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Category Archives "Featured"

Join us for Complexity from the Inside Out October 13-December 15.

September 22, 2022 By Chris Corrigan Complexity, Featured

Fall in the north is a time for teaching for me!. I have a few different courses and workshops on offer this fall, including our third cohort of Complexity from the Inside Out, which is a program Caitlin and I have put together from 20+ years of collective experience with dialogue and personal leadership tools in service of working with complexity.

I invite you to join us (and an amazing group of co-learners) for our fall cohort of this highly engaging, practice focussed program. Together we will explore and learn effective and meaningful ways to better understand and work with complexity at many scales and in different contexts. We know that complex challenges need to be engaged in multiple ways including practices and approaches focussed on the complexity of our inner human systems (mind and mindset, emotions, reactions, conditioned patterns, neurobiology and mystery); the space of engagement between us (in dialogue, collaboration and sensemaking in our teams, organizations, communities); and in our work to influence the larger systemic changes that are so needed with the many complex challenges of our times. 

The Complexity Inside & Out Program includes:

  • 8 engaging online learning and practice sessions. 
  • Including an Open Space session with your colleagues.
  • 2 small group “learning pods” discussion sessions.
  • Applied practice exercises
  • Online classroom with recordings, resources, discussion space and more. 
  • Connection and co-learning with amazing colleagues from around the world

In the course we cover a number of tools and practices from various bodies of work including:

  • Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework and his work on anthro-complexity
  • Tools from Glenda Eoyang’s Human System Dynamics
  • Participatory Narrative Inquiry and sense-making practices from Cynthia Kurtz’s work.
  • Personal practice for working with limiting beliefs, the reactivity loop and internal narrative.
  • Developmental and complexity focused evaluation

What we offer in this course is a framework that helps to links these areas of practice so that your work with complex challenges can develop coherence with both personal development and work in the world outside of yourself.

We focus on inquires that participants bring to the session too, and in the past two cohorts we have explored activism, equity and justice, various topics in community and organizational development, applications in education systems and the non-profit world. We have had some great cohorts full of folks who are working in all kinds of different contexts. The variety and diversity is a huge bonus, and this cohort is shaping up to be similar.

If you have no experience of complexity work, you will get a deep introduction to this field. For more experienced practitioners, we aim to support you hitting the next level in your practice. You are likely to learn a few new things and develop your own map of a coherence for complexity work that includes the personal as well as the systemic.

There are spaces left and we give a good team discount which allows you to come with your colleagues. Times will work well for folks in North and South America, Central and Western Europe and Africa. We are considering offering a cohort in the new year that will work for Australasia too, so if you are in that region, let us know.

Hit this link to find out more and register now.

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The stages of engaging with conflict in small towns

September 5, 2022 By Chris Corrigan Bowen, Community, Featured 3 Comments

A couple of years ago i posted this on our local facebook page. There was something happening that caused me to reflect on how one’s approach to conflict changes the longer you live in a place. As we have turned over our population by more than 50% in the past five or six years, I was trying to give folks a helpful road map. I daresay this is pretty much consistent in every small community anywhere.

For folks experiencing their first Bowen Island conflict, here’s generally what happens next.

  1. Years 1-3. You move to Bowen and fall in love with the place. You’ve found heaven. You can’t believe how beautiful this is, how amazing the community is, how precious it is.
  2. Years 3-5. Some controversy happens and you discover that there are people that think very, very differently from you. In fact, it seems like if they get their way, some core thing you love about the place will be damaged forever. You step up to defend it, on social media, in real life. You get involved, get organized and try to stop it.
  3. Years 5-8 You lick your wounds or revel in the victory depending on how that all went. Regardless, it redoubles your commitment to fight again another day.
  4. Years 8-12 ANOTHER FIGHT! Man the barricades! Take on the social media hordes! Side-eye folks at the General Store. You’re ready this time. You might even connect up with people in a meeting and form a group of concerned citizens. And when you do you see a bunch of people on YOUR side that you were fighting against last time. Your head explodes, but you dive in anyway.
  5. Years 12-15. Well, that went well. Or not.
  6. Years 15-18. ANOTHER fight? What?? Okay, this time, you sit back and watch everyone go through the first five steps. You find yourself in a small group at the pub one night with former friends and enemies, nursing a pint together and shaking your head as you tried to remember why you hated each other so much that one time.
  7. Years 18-20. You get quiet, you don’t get so involved anymore, or if you do it’s on a committee of some kind doing completely unappreciated work making design guidelines or running a community water system or deciding what flowers to plant in the bed by the ferry terminal.
  8. Year 20. You realize you are here for the long haul. You fall in love with the place. You’ve found heaven. You can’t believe how beautiful this is, how amazing the community is, how precious it is.

Enjoy the ride folks.

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How do you work from the soul of a community?

August 26, 2022 By Chris Corrigan Bowen, Community, Culture, Democracy, Featured 9 Comments

Image: a word cloud capturing Bowen Island culture from the 2017 Cultural Master Plan

About 15 years ago I met Lyman Orton, who is a small town entrepreneur who created a very successful mail order business from his family’s General Store in a small town in Vermont. He tells the story of how he got involved in town planning and ended up creating a community plan that was top-down, based on a template and not engaged with the community. When a developer with an idea for a carnival park and zoo came along, the community got quickly divided and Lyman realized that if the community had been more involved in the plan, perhaps the conflicts that lasted for years could have been averted.

That was the beginning of the Community Heart and Soul Initiative that Lyman started through his Orton Family Foundation, and that is how I met him, at a gathering of Community Heart and Soul planners in Denver in 2005. I ran an Open Space session for a ful day of that conference in which planners could share stories and tools and ask questions of each other as they wrestled with how you plan from the heart and soul of a community.

The process of heart and soul planning begins and ends with stories. It’s about the collection of stories about what matters in a place and the engagement of people to make sense of those stories. In my years on the Community Economic Development Committee on Bowen Island, Edward Wachtman and I ran a series of anecdote and sense-making circles in our community working with a storytelling research method that Edward and his life and business partner Sheree Johnson created. The data we gathered and the processes we ran resulted in an incredible set of studies that Ed and Sheree created on visitor, business and resident experiences of our island, and we used this information to produce reports and to hold an annual business summit at which businesses discussed how they could tap into a support the story of Bowen. This work also fed into our branding process. Over the years it became clear to me that the businesses that understood our story and embraced it became sustainable on Bowen and those that didn’t often failed. When the pandemic struck, the community rallied around the businesses that really meant the most to the Island and I think most of the storefronts on Bowen survived with government support and community devotion.

You can find all that research and community engagement work on the CEDC webpage in the expandable tabs.

Over the years through the story gathering and engagement work we did, Sheree was able to bring her immense talents to discerning a core story about the heart and soul of Bowen Island. And here it is:

Just off the coast of Vancouver is a place where everything’s…well…a little different. When you take the 20min ferry ride over, it feels as though you’ve crossed over to another world, a special place where life is a little simpler, a little less stressful.

The sights, the smells, the sounds, the people – all fill you with a calmness and an
awareness; making you feel a little different. There’s no hustle, no bustle, and certainly no
rat race. The sense of community is so strong you can almost feel the hugs. In a modern
world where everything’s always moving faster and faster, it feels really, really good to hit
pause. To reflect. To exhale. To take stock. To stop and smell the ocean. To connect with
what really matters.

Bowen Islanders are fiercely proud of their island, and more than a little protective.
Sometimes they’re tempted to keep it to themselves. But if you’re looking for a way to
redefine play, work or life, this might be your place, too. You’ll leave your ordinary self at the dock along with all your mainland baggage. Bowen will change you… for the better

We found that there were five pillars that I guess pointed to the soul of our community, and these seemed to have stood the tests of time, certainly over the 20 years that I have lived here, and in my experience many who have lived here much longer than me confirm these:

  1. Community. We know each other, we help each other out, we can easily connect and create things we need here.Even strangers on Bowen are closer than neighbours on the mainland. We have a shared experience of the place.
  2. Nature. We live in a forest, in an fjord, in the sea, We are contained in some pretty impressive natural landscapes and we treasure them. We value quiet, the silence, the fresh air and the access we have to the natural enviroment. Almost every Bowen Island owns a piece of Bowen Island art of some kind that points to this aspect of our heart and soul and the community mural by the ferry dock is all about this story.
  3. Crossing over. You can only get here by crossing over the waters of Átl’ka7tsem,usually by boat. The journey from there to here is archetypal and we use it to decompress, to slow down, to change our identity from mainlander to islander. And visitors feel this as well. There are few journey’s more meaningful to the human soul than crossing over a wild body of water and arriving safe in a snug harbour.
  4. You’ll be better for being here. Many of us moved here to raise our children, or came to find community. So many people I know became artists once they moved here, having never created anything before in their lives. This is a place to heal and rest, and we have retreat and recovery centres that are devoted to just this aspect of who we are. People talk about Bowen Island as having a healing character. And truthfully, even though we are often in conflict with one another, you HAVE to learn to live with each other because that person you are arguing with online today may be the one who helps you out of a ditch tomorrow. We have the chance to learn how to live with difference here.
  5. Connected with what matters most. That is to say those things you advise others not to take for granted while you are resting on your death bed: friends, kindness, fun, adventure, spirit, generosity, community. Bowen is a platform for the practice of what matters most.

Around the same time, Dave Pollard led us through the creation of a cultural master plan for Bowen Island which is a brilliant piece of work that used stories and sense-making to more deeply understand our community culture and find ways to use arts and allied organizations to support that culture. I think the Cultural Master Plan is one of most important documents outlining the heart and soul of our place, and one that was massively underappreciated outside of the arts community. Here is an example, an introduction paragraph to the section on trying to define what Bowen’s culture is:

This section of the Culture Plan was written in one of Bowen Island’s renowned cafés—a meeting place where Bowen’s culture is almost flagrantly on display. Bleary-eyed commuters stagger in well before dawn for enough caffeine to get them onto the ferry. Telecommuters work at their laptops, interrupted constantly by friends who pull up chairs and share the latest local news. Several breakfast business meetings are taking place. The walls are covered with local art. Tradespeople get the day’s instructions by
cellphone. A young couple studies a map of Bowen’s hiking trails. A small crowd of dogs waits anxiously by the door for their people, checking out the other dogs much as the people check each other out.

Most of the people filing in wave and chat with others they know, while the few people visiting for the first time look somewhat bewildered, as if this place has a language they don’t know. Suddenly, a flash mob choir bursts into song, and then hurries off to brief applause. Then someone announces “The ferry is here…” and a mass exodus ensues. The café empties, but then as the ferry deposits its load of visitors and returning residents, it quickly fills up again.

Now these documents and values were what we said back in 2014-17 and it has been only six years or so since then but a LIFETIME has passed. We have had a turnover of well over half of our residents since then and many of those who left or died are our Elders and long time community builders who made the businesses and places and organizations that have sustained community life here. The pandemic sent us into our homes and created a double whammy of isolation from one another and a large influx of new people who arrived without having access to any of the institutions, rhythms and practices of community life that I had when I moved here. Things have changed, that’s for sure. But it’s hard to say exactly what’s different.

This has always been a place that welcomes newcomers, and the best stay on and help create new things. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but the important things we do and have are created by people that started things like the fastpitch league, our festivals and community events like Bowfest, Dog Days, The Dock Dance, the Craft Fair, Hallowe’en, Remembrance Day and Light up the Cove. We have a vibrant performing arts community of actors and musicians who worked for decades to build a community performance space. We have dozens of published writers, painters and sculptors, some of whom are internationally known. We have gardening clubs and a little farmers’ market and the shared frustrations of the ferry and fall storms and the overwhelm of tourist season. We have business owners and their teams that care for us like Pat Buchanan at the Building Centre and Glen Cormier at the Pub and the Dike family at the Union Steamship Company. We have teams that have built our arts centre, the library, a state of the art soccer field, a new Health Centre, and a community performance space, We have developers that are actually from here like Wolfgang Duntz and John Reid and although not everyone is always happy with what they do, they are us, and they have made parks and buildings and spaces that we cherish, All these things together make a soul. A turbulent, churning, generative soul.

The five pillars that we defined back in 2016 and the work Dave led in 2017 are so right feeling to me that when I see things that run counter to them, it gets my dander up. Sometimes people have great ideas that will build community but they are opposed on the grounds of property values decreasing. We’ve had lawsuits over docks and temporary use permits and although I understand why people want these things or want to oppose them, I can’t always find pillar number five reflected in those discussions.

The pandemic has restricted our ability to both create and maintain the heart and soul of Bowen Island (and crucially introduce it to newcomers) AND it has robbed us of the chance to have conversations about what is REALLY meaningful to Bowen Islanders. We’re not quite a zombie Island, but we are a bit like a new cake recipe slid into the oven for the first time and about half way through cooking. Tasty looking on the outside, a bit raw in the middle.

in the next few years we are simply going to have to re-do our Community Plan. It no longer serves us. It doesn’t capture the heart and soul of Bowen Island. When we find ourselves saying “no” to almost every new and interesting idea here, it says to me that our plan has not adequately captured a sense of who we are and what we want. And at the moment, I don’t actually think we collectively know who we are and what we want. I think as individuals we know that, but we have not been actively creating that collective sense for a few years now and so the conversations about what matters are rooted in both individual concerns and projections onto the whole. “This is what I think Bowen is, therefore this idea is in line with (or opposed) to that.” History and new perspectives are swirling together and we haven’t had a chance to see them all play out in the social spaces of community creation.

You might think it’s easy to know what Bowen Island is or wants. After all we are only 4200 people on a small-ish island. But back in 2014-16 it took us years of research to really look and see what we could find. And even then of course, we can’t capture it all. Folks who live in Hood Point have a different experience than those who live on Cates Hill or out in Bluewater or down by the golf course. The environment, neighbourhood and histories of our little areas give a flavour and spin to our collective story. But I do believe that before we take a serious and comprehensive look at our community plan we need to do three things:

  1. Participate in community much more than we are now. We need to REMAKE the soul of the place again. Being at some Fastpitch League games this summer reminded me of some of the best of what we continue to be. Singing in choirs, volunteering at the recycling depot, playing soccer, hanging out at the Pier and just watching people come and go all helps me to add a little and be fed a little by the soul of Bowen. What I don’t think is helping me much is having my attention distorted by the conversations on social media. What I am missing is meeting the new folks to the Island. Mostly I get to do that by playing soccer, because our Football Club is a great place for new folks to get started.
  2. Change the conversations we are having. Or at the very least start talking about the stuff that matters deeply. Yes we are worried about the impact of a park on traffic and water or how the community centre and muni hall isn’t the performance space we really wanted. But we aren’t talking about what matters and we aren’t exploring that with curiosity and interest like we did when we were gathering stories from businesses and residents and visitors. Without diminishing the anxiety and pain people feel at the changes that are happening here, we need to get underneath these discussion and find out what what the soul of the place really looks like these days. And we need to hear from the people we never hear from online too, in a way that works for them. Entering the public square right now is not for everyone, because the online space can be withering and the face-to-face space needs to be reinvented to be invitational and deliberative rather than reactionary and exclusive. All of that prevents us from learning from the diversity of opinion and viewpoints here.
  3. Make a very different plan. I don’t have an answer this one. But I know that we need a simpler plan that captures what we want to work together to build and let’s people come with creative ideas to help make that happen. Our community plan needs to be about 180 pages shorter than it currently is.

We have a local election coming up. I’m interested in who is running and what they think about this. As always I’m happy to help (I’m not running) and I CAN do stuff to help these three need-to-dos above. If you are a Bowen Islander perhaps you have ideas too. Share them here.

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Living in a non-regenerative tourist town

August 24, 2022 By Chris Corrigan Bowen, Featured 4 Comments

Here is a great article from Canadian Geographic that describes many different approaches small communities are taking to addressing the impact of tourism in their communities. When I look at the examples of the small towns in this article I see some commonalities and some differences with our own little island.

The small communities in this article are Rossland, BC, Manitoulin Island in Ontario and Fogo Island in Newfoundland and Labrador. They are all small communities quite far from larger cities and they are all quite self-contained. Every community has a chance to take control of their local economy because unless they do so there is very little activity that comes from outside. in the traditional tourist model, people come and visit, perhaps stay a while and local business compete and collaborate for the tourist dollars. Typically these kinds of communities close up shop in the off season and folks try to stretch their summer dollars over the lean years.

What is different about Rossland, Manitoulin and Fogo Island is that they are able to build a year round local economy as well because, unlike Bowen Island, people don’t leave every day for work. If the local economy cannot sustain jobs and enterprises throughout the year, it cannot sustain a diverse business sector that has a chance to work its regenerative magic.

Here on Bowen Island, we live very close to a major city and the vast majority of our residents either commute physically or virtually into that city to do their work. People like Caitlin and I, who run small consulting businesses typically don’t serve local clients in the same way that our restaurants, builders and services do. In the cases of Fogo and Rossland, some of the key attractors in the communities attracted other businesses around them to provide specialized services. With very little money coming in from outside the community, a strong attractor like a ski hill or a boutique hotel can generate businesses around itself and people can create a local livelihood. Those folks will need to spend money locally on services like food and drugs and home repair and so a contained virtuous cycle can be triggered. The key is to diversify the economy as quickly as possible, so that everything does not hinge on the single big attractor in the system. Rossland seems acutely aware of this, having been a boom town in the past.

I don’t know what the pathway is for Bowen Island, but we face a number of challenges to making our tourism regenerative rather than extractive. Currently we get inundated with day trippers who like to wander through the village and do some shopping or hike the trails on the island. Most don’t stay but those that do use AirBnBs and VRBOs as well as traditional B&Bs and our four or so retreat centres. There is no hotel or inn that can serve people the way they are served on Fogo Island and there is isn’t much intention put behind hosting people in our natural spaces, although that may be changing with a new park proposal from Metro Vancouver that, for the first time, would ask our community to allow supervised camping in a primarily walk/bike-in campground.

What makes things very challenging on Bowen Island is that local residents can be very vocal about the impact of tourism,much to the negative. The village is too busy, visitors are rightfully confused by the implicit culture of the place, including how ferry etiquette works, and how tolerant local neighbourhoods are of parties in AirBnBs or on the boats moored in Mannion Bay. Most residents, if asked, would tell you that we have to address the tourism situation, but few could tell you how. ALmost everyone would say that bringing in more people is not desirable, although we can’t do much about being a 20 minute ferry ride from an urban area of 2.5 million people, many of whom love having easy access to the natural landscape of our forests and seas.

One thing that seems to stop us taking a regenerative approach and creating anchor enterprises locally is the fact that Bowen islanders seem to enjoy privacy and quiet and sustained high real estate values. Creating a new local enterprise is an absolute exhausting endeavour that often requires special kinds of permits and changes to zoning. In some cases the opposition to these proposal has resulted in lawsuits, hostile neighbourhood relations and a kind of general appeal to the fear of noise, traffic, overcrowding and diminished real estate prices and quality of life. The chance to develop a key tourism asset like the Fogo Island Inn or an Indigenous Park or something like a destination downhill mountain biking trail system, all of which COULD be possible here, faces a huge uphill battle from people who live close to where these things could be built and who doubt the ability of any government or organization to effectively manage the use and impact.

Additionally, these anchor enterprises are unlikely to generate much in the way of local services. We live merely 20 minutes from the Metro Vancouver area. Already huge numbers of services come from contractors who come over on morning ferries and leave in the evening. Many of these services used to be provided by local people, but the housing affordability crisis (partly but not completely driven by AirBnBs, VRBOs and other short term rentals) have made living on Bowen a near impossibility for service industry workers and those who are trying to start up a business. If you need $2500 or $3000 a month just to house yourself, it’s tricky to raise the capital to start a business, nor is it easy to develop a market on island where already the cost of goods and services is subject to a ferry premium.

Our local economy is incredibly leaky. Most of the money people earn here is spent off-island, and that’s just a reality of location.

At one point when I was on the Community Economic Development Committee I scoped out a concept for hosting tourism on Bowen called “Village as a Venue,” based on an idea developed by my friend Tim Merry and his mates in Mahone Bay Nova Scotia, a community very much like ours. The idea was to organize the hospitality industry here through shared services like housekeeping, booking and events planning to create essentially a big distributed hotel that could host events like arts festivals, Ultimate tournaments, theatre and music, golf camps, marine biology conferences and leadership retreats. I prototyped this idea more than 25 times through week long retreats we offered between 2004 and 2019 and it has efficacy. We even started organizing some of the services in some early conversations.

Post-pandemic, I’m not sure now. I have seen local entrepreneurs create new businesses doing cool things, such a cidery or a distributed education program and I have seen them face fierce opposition by neighbours and legal challenges to the very idea that they could use temporary use permits to establish their businesses and services. In order to make something like this happen here, we would need to revisit our community plan – which is long overdue – and I would be very interested to see where we are as a community. I think folks like the idea of regenerative tourism in theory, but my suspicion is that we all carry many unexamined ideas about how it would affect us and there are very vocal folks who are very quick to pounce on ideas that would bring more people to our little island paradise.

But this article DOES inspire and as I have no plans to leave here any time soon, I await and observe these ideas and the conversation around them with curiosity.

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Transforming Power

August 22, 2022 By Chris Corrigan Featured, First Nations, Power

An invitation to learn about transforming power.

Power.

What’s your reaction to the word? Do you love it? Does it make you shudder? Are you frightened by it or rather do you relish power, look for chances to acquire some and use it? Or maybe you’d rather talk about “influence” or “inspiration” because the word “power” seems toxic?

Have you been hurt by power? i have; my own and others. Power that exploits, power that lords it over us, power that extracts from us and drains us.

But I’ve also been lifted up and supported by power. Mentored, helped along, corrected, guided, enabled.

Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier and I have been talking about power in the context of lots of different pieces of work over the years including at the intersection of indigenous and settler systems of governance, policy and philanthropy. We’ve worked together with social service leaders, Indigenous families, Foundation leaders, churches, students of transformative systems change, folks interested in convening groups and making the world a better place. We’ve been in an active conversation about taking a view of power and it’s uses through a Nuu Chah Nulth lens.

Kelly, who is a member of the Tseshaht Nation is a deep student of her Nation’s culture and language, and in her work with Elders and communities over the past fifteen years, she has been thinking about power in a different way, by connecting it to its relational sources, grounded in family and community and lineage. When we are teaching together, Kelly uses the examples of four animals – the whale, the wolf, the eagle and the hummingbird – to explore four key aspects of cultivating and using power.

Stemming from a worldview that begins with an assumption that “everything is one” her learnings about power from a Nuu Chah Nulth lens invites us to look at how we use power to plumb honest Depth, strengthen collective Courage, create shared Vision and sustain one another to work with Joy.

With our friends Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen at Beehive Productions we are ready to offer a series of four conversations about these ideas to those who work with power in group process and systems change. We know, working in participatory ways, that we can use and transform power to embed it in a relations system that shares leadership and lifts all of us, but it’s not always a simple matter to do so. So in this course we will explore relational power and its uses beginning with ideas Kelly has been putting together from her experience as a host and facilitator and leader in community and queried by my own experience working with power as a settler who is trying to lift more of these relational ways of doing things into the formal structures and systems in order to address the harms of colonization and promises of an alternative way of organizing and being actively reciprocal in the world.

If you are up for the conversation, we’d love to have you join us to explore how to transform our use of power. You might learn:

  • How power shows upin group work and we might work with it differently
  • How leadership is about creating shared contexts for action and actualization of both individual and collective work
  • How working with power has the potential to transform relationships and create sustainability in social change and community.

And you might learn a bunch of other stuff besides! This course will place you in active learning with these ideas, and you will leave with a compendium and harvest of the teachings we all create together.

Want to join us? Learn more and register here.

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Find Interesting Things
Events
  • Art of Hosting November 12-14, 2025, with Caitlin Frost, Kelly Poirier and Kris Archie Vancouver, Canada
  • The Art of Hosting and Reimagining Education, October 16-19, Elgin Ontario Canada, with Jenn Williams, Cédric Jamet and Troy Maracle
Resources
  • A list of books in my library
  • Facilitation Resources
  • Open Space Resources
  • Planning an Open Space Technology meeting
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