For as long as I have been working in the non-profit and government worlds, since 1991, I have been confronted with the idea that somehow we always must do more with less. When I began work at the National Association of Friendship Centres in 1992, my first real job after leaving university, the organization was coming to the end of a five-year cycle of funding for urban Indigenous programs and core capacity that had grown steadily since 1972. Over twenty years, the federal government had increased funding in the Friendship Centres in Canada’s towns and cities, and the movement had grown to over 100 communities with between three and five core funded positions in each centre, offering a myriad of services to urban Indigenous populations from Halifax to Port Alberni and Red Lake to Inuvik.
In 1993, the Liberals were elected to power after ten years of Progressive Conservative government, and they committed to tackling the federal deficit. The did this by actually continuing a series of budget reductions that the last Tory finance Minister Ray Hnatyshyn had proposed in his election budget. Paul Martin got credit for it, but it was a PC plan.
The upshot of these across-the-board spending reductions was that we “had to do more with less,” or “become more efficient” or “get creative” or “innovate” or “tighten belts and find redundancies.” With very, very, few exceptions almost every organization I have worked with since then has had to face the same problem. The neo-liberal economic revolution of Regan and Thatcher and Mulroney delivered massive amounts of money to the richest people in the world and starved government of revenues and marginalized communities of funding and material support, even as they picked up the work of addressing the increasing social problems externalized by the private sector.
We went through periods of funding freezes, cuts, occasional bumps (“investment” it is sometimes called) but there has in general been a growing trend of increasing social problems and complexity, decreasing government support and increasing wealth inequality in Canada leading to massively underfunded non-profits. We are now seeing core government services shredded too. When the word “austerity” is used it seems to signal that direct government services such as health and education and income security are in for a tough time.
Ideology drives all of this. For most of the past 45 years that ideology has been the market-based economic liberalism that has privatized and financialized everything. In the past 20 years it has included ideologies of the culture war that has tied government funding to strange ideas that are put out there to stoke outrage, fuel algorithms, divide citizens and achieve razor thin electoral margins. In places like Alberta a bewildering set of strange ideas about public health, energy independence and education has meant that the public purse is weaponized against people who are trying to provide vaccines against fatal and preventable illnesses, or create sustainable and low-cost energy technologies, or build education systems that create welcoming and inclusive learning environments. These were things we used to fund, plan for and organize around.
In talking with a colleague today we were noticing how this moment of austerity is showing up in the work we do to support organizations and facilitate dialogue, and engagement, especially in this moment when we are confronted by nearly overwhelming confusion and complexity. It used to be that the conversations we were hosting suffered at times from a scarcity mindset, meaning that we weren’t aware of the actual richness that was around us. Participatory leadership and process opens up access to that richness.
Today we are suffering from an austerity mindset, which can be thought of as a realization that the richness we need has been taken away from us. It is harder and harder to find diverse groups of people and voices to work on issues of staggering complexity. People have had their time and material resources privatized, colonized, and taken from them.
We were noticing that coming out of the pandemic, people have welcomed the chance to be together in person again, but how we show up has changed. Every face-to-face meeting is high stakes and there is decreasing trust in opening up and letting go into a participatory process. While in the past it seemed easier to coach leaders and organizations to find solutions at the margins of their work with authentic and creative engagement with their people and communities, these days it seems like our work is to keep leaders from becoming autocratic. With so few hands willing and able to do the work of addressing huge systemic issues, most organizations and networks seem to have only a few key people who are close to the work. This creates a fear that if the leader doesn’t directly influence and shift everyone to their way of thinking, we won’t get the chance to do the work properly.
To be honest some of this worry is warranted. We know from the ways in which Cynefin advises us to act in crisis, that applying tight constraints is the best way to establish safety. But what you do with that safety once you have it is what’s at stake. These days it seems that many leaders are drifting towards consolidating that power by offering to sustain the work of maintaining safety at the expense of other ideas, diverse thinking, or even a challenge to their plans. We see this in national leadership. Trump is the obvious example, but it has been interesting to see Prime Minister Carney stumbling in the House of Commons as Pierre Poilievre looks his seat and provided the first testing challenges of Carney’s leadership. Carney has had it easy since he was elected.
There are lots of implications here for facilitating participatory work and supporting leaders in this time, and to me they come from our lessons in complexity and dialogic practice. Here’s a few, and maybe you can add to them:
The work of the world is teetering on the edge of chaos AND is deeply complex. So that means that yes, leaders and facilitators and Board chairs need to consolidate decision making and create safety. But it also means that this is EXACT time to open up leadership to people who have differing view points and perspectives and experiences. That diversity is what provides the sophisticated situational awareness needed to address the challenges we are in. Polarity management is coming back into my practice in a big way as we help groups to see the tensions they are working with and engage with them productively.
Avoid premature convergence. One of my favourite Dave Snowden slogans implores us to not choose the first good idea and go with it. Even if thing seems to be moving fast, committing too early to a course of action can send you on a path from which return is very tricky. Use scenario planning to keep a view on possibilities, and adjust plans as you go. COVID killed the five-year plan, but you can still set longer-view directions of travel and think about the different landscapes you will confront to get there.
Leave more community than you found. In times of crisis it is impossible to build the social connectivity and relational fields that help sustain us. We need to be doing that in the moments when we can take a breath and think. And meetings are what those moments look like in organizational life. If you are using meetings to preach to the masses, you are missing this chance. Every conversation in the organization right now has the chance to build community while also doing good work, including conversations about how to be together. And if you are a leader with a good idea that you want others to take up, you need to build trust and relational capacity if that idea is to be supported and improved upon. Participatory work does this. It also does this much better if we are physically n the same room.
Big messy conversations are a feature, not a bug. Since the pandemic, I have been doing A LOT of Open Space meetings. Open Space just creates the kind of agenda that is impossible if only one person is in charge. When participants begin posting sessions in Open Space everyone gets to see the real texture of need and capacity in the organization, and we are given the chance to dive in and work on them. Same with Pro Action Cafe, which helps individuals in large gatherings get the help they need with the many different projects and programs they are running. We don’t need alignment on everything right now. We do need much more activity happening in plain view, co-created and co-supported. Like Harrison Owne used to say “Trust the people.”
We need to look after ourselves. This time is taking a real toll on many people. Caring for oneself is not greedy. It is essential. If we are all to stay resourceful in the messy chaos of the present moment we need to be taking our time to be grounded, become familiar with our own patterns of reactivity and do the world a favour and work on them. Yesterday, in talking with a colleague who works right at the coalface of social change and community organizing, I asked her how she was keeping it together. Her morning practice of prayer and meditation has never been more essential, and in fact she had to remind herself to get back to it. I can relate.
I’m sure this list could go on, and I invite you to add to it. Leave a comment about what you are noticing and how you are working with others to cope with the realities of this moment. We are living in a thin time when the macro currents of war and conflict and austerity and hatred are seeping into each of our special places. We need to work within these contexts and find islands of meaning and respite so good work can continue and people can be looked after.
Twelve days ago we left Vancouver for a couple of weeks of guided travel in the central coast of British Columbia. This is the region of the coast that is north of Vancouver Island and south of Kitimat. Specifically we were visiting the homelands of the Heiltsuk, Gitga’at and Kitasoo/Xai xais Nations. For decades these Nations (along with others) have worked to protect this coast from harmful logging, hunting, and fishing practices. As long as I have lived in BC the campaign and the work to protect what is now known as the Great Bear Rainforest has been ongoing. The land and sea In this region is the largest tract of temperate rainforest in the world. When you read the history of the place you encounter a story of collaboration, advocacy and recognition that is profound in its implications for how Canada can be. And when you visit the place, you can be touched by the profound impact that such places have in reminding us of our place in the world.
We were chartering with a guiding company called Mothership Adventures, started by my old friends the Campbell family 20 years ago. They own the Columbia III, a beautiful custom built mission ship. You should read Ross’s blog to get a sense of the incredible care and affection they have for the Columbia III, and for some of the stories about what it takes to keep the ship in order. Mothership provides a crew of a captain, a cook, two guides and ten guests, all of us connected to one another through work, life, or kids. This is our second trip with them and these crew are like family to each other and to us. They are incredible human beings, and we bonded together very quickly, as you do with 14 good people on a small ship together.
W spent 10 days of travelling essentially around Princess Royal Island, poking in and out of coastal fjords, salmon streams, and out to the west coast of Campania Island and its white sand beaches. We spent several hours a day gently paddling pristine waters, with exceptionally great weather, including the two days of Pineapple Express rain which we enjoyed from protected bays around Milbanke Sound. We saw grizzly bears in Khutze Inlet, dozens of humpback whales and Dall’s porpoises and we spent a half an hour in Wright Sound surrounded by 15 fin whales who were surfacing all around us. This trip was full of life changing experiences.
The most profound one happened last Tuesday. We spent a day on a bear platform sitting mostly in silence with Marvin Robinson, a Gitga’at guide who stewards his hereditary chief’s territory on Grebbell Island along a salmon stream. We sat and watch pinks running up the stream, dippers fishing for their food and were rewarded with a profound encounter with the spirit bear pictured above, Tlaiya, named for the red stripe along his back. This bear, fixated on the salmon at his feet wandered up the creek slowly, sniffing the air, loping at one point about 4 meters away from me. He had a calm demeanour, a slow cadence and a wary awareness of our presence. We stood silently on the riverbank watching, barely breathing, overwhelmed with the encounter. As the bear approached, I was flooded with feelings of humility, profound gratitude, of a deep awareness of my small nature as a creature on a planet with myriad other creatures, just being here.
The bear walked on, up the stream and around the corner, half-heartedly swiping at salmon, sniffing the air. After a period of deep silence, tears and floods of emotions, even from Marvin himself who loves these bears like no one else, we decided to stay in the forest for another hour or so. During that time five wolves appeared on the river and walked down towards us through the water, eating salmon heads (they avoid the bodies becasue of parasites). Even Marvin stood riveted filming on his phone. We watched them circle around behind us, and Marvin checked his watch and said he had to leave, inviting us to stay longer if we wished. Then he made a series of howls, and the wolves all through the little river valley starting howling. We were completely wrapped in sound, the plaintive rises and falls of the wolves sharing the story of their territory at that moment. And as that chorus was happening, a mother black bear and her cub walked up the stream, also pawing at the pinks.
It seemed impossible to leave. None of us could believe what we had experienced. When you sit in silence for hours in the forest, you become part of the place, you become absorbed in it. You become slowly aware of your place in the scheme of things. And when the animals especially get a sense of where you are, they flow around you. The FEELING of that, especially around these large animals, is so deeply profound that it feels like it comes from a deep part of our human essence, the part that never transcended our identity as animals, as parts of the world instead of something that lifts itself up and out of its surroundings as if we could somehow exercise a dominion over the uiniverse of which we are a flimsily dependant part.
Belonging is not a choice one makes. It is a status granted upon you by the people and places and creatures that you share the planet with. Even though I live in a beautiful place, surrounded by forest and sea, I am rarely aware of this feeling. It takes silence, stillness and a lowering of the mental, physical and spiritual rpms to find this feeling of openness which, if the environment consents, leads to belonging, becasue you become a part of something, of everything.
This morning I walked to Tell Your Friends, my local coffee shop to write and reflect in the late summer sunlight. I wanted to capture that feeling that was seeded in me last week in the Great Bear Rainforest so I first sat by the lagoon, watching some chickadees flit in the alder trees, watching the crows pulling mussels from the rocks and a flock of short-bill gulls resting on the tidal flats. Nothing profound, no spirit bear or whales or charismatic mega-flora. But that feeling. It’s there. To sit and rest and be remembered by the land that chooses you because you have decided not to move over it so quickly. That you have sat and opened your eyes to see what is always there and have the world reveal itself to you as kin, not as performance. You are related. You belong to everything. Human life, so abstract and far above the rhythms of the tide and sunlight and season and epoch, fall away. Rather than observing and processing, you become observed and processed by everything.
I know this. We all know this. But I think most of the humans I know, including, and maybe especially, me, need to remember this, in the animal bodies that we have, in the landscapes that sustain us, on a planet which produces life in a myriad of uncounted forms, playfully exploring how a universe might populate itlself with creatures and plants that reproduce themselves from within, and fill every available niche life can find.
Over the years I’ve written nearly 3000 entries on my blog ranging from short notes and links to long essays and collections of writing. Of interest to facilitators and dialogue practitioners, I am publishing some of these as mini-books, in pdf form which you can now download for free. All I ask in return is that you leave me a little note if you find these useful or interesting. I’m curious how they are informing your practices.
Here are the first three:
- A life lived in the four-fold practice: my journey in the Art of Hosting. A set of essays on the Art of Hosting, illustrated with stories from my own life.
- The Two Loops Model: A Living System of Change. A set of essays on the two loops and how to apply it in organizational and community life.
- The Tao of Holding Space. This book explores the practice of holding space by reinterpreting the Tao te Ching. While written for Open Space facilitators, it has wide application across a number of facilitation approaches.
You will find more of my writing, interviews, videos and podcasts on their own page.
I had a lovely call with my old friend Johnnie Moore the other day. We catch up a couple of times a year and our mutual friendship with Rob Paterson, caused us to connect up on Zoom and raise a virtual glass to Rob’s life and in particular the ways we knew each other, through work, ideas and good friendship. Johnnie’s got a great post up on his blog today about “Facilitation Antlers” in which, as usual, he manages to speak the thing that occupies my mind too: the pitfall of facilitators feeling the need to explain what they are doing, instead of just getting on with it. It’s one we all have to dance around. Johnnie is offering a facilitation training in November in Cambridge, UK. I highly recommend you sign up for it. I would if I was there.
Another friend, Sally Swarthout Wolf, is also birthing an offering into the world. I’ve just had a chance to review and provide a blurb for her new book “Restorative Justice Up Close” which is a broad collection of stories of restorative justice practice, primarily from across the USA. These are the kinds of stories that experienced practitioners crave, becasue it helps to inspire us in our own work. It’s not a how-to manual, but a how-did-I collection. Even if you are aren’t a facilitator of restorative justice, if you work with people in groups, there is a lot in this book to learn from, especially when conflict is afoot. I worked closely with Sally over a number of years when we were running Art of Hosting trainings in Illinois in part with the Illinois Balanced and Restorative Justice Project. I adore her and her colleagues. The book is available for pre-order now.
And while I’m at it, here is a list of the facilitation training offerings I’m involved in the fall. We have spots for both of our Art of Hosting trainings in Vancouver and in Elgin, Ontario, and you can still register for the Stories and System Change workshop I’m doing alongside Donna Brown and my SFU one-day course in the new year.
The folks at Network Weaver are professional kin to me. Almost everything they post on their blog is something that I resonate with. They are about to publish a short series of blog posts about their approach to strategic planning in 2025, and I resonate with their practice principles:
1. Clarify Your North Star
Ask: What is the core purpose that must remain constant, even as the world shifts? How can you stay emergent and responsive to crises while still focusing on building long-term power and transformation?
2. Plan for Multiple Futures
Ask: What are the factors we know or can imagine, and what is beyond? How can we hold the future lightly as we plan and move with purpose?
3. Design for Flexibility, Iteration, and Collaboration
Ask: Is our strategy flexible enough to adapt, and do we have strong processes in place to support ongoing experimentation and collaboration?
4. Center Equity and Building Power for Your Organization and Community
Ask: What are we building? Who are we accountable to? Are we building in ways that foster a more equitable future?
5. Strengthen Internal Capacity for Resilience and Well-Being
Ask: What do we need to sustain our people, funding, and infrastructure in the long run?
There is, of course, a time an a place for linear and predictive planning, but many folks are still wedded to the idea that if we just double down on a more ordered line of reasoning, we’ll be able to work ourselves through the massive amounts of uncertainty we are currently facing. If you look online for strategic planning templates, you’ll find a flood of these processes, all offered as if context doesn’t matter.
Something I would add to this list is Develop good situational awareness of the people and issues in context. The ask here is “What is going on? How do different people see the situations we are in? Who has what expertise and experience and how can we bring it to bear on the work?” With large scale initiatives I use Participatory Narrative Inquiry and often NarraFirma as a tool to gather and work with the stories of experience that illuminate the current situation. I have also taken to talking to folks close to the situation for more than I used to as a way of preparing for this kind of work. I am finding that these days many people in decision making positions, on boards or in leadership roles, are operating with an incomplete picture of the situation or an inability to grasp of the issues at stake. That doesn’t mean they can’t be useful to the process. Folks that sit on boards, for example, who are not subject matter experts in the core work of an organization may still have immense wisdom on engagement or process or lived expertise with the consequences of decisions. Taken as a collective, a good board or a leadership has a diversity of experiences and perspectives. But if unquestioned assumptions about power and status are at play, that diversity can be sidelined with the result that organizations make decisions with a narrowed scope of awareness. You are always starting from somewhere.
Strategic planning is one of those terms that means a bunch of different things to folks depending on what they need, what their experience has been and what they have done in the past. I usually begin strategic planning engagements with a client by asking them “tell me what you want to do without using the term ‘strategic planning'” and from there we explore a design for the work that gets them where they need to go. The issue, however, is making sure that the folks participating in the process have a clear view of the need and purpose of the work, which is why we spend time on that part of the design to craft a good invitation process. It helps people show up well and helps to bring clarity to what we are doing, especially if the work is unfamiliar.