After the wedding by Leanne Romak
My friend Leanne Romak – the person who designed this very website back in 2014 – has a show at The Hearth, the Bowen Island Arts Council gallery. Along with artist Sonya Iwasiuk, the two artists have a small but lovely show called “Reflections: Stories of Ukrainian -Canadian ancestors” on until October 23.
Leanne’s pieces in the show are painting based on photographs taken by her uncle the 1940s. She found them poking around in the attic of an abandoned farmhouse in Manitoba in the 2010s. She has created fine paintings from these photos that have a kind of softness that blurs the shapes and places them in a kind of always-time. These uncles standing around at a wedding drinking hommade vodka could be from anytime, and the flask they are drinking out of reminds one of a contemporary water bottle, perhaps used to smuggle the contraband into the wedding reception. This particular image is accompanied by a little story of how the alcohol was made, by distilling it from soaked grain or potatoes. Little stills were set up along the North Duck River near Cowan, Manitoba and from the fire tower there you could see “all the little fires by the river.”
Images of prairie ancestors attract me. My own family on my mother’s side were settlers in Saskatchewan, some farming around Lumsden and others building houses in Regina. Prairie history is full of the memories of settler communities, many of them Eastern European communities whose cultures burned like little fires across a landscape that – especially in the case of Ukrainians – reminded them of the steppes of home from which they were driven by invasion and oppression, or lured by promises of farmland and prosperity. The conditions they found in Canada were cold and isolating and in time very tight knit communities sprang up and the little fires of co-operative spirit created the conditions for these communities to survive many decades.
Leanne’s work in this show captures the little fires of social and family life and Sonya Iwasiuk’s focuses on the images of houses, simple, functional structures on an open landscape. These buildings portray stability and community. There is only one of her paintings in the show of a single house alone. All of the others are little clusters of homes some standing side by side, some inexplicably turned away from each other, some surrounded by little unfinished ghost houses, each facing its own direction, but each inextricably linked to others. Unique and yet inescapably connected, the houses in every painting are etched with barely readable text, like the whispers of stories almost forgotten, as if the plain and standard houses are nevertheless illuminated by memory and meaning.
Both collections in this show invite us to reflect on our own stories of ancestor and community, on what is stable and longer lasting, and what is ephemeral and slips from our grasp, only to be rediscovered and reawakened by chance encounter or stray snippet of story or image.
It’s a lovely show, and it opens with a party on Saturday. Well worth checking out if you are on Bowen in the next couple of weeks.
Átl’ka7tsem, the fjord in which I live, in a photo I took in November 2014
The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is coming up in Canada.
Every person in Canada lives in a place that, from time immemorial, has been occupied, used, loved, protected and cherished by an Indigenous culture. In Canadian law, settler governments and citizens have a special relationship with these Nations, and it has been thus since the Crown of Britain elbowed itself into the already fully occupied territories of North America. It was encoded into common law in 1763 through the Royal Proclamation and, subsequently, through treaties and later in the Canadian Constitution.
Despite a couple of centuries of focused efforts to eradicate Indigenous cultures across Canada, we still retain the obligations and responsibilities of that special relationship. Settler governments have always been hungry for the lands and resources of this place and have often acted in immoral and illegal ways in the pursuit of those resources. Even the Supreme Court of Canada has, over decades, chastised and reined in the rapacious appetite of colonizing governments to remind Canada that it is bound to the agreements it has made and to enforce Canada’s own laws on its governments.
Despite that set of obligations and responsibilities, all of which invite Canada and Indigenous Nations and people into ongoing and permanent relationships, Canada and the Provinces and the former Colonies of Britain long pursued policies like the banning of the potlatch, the prohibition of legal action regarding land claims, and residential schools and worse, through deliberate acts of genocide, like the preventable 1862 spread of smallpox across the entire coast which decimated the Indigenous Nations of coastal British Columbia.
These events aren’t news. This history is well documented, and that paradox that Canada has on the one hand, relied on this relationship to sustain its jurisdictional claims on the continent and on the other has sought to destroy the partners with whom it has a relationship in different ways.
Resetting the relationship happens on a variety of levels and ways, and one of the best ways for non-Indigenous people to do that is to take the time to deepen and appreciate the place where you live and the culture that has been nurtured in that place for thousands and thousands of years. It is, as my friend Pauline and I discovered, about Knowing Our Place.
The place i live in is called Skwxwú7mesh Temíxw. I live on an island whose historical name is Nexwlélexwm, above a bay called Kwilákm, in an inlet called Átl’ka7tsem. The names of these places are difficult for English speakers to say, but easy enough to learn, but they are beautiful sounds, guttural and rhythmic and when you hear them spoken by Skwxwú7mesh speakers they are musical. They contain meaning and relationship to other words, to other times, to stories.
It can be hard to learn about your place because Indigenous knowledge is tricky to share. There is knowledge that is held only by specific families and that is proprietary, there is knowledge that relates to legal claims in which large amounts of money are at stake. There are places that are deeply sacred to the culture and need to be protected for cultural practices to continue on the land. On top of all that, Elders, and staff in these Nations are often overwhelmed with requests for information, and they often don’t even have the capacity to respond to the needs of their own communities. Cultural and language revitalization takes time and attention and effort.
The Indigenous government of this land where I live, Skwxwú7mesh Úxwmixw, along with the knowledge keepers in the Nation are deeply focused on recovering from the systematic efforts of the Canadian government. But they have also shared some remarkable resources publically to increase knowledge and awareness of the history, culture and language of the territory and the people. If you live in this territory, perhaps this week is a good time to soak in these resources and learn more about where you live.
An atlas created by Chief Ian Campbell that contains links to many stories about the territory.
A project developed by Kwi Awt Stélmexw (now the Sníchim Foundation) to locate Squamish place names along with some pronunciation guides and a bit of history.
A set of videos of Squamish language terms and expressions from the Nation’s Language and Cultural Affairs Department.
A foundation set up to support the revitalization of the Squamish language. I am a regular donor to this foundation, and this is a good way to support effective efforts to revitalize the language. The Foundation has had a powerful effect in bringing along dozens more speakers at higher levels of fluency through it’s immersion programs and resources. Every time we are asked to do a territorial acknowledgement in this territory we donate a portion of our fees to this work. This is a good and tangible way to donate if you are participating in this year’s “One Day’s Pay” initiative, which advocates providing material benefit to Nations to put meaningful action to intentions for reconciliation.
I hope as September 30 approaches that you take the time to learn about and support the efforts to repair relationships and grow strong partnerships with the Nations in whose lands you reside.
I asked DALL-E to make this image, because I can’t find the great photo i took of streams converging on a beach.
This is one of the things I love about my daily RSS feed. The first thing I see today on my NetNewsReaders list is this blog post from my fiend Mark McKergow in Edinburgh who shares his framework of time, which he has articulated in the Uers Guide to the Future. I like this conception of time, because of the big hole in the which he calls “Ant Country”. Ant Country is that time when the context you are in is important. Mark describes it as the “least useful zone” for planning, becasue it is too far away to predict wat will happen there, but not far enough away that it provides the somewhat reassuring clarity of a vision or a destination. It’s where anything can happen, where life is going to self-organize around your efforts in unpredictable ways, knocking you off course or delivering the resources you need right when you least expect them. “Planning” is rarely helpful here – think about the five year plans we all made in 2019 – but you can and should be prepared for this zone.
Here’s the framework:
User’s Guide to the Future Framework, originally published in McKergow and Bailey, Host, 2014.
I am working with a couple of clients right now looking at their future and it strikes me that there is always an oscillation between that far future and the immediate here and now, and many people can’t actually distinguish between the two, or worse set, they see them as closely connected. Here it is useful to distinguish once again between ordered systems and unordered systems, which helps us distinguish between knowable future and unknowable ones. In his article, Mark talks about ascending Everest, and also uses the metaphor of taxi drivers getting passengers to knowable destiations. These are “knowables” even if the route from here to there is yet to be discovered.
In many ways the near future zones and the far future zones are equally easy to identify. What is right in front of you is yours to do, and you can see what you’re doing when you take a step forward. For the far future it is easy to identify where you want to go, whether that is a knowable and fixed place like a peak or an address, or a hoped for dynamic state, like a generally productive and meaningful work culture, one which might look very different from where we are today. The more knowable and fixed the future state is, the more you can concentrate on backcasting, using experts perhaps who can advise you how to get there (like a map or a cabbie with The Knowledge), or who can help you deal with the technical challenges (like a Sherpa). Linear planning can be very helpful in these cases, as the act of moving into that future is a process of discovering knowable information. Much of that information might already be available, and if it isn’t there are probably people around who can help you find it in a good and accurate way. That doesn’t take the influence of context out of the Ant Country stage, but staying true to the line you have marked through that country will give you a strong sense of direction and a robust plan to get where you are going. One must be careful to pay attention to the vagaries of Ant Country, but in general fidelity to a well put together plan is what you need.
But in the case where you are trying to shift a culture or engage in other highly emergent kinds of work, two things come into play that will help you through Ant Country. The first is knowing that your present state does indeed matter. A lot. Even though you might still be making adjustments and evaluating your immediate need, the history of the system you are in and then nature of the current state actually liit what is possible if you intend to make a move from a current place (overwork, poor morale, a sense of purposelessness) to a more desired state (ease, support and connection, meaningful work). Identifying that far off horizon is important because it orients you in a direction of travel. Instead of worrying about what needs to be in place before getting over the horizon, essentially everything from here to there is ant country. What I typically advise then is to look for patterns in our surrent state of being that provide us with information about what is more possible. That could ean looking for examples or patterns where small hints of our desired future are present. If what you want already exists somewhere in the system, it might be easier to try to grow more of that than to start fresh. This is what we call “affordances.” And it also means looking at the reason why these things never seem to take off, because that gives us some sense of things that we might try in the here and now and the near future. When we are heading in a direction with an unknowable future state, playing with emergence is the goal.
This means that we need to drive directly into Ant Country. We can start doing some things and then open ourselves up to the influences of context and the swirls of randomness that alter our course. Ant Country suddenly becomes the source of creativity and outside knowledge that helps break us out of the patterns that have hindered us and starts giving us options for new ways to get to the better place we have been aiming at. Instead of our plans, especially when we are trying to discover new things and break old habits, we need to get good at participatory leadership and iterative Adaptive Action…what? so what? now what?…probe, sense, respond…observe, orient, decide, act…all the little heuristics that help guide us in this zone are about making sense of the present moment and holding on to the desired future. And then comes the Deep Breath Moment.
Mark’s piece talks about the Deep Breath Moment:
This dynamic steering and adjustment is fine… until, sometimes, a more fundamental adjustment is called for. I call this a ‘deep breath moment’. It’s the time when the far future is re-examined, hopes and aspirations are revised, and a new direction is set.
I’ve experienced this several times in my life and work. What surprises me is that it can creep up without being noticed and appear suddenly, a realisation that something needs to change. Other times it can be a dawning realisation, something that starts as a quiet idea, keeps coming back and seems to get louder and louder until it’s inescapable. But when you do a re-set, a revision of hopes and set a new direction, the effect can be dramatic. Often previously stuck things start to move quite quickly – like pushing on the (push) door when you’ve been fruitlessly pulling and getting nowhere. Things fall into place in different ways. New connections get made. New possibilities arrive. And what was a frustrating stuckness becomes once again a moving and flowing process.
The first thing to say is that this is not a sign of bad planning. On the contrary; it’s a sign that the User’s Guide to the Future is being used well. One of the wonders of viewing the world as emergent is to acknowledge that the unexpected will sometimes happen, and that’s just how it is. The key thing is not to totally prevent the unexpected (which would be futile) but to respond to it well and to use it constructively.
In complex work, I recognize this deep breath moment as one of two things happening. First, it may be that I have found myself in a productive channel flowing towards that desired future. That is a sweet place to be in, but it means, like all affordances, that other options are now closed off to me. I am clearly committed to this path. Deep breath. “We all choose our regrets” as Christopher Hitchens was reported to have once said. Even in the service of the good and right thing that you wanted, possibilities are now forever gone. I find this an important moment of threshold crossing: especially the older I get. It’s poignant. I want my kids to grow up and be strong, but that means there will be that one moment when I picked them up and held them in my arms for the last time. Sigh.
The other deep breath moment I have experienced is the one where I have reached a dead end and I have to move out of the deep channel I am in and make the trek up and over a ridge to a better valley. In our lives perhaps we experience that with relationships that don’t work out businesses that fail, ideas that never take off. We put a ton of time and energy into them and they are over. Sometimes we double down, engaging in sunk cost redemption until someone takes a hold of us in the wilderness of Ant Country and says: “buddy, you’re done. Use your lats amount of energy to get up here and we’ll carry on.”
Working with clients, there is always a temptation to reassure them that the path from here to there is knowable, if we just study things are little more and make a good choice. But remember, the moment of a decision is a madness. Entering Ant Country is inevitable, and it’s going to require a deep breath, some keen awareness of where you are and where you have come from and some solid personal practice to stay in it.
My Epiphone Emperor Joe Pass guitar upon which I am learning…leadership? Read on!
It’s a cliche as old as time, one I have been guilty of using occasionally too. Leadership is like jazz, where the members of an ensemble support each other in improvisation. We listen carefully, respond to what each other is doing, offer creative responses and make something amazing together.
Yes. Leadership is way more about improvisation than, say, following a step to step guide to assembling IKEA furniture.
But there is another set of metaphors from jazz that I have never seen talked about, perhaps because it needs you to understand a little about music theory, but that is leadership as jazz harmony.
My pandemic project was, after forty years, marrying my love of jazz with my love of guitar playing. My musical life hasn’t been the same. It has felt like starting over again. I have been learning jazz guitar with a teacher and with online tools now since late 2020. I’m focusing on learning how to play jazz standards, mostly solo, which means learning how to make chord melodies while also trying to do interesting things with improvised lines, over chords. I had to learn the fretboard in new ways, had to learn new techniques for voicing chords and playing lines from scales to which I had never given much thought: the harmonic minor, the altered scale, the Lydian dominant. I am getting to the point where I am learning to say things with jazz, but I feel like a baby. One reason for that is that there is SO MUCH TO LEARN from technique to theory to language to repertoire.
Of course with all new endeavours you have to learn a bit of theory to understand how it all works. While I know basic music theory, I have also had to take a deep dive into jazz theory because at its core, jazz is a structured, logical music that provides a harmonic and rhythmic container for improvisation and all the tools one needs comes from the specific ways jazz theory works. When you are playing on guitar, especially comping the lush and colourful jazz chords that accompany other players, your goal is to be as sparse as possible while still implying the harmony so that the melodic lines that the soloists are producing make sense. To the untrained and cynical ear, jazz sounds like “the wrong notes” but in the hands of skilled guitarists, jazz harmony has a number of different characteristics that are interesting.
First of all, in good jazz guitar playing, we try to make arrangements where the chords change only one or two notes at a time, and most often to notes that are just nearby. This is called “voice leading” and has been a feature of Western music since harmony was invented. In fact it probably was the origin of harmony, as two independent voices singing together will produce different notes. Sometimes these notes will sound pleasing and consonant and sometimes they will clash and sound dissonant. However, the point of voice leading is to guide the ear gently from one chord to another through the changes. As long as I have have loved music I have loved voice leading. I spent hours just voicing chords on piano as a kid without knowing what I was doing. But when you play a chord and change one note you discover that you are somewhere else entirely. Your next move from there is constrained by where you are now, and there are patterns of logic and harmonic tradition that are yours to follow or break as you wish.
Because guitar is a weird instrument – six strings played with four or five fingers with the same note appearing in different places all over the neck – jazz guitarists are very fond of stripping chords down to only two notes, to play their essence. In jazz we call these “guide tones” and they are the 3rd and the 7th notes of the chord scale. For example if I’m playing in the key of C and I need a C major 7 chord, I need only to play an E and a B (C-D-E-F-G-A-B) to imply the chord. Guide tones, along with the context of the chord – what comes before and after it – gives you enough information to work with to create a solo that sounds good. Guide tones are connected to voice leading. Playing a standard jazz chord progression like a Dm7 – G7 – Cmaj7 (the well-known “ii-V-I”) with guide tones produces smooth voice leading: Notes go like this: F-C, B-F, E-B. You can see that in each chord change, only one note changes, but when it does it produces a very different sound. We get led by one notes that wants to stay stable (the third) and one that wants to go somewhere else (the seventh). Together these two notes contains the essence of tension and release.
Jazz harmony is all about tension and release. In most of the music I have ever played on guitar, chords are just blocks of information. I might have a chord progression that goes C-Am-F-G (I-vi-IV-V) which is very common in pop and folk music and while certain chords want to go to other certain chords, the most tension is with the G chord, the five chord, which wants to go back to a C. End a song on a five chord, and your audience will be left in suspension. Go listen to the end of The Beatles “For No One” and you’ll see what I mean. You get left there. What happens next? This is the most basic tension and release. When most of us are learning guitar, we learn 7th chords and understand that these always lead us back to the tonic. D7 goes to G. A7 goes to D. C7 goes to F.
In jazz working with tension and release is a high art and there are many, MANY, more things you can do with chords to make jazz lines flow from one chord to the other, but the essence is that a little bit of suspense makes for a satisfying resolution. So we take those guide tones and start adding notes to them, and this is where jazz theory gets really arcane. You can add a sharp 11 or a flat 13 or a sharp or flat 9 to give you some tension and dissonance. Or you can add a 9, 6 (or 13) to give some lush colour to a more stable chord. You can play different scales over different chords. You can keep suspense and tension alive for a long time, or just imply it and bring it home. In Western music tension and release is such an important aspect of the musical experience that it is essential to understand for both composition and improvisation. Music with no tension of release is just a drone. Everything else in music is textured around moments of discomfort and anticipation and moments of relief and stability.
So if you want to see all this in its glory have a watch of this old Ed Bickert recording with his trio. Ultimately all of these tools are helpful in aid of creating a container inside which you make coherent choices for expressing yourself. And THAT is why jazz harmony is like leadership.
Extending the metaphor
I’m writing a lot on containers right now, so my attention is guided toward how containers – contexts for meaningful action – are structured and how we create them. In complex situations, leadership is about creating these contexts for action and interaction, and there are many lessons from the world of jazz harmony that apply here. Here are a few, in case you haven’talrady sussed them.
Theory matters. It really does. In jazz, there are reasons why something sounds “jazzy” and reasons why it doesn’t, and the same is true in working with containers and people. There are things you can do as a leader that will have better chances of certain outcomes than other things. Learning theory, especially working in complexity – like why managing to targets is less effective than managing to a direction of travel – will help you create experiences for people that get better results over time. If you want your tem to be more creative, there are things you can do that will help. If you all want to learn some new things together, knowing what they are and how learning works makes a big difference to how effective you will all be.
Small changes make a big difference. Voice leading in jazz has taught me that changing one small thing can have a powerful effect of taking you somewhere else. We think of “change” in organizations as a big planned thing, but in reality the constant change that arises from interactions between people creates all kinds of new situations. Leadership is about working with existing stability – for better or worse – and making small adjustments to see what can be done to take you closer to your preferred direction of travel. And making small changes means that, as you are improvising, you don’t over commit to an idea that has no future. Instead you are trying to open up new pathways to explore – called affordances in complexity – that are coherent with what is already happening, but might offer a better way to be.
Start with where you are. In jazz if you are playing in the key of B flat major, you should not play a line from the D major scale unless you really really really know what you are doing. One of the biggest lessons I have learned from complexity theory over the years is that the current state matters so much that any attempt to just show up and create something new in a workshop or a retreat with no regard to context is almost guaranteed to be a failure. In complexity, change happens along affordances in the current context, and fruitful change-making and leadership understands that. That is not to say that you cannot create completely new things out of the blue, but there are all kinds of reasons why this entails a massive energy cost to individuals, not the least of which relates to just how much tension and release people can take.
Tension and release helps us move from one place to another. Our work lives are full of moments of tension snd suspense followed by moments of release and stability. Cognitively, we can only stay in this so long and we all have different tolerances. Just like your endurance for listening to a free jazz piece that seems to have no release of stability at all – I love Cecil Taylor but your mileage may vary – folks at work will have a hard time staying in a state of constant tension, or indeed, constant stability. And even though good leaders give their teams and organizations a sense of stability over time, ignoring the changing context of one’s work can render a team irrelevant or ineffective, and in some cases, an entire company can find itself no longer in business. So as a leader, it’s a developed practice to dance with the paradoxes of challenge and rest, creativity and stability, outside thinking and standardization. Human beings live this journey and it is what helps us grow and evolve and form and break our identities and try new things and generally give meaning to our lives. That is a high art of leadership: to create what I’ve heard Jennifer Garvey Berger call “life-giving contexts.”
So there you go. The next time you meet someone who just cavalierly throws around the “leadership = jazz” metaphor, go a bit deeper. And I encourage you to really listen to great music to hear all these things at play. Knowing a bit about how music works helps us to understand why it matters to you, why you like what you like and why and how you are moved by it. Just like everything.
A piece of public art in Berne, Switzerland. Two chairs facing each other in dialogue, but chained to the walls behind them so they can never meet.
At the conclusion of Alicia Juarrero’s new book “Context Changes Everything” she writes:
“Neither puppets nor absolute sovereigns, human beings and the material and social forms of life they induce are true co-creators of their natural and social worlds. We serve as stewards of the metastability, coherence, and evolvability of both of these worlds. Matter matters. History matters. Social and economic policy matters. Most critically, however, because top- down causality as constraint makes room for meaning and value-informed activities, our choices and actions matter tremendously. In acting, we reveal the variables and the values that really matter to us, individually and to the culture in which we are embedded. We must pay attention to what we pay attention to; to which options we facilitate and promote and which we impede and discard. We must pay particular attention to what we do.
The influence of constraints has been dismissed because they do not bring about change energetically. Because they can be tacit and entrenched, their Escher-like characteristics also make them difficult to track. As background constants that go without saying, they have also been taken for granted. Foregrounding these enabling and governing conditions, so different from but as effective as forceful impacts, has been a central goal of this work.
Facilitating the emergence and persistence of validated coherence, of adaptable and evolvable interdependencies that can continue to form and persist in nature, among human beings and between nature and human- kind, is among our most compelling responsibilities. Facilitating the emergence and preservation of a thoroughgoing resilience that affords to both the natural and the human worlds the conditions not only to persist but especially to evolve and thrive is the most pressing moral imperative facing humankind today.
Facilitating the emergence and persistence of validated coherence, of adaptable and evolvable interdependencies that can continue to form and persist in nature, among human beings and between nature and human-kind, is among our most compelling responsibilities. Facilitating the emergence and preservation of a thoroughgoing resilience that affords to both the natural and the human worlds the conditions not only to persist but especially to evolve and thrive is the most pressing moral imperative facing humankind today.”
Alicia Juarrero, Context Changes Everything, p. 237
I think this is a really important point because it brings a moral imperative to understanding and working with complexity, something I have long felt is important for law makers, policy makers and citizens to understand. Without understanding the nature of complex systems, one is at a loss to effectively lead, craft policy or other solutions to emergent problems that plague our world. From planetary climate change to individual mental health, working with complexity dynamics – constraints, and, in my work, containers – is critical to approaching complex problems. It should go without saying I suppose, but it needs saying anyway. And it’s the reason I want these tools and perspectives out in the world in the hands of as many people as possible.