or barren ground make plants that make more soil. Lichens and mosses break down rock and create mineral soils that larger plants can grow in. Likewise, sometimes you just need to work with what you’ve got – design a question that assumes the best intentions of a community and drop it in and see what happens. People choose their engagement in cafe, they make decisions all the time about who to be with. In many subtle ways those decisions actually work towards optimal. During the evening, the law of two feet took over in this cafe. Many people were visiting with the Elders to hear what they have to say and the Elders were strategically visiting with others to make sure people understood their perspective. This is the field of good soil that is created by a good question and the freedom for people to engage. It’s by no means a garden of rare and wonderous plants, but with careful tending, the meager harvest from tonight could at least represent a change in the life of the community around this issue.
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Ensconced at the head of an inlet in what has to be the most beautiful valley in BC. My commute yesterday to get here was a one hour flight from Vancouver over huge icefields, 9000 foot peaks, high mountain lakes and deep forested cirques. The landscape here is forbiddingly raw, and when the morning sun catches the blue glint of glacial ice in the cracks and crevacies on the icefall you are flying PAST (not over!) your heart just sings.
In this tight little valley – now rain soaked and cloud choked – a few thousand people live cheek by jowel. At one end, where the long inlet terminates, is the Nuxalk Nation where I am doing a little work, trying to bring some hasitily organized participatory process to a couple of pressing needs in th ecommunity. Today is basically about trying to host a community conversation that sees the good and the possible in a desperate and fractious context. In most First Nations communities, hurt runs deep and the kinds of dynamics that are at play here are deep currents that carry away optimisim, creativity and possibility. And yet, everyone I talk to here wants something different, a different conversation, a different wnay of looking at things. So today and tomorrow, using Cafe and Open Space, we are going to try that.
We haven’t had much time to prepare, and there is much working against making this an ideal situation, so I truly don’t know what will happen. I am just entering today as open as I can be to what’s possible, trying to embody what others are longing for.
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My friend Kenoli Oleari on the possibility that the conversation can be changed:
We are finding that there are lots of opportunities for public meetings, town halls, task forces, etc. as well as a lot of dissatisfaction with the way things are done. People fear new approaches, but we are finding if we don’t buy into those fears, rather working with them to stay focused on outcomes and the best way to achieve what they want, that there is some degree of receptivity. In many cases people do care about good outcomes and let this desire assuage their fears. There is certainly huge gratitude when they see the amazing results they had never imagined.
We are also finding that little process tweaks can have huge impacts on the quality of results.
In the Art of Hosting world we call this “chaordic confidence” the ability to stay in the heat and fear of chaos and uncertainty and hold space for collaboration and participation to unfold.
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Check this quote:
Social scientist Herbert Simon wrote in 1971
IN an information rich world, the wealth of information means the death of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence the wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
It’s just plain obvious that information consumes attention, but it is not always apparent how it is working on us.
Last night, I was at my weekly TaKeTiNa session with friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk, exploring what happens when we induce groove and confusion using rhythm, stepping and voice, and I was really struck with an exploration of the polarity between planning and doing.
One of the questions we were playing with was “What do you do with space?” The rhythmic pattern we were working with had moments of lots of space, and moments where several movements happened all at once. It was a kind of sprung rhthym, all carried over a steady beat. What I noticed was that in the spacious moments, I took time to get myself ready for the next burst of activity instead of resting in that spaciousness. The result was that, to the extent that my mind was living in the future, my body went there as well and I ended up often doing things AHEAD of the beat.
In other words there was so much information I was taking in, including information about what to do next, what to sing, how the polyrhythms worked, what else was going on in the room, that my attention to the present moment was erased and I had a hard time just DOING.
This polarity between planning and doing is familiar to me. When I meditate, and when my thoughts drift, they almost always drift to the future, to things I need to do or should be doing. I notice that this keeps me away from being in the present and actually paying attention to what is happening all around me.
In group settings, this imbalance can lead to me missing a whole bunch of information about where a group is at, if my mind is fixed on where we are going, or where we need to go.
By contrast, when I focus on the present, and on doing rather than planning, I am in balance. Balance in this case means that every part of my mind and body is HERE. Imbalance is when some part of your mind or body shifts elsewhere, and you very often topple in that case – physically or otherwise. Being present opens up the spaciousness of the present moment (what Harrison Owen calls “Expanding our Now“) and ironically opens many more possibilities and pathways for action.
So my learning from all of this is that information overload obscures attention, fills space and limits possibilities.
Think about that the next time you need to do a comprehensive environmental scan!
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In the US right now, the health care “debate” is raging and town hall meetings being held across the country are being deliberately hijacked by those who don’t want to see reform go ahead. This tactic is discouraging but predictable. “Town Hall” meetings are not usually conducive to democratic deliberation, and they are never about dialogue.
Over the past few days an amazing conversation has unfolded on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation listserv about what these events mean for deliberative democracy. Tom Atlee has summarized a lot of the learning from these in a long blog post which is a keeper:
I want to take a look at the dysfunctional health care debate as an opportunity for evolutionary action. Not because health care is more important than other issues, but because its current dynamics exemplify the kind of transformational potentials we will face over and over in coming years, as the multifaceted crises of our time unfold. Understanding the dynamics of this currently disturbing event may help us prepare better for each new wave of opportunity.
Go have a read: Are Disrupted Town Hall Meetings an Evolutionary Opportunity?