The above is a photo of a great campfire that happened on Saturday night in the forest by a lake in Eastern Ontario. You had to be there. But if you want to do an interesting exercise, take a moment before reading on and make a list of things that you should do to create a great campfire experience.
I’m working away writing a book on dialogic containers and reflecting on the remarkable phenomenon of stability in the midst of change. I remember years ago Dave Snowden sharing a pithy description of the the difference between robust and resilient structures. Using the examples of a sea wall and a salt marsh, he says, essentially, that a robust system is one that survives by not being changed and a resilient system is one that survives by being changed. That description has always stuck with me and as I look at the nature of dialogic containers, ephemeral spaces which produce meaning between people, it’s interesting to me to think about what contributes to their relative stability in the face of change.
This was brought home to me again today while listening to a talk by Gil Fronsdel on the Buddhist practice of “Right View,” (he calls is “Wholesome View”) the first discipline of the Noble Eightfold Path. Fronsdel uses the example of standing in a rive to discuss what mental and spiritual stability looks like, even as a current flow all around you, carry the river over a waterfall. The way to address your fear of floating over a waterfall is to stand up and take a stable stance:
I’ve been in somewhat shallow rivers, maybe that the river was up to my mid?thigh, and I could lay down flat on the surface of the river, and it had a nice current that carried me beautifully down the river.And it was kind of fun and nice to be floating along. It feels really nice until you realize that the river is going right over a waterfall, a big waterfall. So then it’s not so nice anymore.
And so… you turn around, try to swim upstream, but…the river is pulling you down the stream faster than you can swim up. The waterfall is coming, you can hear the roar. And so all you have to do, though, is stand up in the river. Because it’s shallow… it’s just courage, it’s only up to your mid?thigh. And if you stand there, then the current of the river continues. It flows right by you. But you’re still.
You’re not separated from the current, but now you’re free of the current because you have the stability, the strength of standing there, and you’re far from any danger of going over the waterfall. It’s relatively easy now to walk to the shore or walk up river. And so we get swept away sometimes by our thoughts, swept away by our emotions, swept away by the world and concerns that are going on. And we don’t realize how much we’re being carried along, swept away by the current of this momentum of thoughts, momentum of desires, momentum of aversion. We don’t even see the waterfalls that’s going to take us over sometimes. But what mindfulness teaches us is that we could always have the ability to stand up in the current and kind of wake up and kind of be stable and strong.
In dialogue, containers offer a kind of stability to hold emotions and thoughts. Human beings thrive when there is a container in which we can fully participate, be fully human, and be. And they require us to have that overview of process and context, to see that we are in something that is meaningful, or not, and to notice what is contributing to that state of affairs. From there, we might even be able to catch ourselves and offering a slight shift, a slight move, a slight contribution that might catalyze more or less stability. It is a subtle art.
The way a conversation unfolds around a table and deepens and becomes sticky – you don;t want to leave it – is a kind of stability. When it breaks it’s hard to get it back again, and nif you weren’t a part of it “you had to be there” to understand what it is like. Other forms of stability for dialogue are held through rigid physical or protocol constraints so that deliberative chambers like court rooms and legislatures are designed for rational, non-emotional discourse. When feelings erupt in those chambers, the integrity of container fails, and chaos ensues, because those who are responsible for this spaces have no way to cope with the events of the moment but to shut it all down (don’t perform a haka in the New Zealand Parliament!). That can be a form of liberation, but in the end some form of stable container needs to arise in order for human relationships and conversations to unfold. Places like Parliaments and court rooms are structured to assert a particular kind of power relationship, so the physical and procedural stability of those containers is designed to re-establish that state of affairs “once every one has calmed down” and the dour business at hand can be considered again in the desired modality of the system, in these cases, predicated on notions of reason and civility.
But even in highly structured and constrained places, dialogic containers are emergent. You cannot force meaningful dialogue. You can only set some initial conditions and monitor what unfolds. Even though a room may have robust physical restrictions, adjustments to the constraints of the container can still offer a chance at something meaningful happening. I bristle from the idea that a dialogue facilitator’s role is “to create and hold the container.” I prefer instead to think of that role as one of using constraints to increase the probability that a a dialogic container will emerge. The way I have learned to practice facilitation is to be a witness to the capacity of a group to self-organize and manage itself with minimal intervention from a “facilitator.” Instead we work hard to design initial conditions, and pay attention to threshold practices like beginnings and endings to invite human beings into a place in which meaningful work gets done.
For my whole career I’ve been consumed with the mystery of the emergence and stability of dialogic containers, how something so ephemeral can create deeply meaningful experiences, and how we might find the ways to work with containers – through constraints of connection, exchange, attractors and boundaries – to increase the chances for powerful dialogue and meaning making. Everywhere I look, there are examples and lessons to be learned about this.
So, back to that campfire that is pictured above. If you took the time to make the list, think about whether that list will guarantee a great campfire every single time, from the get go. If not, what do you think you will have to do to make that more likely to happen? The answer to that question might be a good way to think about your approach to facilitation.
Here comes community!
I’m on a flight home to Vancouver from Ontario. It has been a mix of family and business on this trip. This past weekend I joined my colleagues Jennifer Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle for our third Reimagining Education Art of Hosting. Thirty-one people in total gathered at the Queens University Biological Station in Elgin Ontario on the most beautiful fall weekend. The leaves were bright yellow and a little red – more muted this year from drought than usual, but still beautiful. The water and air was warm enough for swimming and canoeing. And the skies offered us moments of crystal clarity during the night. The land was – as it always is – the first and final host.
While we were teaching the chaordic stepping stones yesterday, a very powerful conversation broke open in the group about invitation. In my practice the whole point of using the chaordic stepping stones is to slow down the conversation about process design to really name the shared urges necessity and purpose of a meeting. It is from this place that a quality invitation arises. And when a person is deeply and sincerely invited to a meeting, it makes all the difference for how they show up.
The conversation yesterday contained a thread of grief. Participants were sharing how painful it is to have to go through meeting after meeting in their day without any genuine invitation. Many meetings aren’t even necessary and, like weekly staff meetings sometimes, just occupy a regular hour every week on the calendar help with minimal intention. Because so many of these gatherings are on line now it is becoming common practice for participants to divide their attention between what is “mandatory” and what is more interesting or more pressing. My heart breaks when a participant in a meeting says hello and then turns of their camera, mutes their audio and never appears again. What a waste of their time.
This bleeds into community life too, and I was especially moved by one of our participants, an Elder who cares very deeply about her community, who witnesses public meetings, community gatherings and politics as being hurtful, disenfranchising and a place where people come and work out their own pain and trauma often in laterally violent ways. There is no healing, no restoration, no creativity, no sense of shared purpose and no call for people to offer something. The meetings are corrosive and toxic. We talked about the kinds of room set ups in meetings like that – rows of chairs, no one looking at one another, exchanges only between “the people at the front” and “the audience” as if citizens were actually a mix of paying customers and school children.
When this Elder was speaking, she was expressing the grief of this state of affairs. It occurred to me that this grief is everywhere. Very few of us in any public or community setting feel invited to community work. We might go along to a public information session. Or we might go along to a Council meeting and make a presentation. We might take part in a shouting match over a controversial decision or course of action. But I think many people are mourning the fact that we are never invited into active, creative community with one another. Some don’t even believe that is possible. “Oh a community meeting,” they will often say, folding their arms. “That’ll be…interesting.”
(As an aside, “that’ll be…interesting” is one of the most Canadian ways I know of saying “that whole thing is going to be a complete disaster.”)
Communities are full of talent and resources. How many times have you been asked to serve your community with what you know or what you do? Where are the opportunities for people to participate in community work that also builds community? At the very least, can we do this work together without poison relationships and eroding the promise of democratic and community participation.
The erosion of democracies, the professionalization of decision making and the capture of legislative bodies by huge commercial interests has been going on for my whole life. But when I look around my own home community – which has seen its fair share of divisive conflicts – I can see initiatives that were citizen-led that built things that we need. We now have a health centre on our island, a credit union, a recycling depot and second hand store, and playing fields for fast pitch, soccer and ultimate. We have preserved forest and coastline with the Nature Conservancy. We have institutions like the Arts Council and the Fabrc Arts Guild and the Nature Club and community choirs and the Legion and the Food Bank that all bring us closer together and weave our connection to one another and the place.
In small communities the chance for that kind of thing is higher because we know each other a little better and we can put our finger on the folks that can contribute, and ask them to show up. And we can do it in a way that invites the community to come along and be a part of something. Not every small community is this lucky. Some are in terrible moments of division and conflict that are violent, harmful and probably irreconcilable.
Peace and reconciliation at any scale is not possible without people being genuinely invited into it. The dehumanization of our world in conflict, at work, and in governance leaves us mourning for something that we may not ever have experienced: a genuine invitation to form and join a field of belonging that gives our lives meaning and connection.
I think this is why dialogic work is so important. Anywhere people gather is a chance to correct that tyranny of dehumanization that sees persons as cogs in the machine, to be counted, corralled, manipulated, avoided, lied to or disposed of. As Christina Baldwin has said, you treat a person differently once you know their story. You invite them, you get curious with them, you wonder what they have to offer and you might even make something together.
Our TSS Rovers League 1 BC men’s team, boys academy and supporters celebrating together this summer, photo courtesy of Tom Ewasiuk at AFTN Canada.
When I’m back in Ontario, as I am now, I spend a lot of time with my family watching sports. We’re all Toronto Maple Leafs fans, so when the hockey is on, we don our Leafs jerseys and watch together. At the moment this part of the world is also consumed by the deep playoff run of the Toronto Blue Jays, who have, against the odds, advanced to the American League Championship Series of Major League Baseball. I don’t follow baseball, but it’s impossible not to be caught up in the energy of the moment.
Both the Leafs and the Jays had bad weekends. The Leafs lost two games to Detroit back to back, with dire performances in which their offence sputtered. A leafs legend, Mitch Marner was traded away in the off season and his replacement on the top line last night is an enthusiastic young talent called Easton Cowan. He has big shoes to fill and it’s fun watching young players begin their journey. Cowan was probably the pick of litter last night as nothing else seemed to get going. Both games against Detroit had the feeling of pre-season warm ups. The hunger and energy and resilience isn’t there yet.
Meanwhile, across the tracks at SkyDome, the Jays dropped game two of their playoff series to Seattle. They too seemed to be truly sapped of enthusiasm and energy. Despite an early flurry of runs, the Jays had some poor pitching and defensive errors that Seattle pounced upon and they were sluggish with the bats. They are under the cosh now as they head to Seattle for games 3 and 4, and the mood in this city is far from ebullient.
In soccer news, while the Canadian Men’s team struggled against Australia and gets ready for Colombia tonight, there are machinations afoot at the governance level of the sport. I can hardly stand to engage in the arcane minutiae of how soccer is run in Canada – and I have a far from complete picture – but at the moment there is a concerning trend happening. In Canada, the Canadian Soccer Association has a deal with a company called Canadian Soccer Business. The deal gives all of Canada’s marketing and broadcast rights to CSB for a flat rate. CSB can then sell these rights and make a profit which it largely channels into the Canadian Premier League, the division 1 professional league for men’s soccer in Canada. The owners of the CPL teams, are also the directors of CSB.
Back when the deal was signed, it was a practical solution for Canada Soccer. The Association was having a terrible time getting funding for the national teams and getting them covered, marketed and recognized. Since then however, CSB has moved towards an ownership stake in the game. Last year they bought the second division semi-pro leagues which are organized under League 1 Canada. In BC, our league was set up by BC Soccer initially to provide a pathway to professional opportunities for BC based players, a vision we champion at TSS Rovers, the only community-owned team in the League 1 structure. It still exists for that purpose, but it is now owned by a marketing company who profits from the selling sponsorship rights to our league and so far hasn’t returned much into our level to assure it’s sustainability.
And lost in the mix of all of this is the women’s professional game, which has finally hit the ground running with the launch of the Northern Super League. The NSL is the brainchild of Diana Matheson and other former national team players who had to do it on their own, because Canada Soccer has made no effort to create a professional women’s league despite hoisting the women’s World Cup in 2015. Meanwhile CSB has profited from selling the images and broadcast rights of the national women’s team who were defending Olympic Champions and have maintained a top 10 global ranking for years. CSB has not at all invested in the NSL, nor have they been invited to. Their involvement in Canadian Soccer has largely NOT enabled the professional environment for women, and has been highly problematic for the national team, which is why Matheson and her partners started their initiative own their own.
This is a direct example of the forty five year project of privatization and commercialization of community resources that was started in the Western world in the 1980s and has spread around the world. This month Canada Soccer Business released a vision for soccer in Canada and it is deeply at odds with the idea of grassroots based, publicly-owned clubs and leagues who are building the game in the broader public interest. Instead it fits the privatization agenda to a T, and promises results based on growth. It is a financialization vision for soccer in Canada that primarily and ultimately benefits the Canadian Premier League. It doesn’t address the women’s professional game at all, because CSB has no involvement in that game. It is by definition not a unifying vision.
It is also profoundly at odds with the vision that is championed by the federal government’s Future of Sport in Canada Commission who released their preliminary report back in the summer. Their vision is very different and seeks to develop elite athletes in the context of a safe, vibrant and participatory national sport strategy that puts the welfare of the athletes first and roots sport in the community and national interest.
My buddy Will Cromack shared his thoughts on these competing visions today and I deeply appreciate his perspective and connection to the issues and his thoughtful, slow deliberation on what is laying before us and the possible pathways to the future.
Developing sport in Canada is a long slow road, because developing athletes is a long slow road. Our culture is changing in many different ways, and sometimes in directions that run counter to each other. We fetishize the professional at the expense of community. We create structures and enclaves which create opaque places where people and communities can be hurt. We demand results, but wring our hands over funding and investment. We laud accessibility but demand elitism. We eschew public involvement but fear the market’s rapacious rush into the vacuum. And at the end of the day, we often take a narrow self-centred view towards sport, making sure our kid or our team or our agenda is the one that succeeds with no awareness of the broader ecosystem for our sports, or the bigger role of sport in general.
As Will writes, a bigger conversation is afoot, as it has been for many years. We need to feel our way through all of this, while also taking bold steps to set the container for sport development on the right footing. And the context is changing all around us.
Detail of the Ocean & Way of Life map produced by the Council of the Haida Nation in 2011
We’ve had a fantastic week of work and visiting here on Haida Gwaii. We were working with our friends from the Sahtu Renewable Resources Board, who came here to build relationships with each other, dive into some light conversations about the future and connect with local Haida Nation people, places and culture. It was a moving and transformative experience for all of us. One of the team’s staff Elders, in the closing circle talked about how inspired he was to be in a place where the historic and traditional Haida names are used. He talked about how that changes the way we think about land and animals, and it changes the conversation between settlers and Indigenous people of the region. It centres Indigenous knowledge and history and provides a container of governance that is clearly Indigenous-led. Shifting that perspective helps in the shift of decision-making power.
The idea that somehow First Nations can’t be trusted to lead in land use planning and governance over their own traditional territories is patently absurd, and yet many of the government negotiators of agreements between federal and provincial governments and First Nations often move from that assumption until is met head on at the negotiating table. What happens on Haida Gwaii is a prime example of what happens when that assumption is dashed. It doesn’t mean that an economy is destroyed – the biggest logging operations on Haida Gwaii are Haida logging companies. But it does mean that local people own the resources and the benefits and are the ones who are best positioned to talk about protection and stewardship because they are the ones who will live with the generational effects of long term damage.
If we can only imagine an economy where big multinational companies do the work of extracting resources, then we simply give away the benefit and reap very few of the rewards. Promises of jobs and economic prosperity are only ever seen in the short term gains like royalties paid and high salaries for a few jobs, and result in the ancient cycle of boom and bust resource town economies. Despite multinational companies reaping immense profits over time from fishing, mining, logging, and oil and gas, Canadian communities still have high levels of poverty, and dangerously underfunded health and education systems. The long-term benefits of prosperous communities, which should accrue to multi-generational social development, are eroded in favour of short term individual benefit from an injection of cash and a massive sucking out of profit to a concentrated tranche of billionaire owners and investors. Who pays for clean up in 50 or 100 years? And how are we to manage the restoration of healthy communities and landscapes over multiple generations if we sacrifice funding for social development to appease people and companies that demand the lowest possible taxation and royalty payments while a project walks away with billions in profit?
Typically in resource communities, the labour force is brought in from elsewhere and the population ebbs and flows with the activity around the mine, the plant, the refinery, the mill or the cannery. It’s natural for folks who arrive to be covered with the ongoing sustainability of the economic enterprise during their lifetimes, but Canada is lettered with communities full of infrastructure that are abandoned once the mine closes. The people who came in and built schools and stores and clinics and community centres, left once the major employer was gone, leaving ghost towns like Ocean Falls, Brittania Beach, and Field. Sometimes these towns try other reinvent themselves, but other times they just disappear, like many of the cannery towns on the coast.
But the people that remain are the First Nations. Those that were there before the companies arrived and those that are there long after. In in places like Haida Gwaii and the Central Coast, where the Great Bear Initiative was established, it is those Nations who have wrested control of the future of their places from those who would propagate another wave of exploitation, destruction and shirked responsibility. As Guujaw said the other night when we met with him, “When the province said we couldn’t manage our own territories, we said ‘we’re haywire as hell, but we couldn’t possibly wreck it worse than you did.'”
Resource development can be in the national interest, of course. More typically it is in the focused interest of investors and owners who live far from the place of activity. When that happens, we are not engaging in national building, we are engaging in the pursuit of rapidly developing wealth inequality. When we take a measured approach to resource development that slows the pace of what is happening so it can be done right it allows for economic benefits to accrue locally, it allows for long term infrastructure to be built and sustained even after the town transitions (Powell River, is my favourite current example) and it means that the damage that is done to the lands and waters can be mitigated up front and dealt with easier later, creating yet another round of local economic activity that restores the land and sea and positions it for whatever comes next, including dealing with climate change.
The story of Indigenous lands in Canada has largely been one of cleaning up from the destruction of a country that is founded on the idea of being hewers of wood and drawers of water. The hewers and the drawers leave, and First Nations are left to deal with the ecological, social, cultural and economic damage of exploitation and hit-and-run resource development.
It’s a grey muggy day here on the south coast of BC, and the photo above is from this morning’s ferry ride into Vancouver to begin a trip to Haida Gwaii this week.
Chris Mowles has a good post on the politics of uncertainty and writes about how that is unfolding in health care systems he is working with. I resonate with these words:
My colleagues’ dilemmas also made me think about the anxiety associated with uncertainty and how it is unevenly distributed. In times of crisis and hardship there is often a myth that ‘we are all in this together’, whereas in reality some are more in it than others. In his book The Politics of Uncertainty Peter Marris (1996) explains how group life, particularly in highly individualised and competitive societies, also comprises competition over who gets to sit with the most uncertainty. Your position in the hierarchy will determine how much you can pass on uncertainty to others. And Marris argues that the most marginalised are likely to bear the brunt.
This isn’t just true of inter organizational politics but of social politics as well. If you want to assert power, offload as much uncertainty as possible(and it’s accompanying anxiety) to others. That way you live with at least an illusion of comfort, shielded from the mental health challenges of being on constant stand-by for crisis or emergence.
It’s one of the reasons why I think it’s important to build capacity for working with complexity throughout organizations and societies, and especially deep in the lower middle management parts of these societies, where anxiety and uncertainty (and accountability) has been shifted. Of course, senior executives and government ministers have massive uncertainty to deal with, but typically they are resourced well to do it. Making complexity tools available to everyone helps everyone, becasue everyone is needed to deal with complexity.
If you want to to talk more about this and how we can provide accessible, lower cost training and capacity building to these levels of organizations and community, let me know. I’m constantly developing my practices and tools for doing this. We are doing this through story work and Participatory Narrative Inquiry, through sharing frameworks like Cynefin and the Two Loops, through our own bundle of complexity tools for facilitation and process design, and through facilitation and leadership practices that increase the relationships and participation that is needed to share the burden of living with uncertainty wherever you are at.