Reading David Holmgren’s book on Permaculture right now, sitting on my front porch overlooking the garden that we have created using some of his principles. I love the permaculture principles, because they lend themselves so well to all kinds of other endeavours. They are generative principles, rather than proscriptive principles, meaning that they generate creative implementation rather than restricting creativity.
At any rate, reading today about the principle of Design from Patterns to Details and in the opening to that chapter he writes:
Complex systems that work tend to evolve from simple ones that work, so finding the appropriate pattern for that design is more important than understanding all the details of the elements in the system.
That is a good summary of why I work so hard at teaching and hosting important conversations in organizations and communities. Very often the problems that people experience in organizations and communities are complex ones and the correction of these complex problems is best done at the level of simple systemic actions. Conversations are a very powerful simple systemic action, and serve to be a very important foundation for all manner of activities and capacities needed to tackle the increasing scale of issues in a system. Collaboration, dialogue, visioning, possibility and choice creating, innovation, letting go of limiting beliefs, learning, and creative implementation are all dependant on good conversational practice. If we use debate as the primary mode of communicating, we do not come to any of these key capacities; in fact debate may be the reason for these capacities breaking down.
Conversation between people is a simple system that is relatively easy to implement and has massive implications for scaling up to more and more complicated and complex challenges. The ability to sense, converse, harvest and act together depends on good hosting and good conversation.
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Was listening on the beach yesterday to a good talk by Joseph Goldstein about four reflections that bring the mind to dharma. These relections are used by Buddhists to become mindful in everyday life. Mindfulness – individual and collective – is a resource in short supply in the world. A lot of the hosting work I do is about bringing more mindful consciousness to what groups are doing. These four reflections are useful in that respect.
From a dharma perspective, the four reflections are:
- Precious human birth
- Contemplation of impermanence
- The law of karma
- Defects of samsara
On their own these are esoteric terms, especially if you are not familiar with the Buddhist world view. But in practice they look like this:
- Be aware of possibility. What is possible right now? What is the gift of the present moment? If we were to think about what we could do right now, what would be the most valuable thing we could do?
- Everything changes. What we are experiencing right now will pass. We cannot know what will come, so we must prepare to be agile rather than prepare to be stable. Can we be as flexible as the changing nature of the world around us? If no, we risk being locked in an old operating system.
- Action brings results. And in a complex system, cause and effect cannot be isolated. Therefore what matters is awareness, and consciousness about what we are doing in every given moment. What are the things we do habitually that get us into trouble? If I intervene in a group now, what effect might that have over the long term? Be aware of motivations and try to stop acting habitually.
- We keep ourselves locked in repeating patterns. What are the patterns and behaviours we need to let go of to free us up for creativity, innovation or real change? What are the things we are doing now that limit us from doing anything differently.
In some workshops I have used these concepts to bring a deeper set of questions to work we are doing. For example, with a group of Native radio stations with whom we were trying to determine their impact, we kicked off a conversation with the question”If you were to disappear tomorrow, what would your community miss?” This dealing with one’s death is a great way to determine the impact you are having now, and it truly leads to a deeper reflection on what is going on.
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Thank you Euan.
Now, there is a time and a place for judgemental skepticism and cynicism (I suppose) but somehow there is a widespread sentiment that associates these two stances with expertise and prudence. Now I don’t want you to think that I am all about squashing opposition or creative tension, but I have to say that when I am working with groups of people to create processes that will help take people out of their comfort zones, there is a particular cynicism that does not help. Euan Semple calls this “pomposity” and that certainly seems to capture the holier than thou effect that this kind of stifling aloofness has on groups of people. And Euan names the price that it takes:
- Every time someone is faced with a pompous response to a suggestion or idea they take one step back and become much less likely to ever offer their heartfelt thoughts again. Imagine the impact this has on the creativity and innovation that organisations depend on.
- Many, many meetings could be done in less than half the time if there wasn’t a need to feed the ego of the chairperson or more vocal participants. How many times have things gone on way too long because someone likes the sound of his own voice?
- How many millions and millions of pounds have been spent because someone was too pumped up and full of themselves to admit that perhaps the major project they are sponsoring should be aborted?
- How many fledgling social media projects get squashed by IT departments because “professionals” have had their nose put out of joint at “amateurs” thinking they know better?
- How many bright, committed and intelligent potential senior managers have failed to step up to the mark because they couldn’t face the antler clashing and ego massaging that goes on in the boardroom?
I have recently had the experience of people saying to me that the work I do would never work with such-and-such a group of people. My response to them is nothing will work with people if you don’t believe them capable of doing something different or trying something new. I have been responding to these kinds of limiting beliefs with two questions:
- How do you show up with a group of people when you believe they are not capable of something?
- How do YOU show up when something thinks YOU are incapaable of something?
That tends to take care of the holier than thou attitudes. A little empathy, a little creative tension, a little mutual compassion for the other helps makes designs for new and difficult things easier. These questions force us to really consider whether we are more capable than someone else. It forces a conscious awareness of the choice you are making when you adopt the pompous stance.
I choose to believe that people are capable of engaging in all kinds of things, from sitting in circles (the scariest thing in the world, if you would believe some) to radically letting go of huge projects they were working on because they weren’t going anywhere.
Lately I have been making an explcit request of clients that we create design teams for events and processes that DON’T include cynics. That is not to say that we don’t need people bringing concerns and challenging questions to the work, it’s just that when you have someone in a design team that does not believe in the possibility of what you are trying to create, so much energy gets taken up catering to the unhelpful pomposity of the rightous skeptic that the design suffers and in the worst case scenario, the result is a design that just serves the status quo. I have, in the last couple of years actually “fired” a client who wanted me to help create the illusion of a participatory event but who could not allow himself to actually let a participatory event unfold. He was completely unwilling to let go of control and unwilling to trust people. He even described the people he was working with, government employees in First Nations communities, as “children that need to be shown the answer.” There is a huge cost to this kind of stance in time, trust and the ability for groups to actually hold the real fears and concerns that they have. What do you think is possible when you work with someone who considers an important policy gathering to be like a daycare?
So start with possibility and create the space for inquiry, curiosity and yes even judgement to arise. But if you start with these things, you will not be able to create creative spaces of possibility because you will get mired down in the energetics of unhelpful politics, posing and pomposity. Staying in possibility is hard, but it is the only way we get to new places. More of the same is too deceptively simple.
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Anchored down in San Francisco awaiting a delayed hop to Eureka California, from where we will drive to the Hoopa Valley and work there for a couple of days. On leg five of the epic journey.
So a little time to breathe and reflect on a couple of harvests. First from Geoff Selig who was at the Pembroke Art of Hosting, and who collected the tablecloths from a final day World Cafe on what we have learned about the power of conversation.
Second, a harvest poem from the Open Space I ran yesterday in Kelowna. This was an afternoon session for the 30th anniversary of the Assembly of BC Arts Councils and 18 conversations took place that reflected the place of these volunteers and staff people who support the arts in towns, cities, islands and villages across our province. With Open Space these days I am trying as much as possible to have a place in which a meta harvest can be collected and created. Most often this looks like a graphic recorder who gathers materials and snippets from the sessions and co-creates a harvest with session conveners and participants. This gives a high level framework upon which the individual sessions can hang, and it invites another level of coherence and pattern noticing. Yesterday. we had no graphic recorder available, so I substituted with this poem that I created partly from the titles of the 18 sessions and partly from what I was seeing emerging in the conversations. As we only had 15 minutes for a closing, I presented this in lieu of a closing circle, and it made for a nice cap on the day:
The assembly of those who host space
by Chris Corrigan
Who are we? What do we do?
How do we face change while staying true
to the art that is the heart of community unity?
What body serves the life that comes to us?
Here we pause and reflect:
Youth are the truth of growing inclusivity.
Dialogue, funding, engagement are our tools
and it’s what we create with them that fuels
the passion for change
and well-ordered offerings that welcome the stranger,
the small connections that bring us into relationship
with land, citizen, government and institution.
So how to begin to offer form
that invites the spirit of the arts to warm
the cold spaces of urban waste
and rural forgetting, arts-based, human-paced
endeavours that bring us home?
How do we step up to govern and guide
theatres, galleries, facilities, the sides
of desks off of which our best work is done?
And how do we cultivate the source of our energy,
the money and bodies that make smooth
the skid roads and rip rap that brings this enterprise alive,
delivers the promise which grows and thrives?
We host space.
The spaces between people that light up with the spark of connection
recognition, a shared story, historical succession,
the tending of the coming soon that arises
from the done before rooted in the best of now.
The space of social media
both digital and tactile that expedites
the meeting of needs,
the speaking of deeds
into the record of our collective story.
The spaces of creation and illumination
like so many star-birthing clouds
spaces that resound with the colour of the voices that sound
the melodies and harmonies of our becoming.
Spaces in which we re-create, in which we see
what we could be with the power of free
expression coursing through the veins
that carry the pulse of life – the arts beat.
And here we confront our souls,
navigate the narrow channels, reefs and shoals
that want to gobble us down,
sink us in work, overwhelm and drown
our efforts in the skookumchuk
where scarcity and demand
suck and boil together and we move uncomfortably with outstretched hand.
Only and finally in THIS space,
do we recognize friends, companions
that also walk our path between elation
and struggle, who know the million details that support creation.
Thirty years we have sat in assembly
hosting a resonance that trembles
up the coast, valleys and rivers
like so many shivers
through the spine of beauty,
a reverent bass line, upon which rests
the deep song of who we are.
A deep bow to you all –
for the boards that lead
for the boards that are tread,
for the boards that are hammered together,
the music of spruce and pine and fir
forming the floor from which we stage our flight,
take wing and soar.
This poem was composed in honour of the 30th anniversary gathering of the Assembly of BC Arts Councils. It is a reflection of the issues that were articulated in 18 Open Space dialogue sessions held on the afternoon of May 2, 2009 in Kelowna, when Assembly members gathered to find wisdom in the stories and questions that were held within their community of practice.
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I was talking to my daughter tonight on the phone. I was walking out of The Forks in Winnipeg where I had just eaten a pickerel (that I learned was from Kazakhstan…W.T.F!) and my daughter requested that I get a GPS that could beep and show where I am on this epic trip. After being on the road for eight days already, with another 12 ahead of me, I don’t even know where I am sometimes.
Yesterday I was wrapping up the 2009 Good Food Gathering in San Jose and I took a CalTrain up to SFO, hopped an Air Canada flight to Calgary, spent the night there, and flew to Winnipeg early this morning where I joined national gathering of Aboriginal youth who are meeting to thinking about how to renew a very successful federal government program. That’s a lot of travel, but it doesn’t stop there. I fly to Ottawa tomorrow and spend most of the week at an Art of Hosting in Pembroke, Ont. before flying to Kelowna for a one day Open Space and then down to California again, this time to Hoopa, to work with a small Native radio station, KIDE. I get home May 6 after 20 straight days on the road split between five different gigs.
The Kellogg gathering was a lovely experience, and I was especially tickled by how we dissolved the traditional conference model. Day one was all speakers and plenary panel presentations, with a little bit of conversation built in around the ballroom set up with six foot rounds. Day two, we got rid of the tables and held the whole day in Open Space. Day three, a day that we deliberately left free for an emergent design, featured us getting rid of the chairs. When the participants arrived, the room was empty save for a few pieces of tape on the floor. Although half the participants called it a day right there, about 250 stayed on to engage in a beautiful piece of intergenerational work. Led by our youngest team members, Norma Flores, Manny Miles and Maggie Wright, the participants self-organized into a spiral by age, with the youngest person at the centre and the oldest on the outside. Looking around that spiral was to see the journey of a person growing in the Good Food movement.
We then people gather with the ten people closest to them on the spiral and figure out a song, chant, slogan, sentence or movement, that captured what their small demographic had to say to the whole. The next 20 minutes consisted of people bot speaking to the centre and speaking from their place. A voice and story of life in the movement unfolded all the way from the energy and optimism of the youth to the stretch of middle aged people to the tired, but persistent presence of the movement’s elders. After we took a breath we moved to another room and ended it with a drum circle.
Fun.
Tomorrow, a day of Open Space with youth who are designing the future of the Urban Multipurpose Aboriginal Youth Centres Program and then it’s off to Ottawa to run this Art of Hosting with dear friends Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and Kathy Jourdain and a great local team.
I’m twittering more than blogging these days. The microform works well. If you’re interested (yes Aine, YOU!) my twitter feed is here.