Today I ran into an interesting situation. I was in a conversation about a community process I have been designing and a potential participant took me aside and said that she would love to participate but that one of the people who had already agreed to also participate had committed some serous abuse against her partner. She wondered how I would do to resolve the situation.
That was a good one, a little bit out of the blue and somewhat unexpected. I thought for a moment and then, putting my best collaborative principles into practice said “I don’t know. What would you do if you were in my situation?” She wasn’t expecting this answer, but to her credit she stopped and thought about it. We stood next to each other in silence for a few moments.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Well then,” I said. “That makes two of us. Let’s think about this together.”
We shared a little laugh and then I started thinking out loud. I mused about the fact that we needed many perspectives in this process, and perhaps even the perspectives of “abusers” whatever that means. Having all voices in a process does not come cost-free. I also acknowledged her needs for both safety and a way to contribute to the process. The truth of things, as Christina Baldwin has said, is that as a facilitator I can’t guarantee anyone’s safety, but I can help a group create the conditions that would look after its own safety. In that spirit I invited her to join our process and be in dialogue with me about co-creating the conditions of safety and participation that would meet her needs and keep the group functioning well. This was an agreeable proposal to her and so we will be in conversation as our process unfolds to make sure that the group is doing its best possible work. She has taken some responsibility for helping us to understand her experience of the situation and we’ll deal with whatever comes up with inquiry, curiosity, imagination and patience.
It is a great gift when individuals in a group step up to take responsibility for co-creating conditions of safety and efficacy in their dialogic container. It pays to be honest with people and as for help when you don’t know what to do, and see if proposals forward can be co-created. I was reminded today how important that is to adopt as a world view and not just a facilitation trick.
Diamond graphic by Darrell Freeman at Colour
Within the constellation of design tools I find especially helpful in creating spaces for conversation, Sam Kaner’s Diamond of Participation has been very influential. About three years ago my friend Myriam Laberge pointed out to me the possibility that all learning conversations take place along this flow of thinking and since then the model has been an important part of my life and work.
The diamond is a map that points to three phases that groups pass through as they move from questions to insights. Groups begin with divergent thinking, sit for a while in the chaos and uncertainty of “The Groan Zone” and later move into convergent thinking.
Today I found a nice description of these modes of thinking, buried in an article on neuroscience and fundamentalism
Convergent reasoning involves an assembly of known information and results in a solution within the realm of what is already known. Most problem solving occurs this way. It is instilled, for example, in medical school students. If a physician sees a person in the emergency room that has a fever and is comatose, they are taught that there are two possible disorders that might give these signs: an infection or a heat stroke. If this patient is found to have a stiff neck, the physician considers the possibility that the patient’s fever and unconsciousness are related to an infection of the central nervous system, such as meningitis. To obtain further converging evidence the resident doctor may perform a spinal tap; if the analyzed spinal fluid reveals certain indicators there is now sufficient converging evidence to make a diagnosis of meningitis and to start antibiotic therapy.Divergent reasoning, on the other hand, enables a person to arrive at a previously unknown solution (at least unknown to the person who is doing the reasoning). When a person is confronted with a problem and decides that the existing information is insufficient to develop a satisfactory solution, he or she may diverge from the information and imagine,or reason about, new possibilities. William James, who first put forth the concept of divergent reasoning, stated:
Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another … unheard of combinations of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy … we seem suddenly introduced into a seething cauldron of ideas … where partnerships can be joined or loosened … treadmill routine is unknown and the unexpected is the only law.
The human capability for divergent reasoning results in a nearly limitless range of creative outcomes, from entirely personal to world changing. Surely humanity’s earliest innovations were life altering, as were the many that followed. Recall our eventual acceptance (against initially unyielding church doctrine) of Copernicus’s unfathomable idea that the Sun, and not the Earth, was at the center of our solar system, or Einstein’s affront to the known laws of physics with his concept that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. But even more mundane activities, like resolving an unacceptable marital situation by seeking conduct on the part of one of the partners that was previously not considered, discovering a treatment solution for a heretofore incurable disease,creating a work of distinctive art, finding an alternative to war in a tense geopolitical situation, a chef’s creation of a new recipe, carefully arranging flowers in vase, or making up a bedtime story, are examples of creative acts resulting from the ability to diverge from current circumstances and consider or enact new possibilities. Certainly, both convergent and divergent reasoning serve to enhance our well being. But it is an individual’s ability to diverge from what is familiar and move beyond the known into a new understanding which is the essence of creativity, and that which gives rise to advancement. In the words of Frank Zappa, “Without deviation from the norm, ‘progress’ is not possible.” Whether a person chooses to question and think on his or her own or remains unconditionally adherent to religious dogma, might relate to how specific areas of the brain are utilized–or not.
Interesting, eh?
[tags]Sam Kaner, Myriam Laberge[/tags]
Johnnie Moore and I have been trading links about podcasts…today I’ll point you to one he did with Annette Clancy and Matt Moore on shadows in organizations. It’s really, really good, and what got my attention is when Annette asked “what job was your sense of shame doing for the organisation for which you worked?”
I first met Annette in 2005 when she responded to an invitation I issued about looking for help designing an Aboriginal youth conference on suicide. She has a great knack for asking these questions and has terrific ideas floating around in her blog.
Matt I don’t know, but he’s a great sparring partner on this podcast.
Courtenay, BC
I’m coming to the end of a Moleskine notebook I’ve had since March, and it’s almost filled up. I’m going through it harvesting a few things, and thought I might post a series of notes here. The journal began with a few notes that I made about the preliminary design of an Art of Hosting we ran for VIATT on Quadra Island. This particular Art of Hosting was called to train with 40 or so people who are helping us to build an Aboriginal child and familiy services system on Vancouver Island. It’s big work, undoing 120 of colonization and history and taking advantage of an historic opportunity to build a community-owned system that puts children at the centre of our work. Here’s what the notes say:
- Be the healing organization
- Establish everybody’s authority
- Healing patterns connecting heart to heart
- Host for community to become conscious
- Our work: healing the relationships between people that have arisen from the history of being tied to stakeholders
- This circle seems to recommit us to the work
- Putting our purpose at the centre, build a process to do this.
It’s fitting that I’m reflecting on this harvest tonight. Tonight we ran our third regional assembly here on Vancouver Island, inviting people from this area to share what is exciting them about this work. The purpose of the assemblies is to create champions for the process and to enlist people into a more intensive experience of community-based dialogue and deliberation by creating community circles. These circles will do the work of incorporating the community voice into the decisions and policy making of this new Authority we are creating to take over Aboriginal child and family services from the provincial government. We can’t do this without the community being involved and we’ve been quite taken by the response of Elders, youth and parents to our invitation to join us in creating this new system.
These notes remind me that much of the work I do has a healing component to it, that the work of opening hearts and supporting movement in Aboriginal organizations and communities is about healing – making whole – and sustaining connection and belonging. That makes the work I am doing complex and many-aspected, but when we get it right, like tonight for example when we ran a cafe that tapped open heartedness, it does so much more than move the organization forward in strategic ways. It makes things stronger.
Strengthening is a powerful and needed quality in development work, whether it is in organizations or communities. Strengthening commitment, heart, leadership, quality, results…it is a pattern of “better” that is embedded in the nature of powerful conversations and participatory leadership.
One session in Camden last week that really grabbed my interest was hosted by my dear friend and colleague Father Brian Bainbridge from Australia. Brian is another remarkable man, generous, dry in his humour and open hearted. He has been working on a little book for a while about brining Open Space to parish life, which documents his stories of working with the parishoners of St. Scholastica’s in Melbourne. In a little over two years, Brian has been exploring the transformation that comes about from shifting from the managerial worldview to the open space worldview. What he has found is a renewal in the life of the parish, and in the spiritual life of the parishioners. What interests me about this transformation is how it relates to the spiritual teachings that lie at the heart of the parish. In other words, is an Open Space worldview compatible with Christian teachings?
Brian was good enough to host a session on this topic which was attended by folks from many faith traditions. For me, it became very clear that Open Space invites us as individuals to connect with the deeper sources of creation in our world. Almost all major religions teach both a path for individual spiritual practice and a path for collective spiritual community building. Whether you are a Christian, a Buddhist, Baha’i, Jew, Taoist, Muslim, Hindu or you practice a traditional spirituality, there are precepts for the life of spiritual communities that, I think, invite us to notice the source of creative energy as it flows between us. Living in community is a spiritual practice. Open Space, it seems to me, offers us a chance to connect with one another in a deeper way by connecting with the source of creativity in the universe. We call this by many names. Religious people migt call it Spirit, secular folks will see it as self-organization, Taoists call it the Tao. Whatever it is named, it is possible to experience it, and Open Space seems to create the conditions for that experience. This explains to me why many people report a much deeper experience in Open Space than in many other process I work with.
This theme surfaced at the Art of Hosting workshop I took part in later in the week in Indiana, where there was a large contingent of participants who were exploring the roots of their leadership practice and discovering that at a certain point they converged with their spiritual paths as well. This continues to be interesting for me, and I wonder what your experience of leadership, Open Space in particular and spirituality is?