Detail from Richard Shorty’s work “Genesis 1:20-25”
Wednesday is National Aboriginal Day and ten days later, Canada commemorates its 150th birthday. Since the centenary in 1967 and even since Canada 125 in 1992, the whole enterprise of Canada has become deeply informed by the need for reconciliation between indigenous people and communities, and settler people and communities.
We are all treaty people. Everyone in Canada who has citizenship is also a beneficiary to the treaties that were signed and made as a way of acknowledging and making binding, the relationship between settler communities and indigenous nations. The ability to own private land, for example, is one way in which settlers benefit from treaties that were signed long ago, even if those treaties were made hundreds of years ago in other parts of the country. Canadian society depends on the ability of governments to provide access to land and resources, and that access flows directly from treaties. Not from conquering and taking. From legally binding agreements. You are a treaty person.
The promise of Canada has never been properly delivered to indigenous communities. Over decades courts have declared this. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission declared this. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples declared this. It is evident in data and research and popular culture.
The need for reconciliation is long overdue.
For thirty years I have worked in this space, and lately I have been working with a small set of principles, when settlers ask me about reconciliation. Here they are:
- Reconciliation requires restitution. For reconciliation to be real it must be accompanied by restitution. Reconciliation efforts aimed at increasing awareness are fine, but they should have a direct and material benefit to indigenous people and communities, When indigenous communities do well, we all do well. Restitution can happen in all kinds of ways including the return of lands and property, but it also requires the honouring of the ongoing relationships embedded in the treaties in which mutual benefit was supposed to flow for the future.
- Reconciliation is unsettling. My friend Michelle Nahanee talks about “emotional equity” which is one way of thinking about what it costs for indigenous people to interact in non-indigenous contexts. It is inherently unsettling. For non-indigenous people a true commitment to reconciliation means unsettling notions of what you take for granted. Just understanding how you are a treaty beneficiary is one way to suddenly become unsettled. And I have often said that the only job for settlers in reconciliation is to be unsettled. It is from that place that we can all meet and work on a different set of ideas than colonization.
- Settlers need to make the first move. Still with the idea of emotional equity, it is important that settlers make the first move in a reconciliation initiative. Indigenous people cannot be expected to be the ones to make it easy for everyone to do reconciliation. Settlers must make the first moves, and must do so in all the vulnerability and fear that comes from making the first move. Do something, do it badly, be open to learning and keep going.
- Reconciliation is a verb. The right term is “reconciling” because we aren’t ever going to acheive a place wher ethe world is reconciled. It is an ongoing project. If the project of the last 150 years was about creating a Canada where there were once only dozens of nations, perhaps the project of the next 150 years should be about figuring out how to make a country possible that reconciles the interests, duties and obligations of it’s history and privilege with the results of the colonization that enabled that privilege. There is no certain answer, but I have faith that together we can create a place that is better than either of us can do separately.
- Its about relationship. The reason why Canada has to confront the horrible legacy of colonization is that Canadians entered into and then promptly forgot the nature of the relationships that were set in place by the laws and policies of 1763. In that year King George proclaimed that nations west of the Atlantic watershed needed to be dealt with as nations, and according to the rule of law. That proclamation, recognizing the importance of relationship over domination, became the basis for all Aboriginal law in Canada and is still to this day the standard upon which adherence to the rule of law is applied. All Canadians are born or move into a relationship with indigenous people and the relationship is direct, personal and beneficial. Reconciliation needs to restore this sense of mutual dependancy and correct the balance.
I will be hosting conversations on reconciliation at Canada Day commemorations on (Nexwlelexwem) Bowen Island this year with my friend Pauline Le Bel, who is running a series of interesting events this year called “Knowing Our Place” about the relationship of Bowen Islanders to the Skwxwu7mesh Nation and to our At’lkitsem (Howe Sound). If you’re on Bowen, join us. If not, host your own and think about why reconciliation matters to you.
“Vision” is one of those words that is overused in our work and the reason it is so elusive is that is is so context dependant.
You can have a vision of a full bath tub of steaming hot water. You can have a vision of making your home run on rain water alone. You can have a vision of safe drinking water for all humans.
The first is simple, short term and you have all the tools and abilities to make it happen.
The second is more complicated and you require a few experts to make it happen, but with the right people and resources, you can achieve it.
The third is not up to you. It is a complex and adaptive system. You may be motivated by a desire to see safe drinking water for all humans but you are unlikely to achieve it because it is a complex problem. Intention can make a difference here and instead of working TOWARDS a tangible vision you can work FROM an intention and guide your actions against that.
The problem comes when people want tangible outcomes from linear processes. “We need a vision of our future” can sometimes lead to work that ignores all the opportunities and threats that come up in a living and evolving system. Without good methods of understanding what is happening, what a system is inclined to do, or iterating work based on learning (in other words developmental evaluation), in my experience those with power and a mandate to accomplish something will eventually narrow the work down to mere deliverables. The vision maybe in there somewhere but the context renders it useless.
So these days when a client asks me for a vision I want to know why and whether they have the means and desire to actually achieve it, or whether they are simply calling for a conversation on “what we’re all trying to do” so that work and opportunities can be evaluated against that.
At some level, in complex systems, vision and purpose become moral centres and ethical guidelines and not targets. That seems important to me.
I think that doing strategic work with organizations and communities is really about learning. If a group is trying to confront newness and changes in its environment and needs to come up with new strategies to address those changes, then it needs to learn.
I love the term “desire lines.” Most of my initial work with organizations tries to get at the desire lines in the organization; the patterns embedded in the culture that help or hinder change and resilience. Naming and making visible these entrained desire lines (including the ones that that group takes into the darkness of conflict and unresourcefulness) is a helpful exercise in beginning to first reflect and then disrupt and develop capacity. When a group can see their patterns, and see which are helpful and which are not, they can make the choice to develop new ones or strengthen the stuff that works.
When problems are complex, then the people in the group need to focus on learning strategies in order to discover and try new things, rather than adopt a best practice from elsewhere. It is, as Steve Wheeler says in this video, the difference between designed environments and personal choice:
“Students will always find their own unique pathways for learning. They will always choose their own personal tools and technologies. Our job is not to try and create pathways for them, but to help them create the pathways for themselves and the scaffold and support them as they go through those pathways.”
Hosting groups is always about learning – in fact one core question of the Art of Hosting community is “what if learning was the form of leadership required now?” To support learning, help groups find the desire lines for learning and good strategic work to address change that is owned by the group will follow. That is how learning builds capacity and capacity builds sustainability.
This month I am in the middle of delivering another very cool online offering with Beehive Productions on the art of invitation. It’s a three session program focusing on the practice of invitation as it relates to participatory meetings, longer term participatory strategic initiatives and even organizational design. Michael Herman will be joining us next week for the “Inviting Organization” module. He’s really the guy that got me thinking about invitation way back in 2000 when I first came across his work as an Open Space colleague.
While Rowan and Amy and I were thinking about content we discussed some of the essential practices of invitation that facilitators, leaders and process designers should keep at hand. As we did when we discovered the “PLUME” mnemonic for harvesting, we arrived at VALUE as a mnemonic for invitation.
In participatory processes, I have found that the success or failure of the work is rally correlated to the quality, intention and active nature of the invitation. Just as participatory processes require participatory harvesting, they also require invitations to be participatory, iterative, emergent, and yet clear in intent and boundary. These five principles form a decent heuristic for invitation practice that can be scaled from single meetings, through to sustainable initiatives and enterprises. Here they are
Invitation is a VERB: If you are inviting people to a gathering using a single static email or a poster, you aren’t doing enough, in my experience. Invitation requires you to be active, in relation and dialogue. The interaction between inviter and invitee creates a connection and a commitment and kicks off the design. My friend Christie Diamond one time remarked “The conversation begins long before the meeting starts…” and that captures perfectly the idea of an active invitation.
Invitations are made from ATTRACTORS AND BOUNDARIES: It’s obvious that an invitation should have a purpose at its centre, but it should also include a statement of the boundaries of the container you are inviting people into. This could be a clear sense of what we are NOT doing, or it could be a cost associated with coming (time, money, attention, commitment). Peter Block says a good invitation contains a barrier to overcome to assure that the person reading it will respond with an authentic yes or an authentic no to what is on offer. Attractors and boundaries together help to define the container inside which the work will unfold.
Invitation is LEADERSHIP: When you invite people to something you are taking an active leadership role. You will confront all kinds of emotional states in yourself, ranging from excitement to anxiety. You are taking a stand for something, especially if you are inviting people to something new and there may be times when you are the only one with a strong sense of possibility about the work. Good invitation requires people to practice good leadership.
Invitations respond to an URGENT need: in chaordic design, we go to need first, to understand why something is necessary and to be able to reach people who also feel the need. The more an invitation can respond to the zeitgeist of the moment, the more energy and focus people will have coming into your container or your process.
Finally, invitations are EMBODIED: You cannot just send a text, or invite somebody to something while signalling your distinct lack of invitation with your body and behaviour. Recently, there has become a trend among American high school students to do fantastic invitations to prom dances. Like bower birds, young American men are going completely over the top to wow their dates. You can say what you want about it, but there is no doubting the fully embodied commitment to invitation expressed by this guy. How are your invitations?
(Thanks to Viola Tschendal for the image. She does our real time harvests for Beehive.)
A couple of years ago I wrote a post that was critical of the way in which the Representative for Children in Youth in British Columbia drove practice changes among social workers. In short the reason had to do with apply too much order (rules and checklists) in a complex space (social work practice). At a certain point, when you are trying to prevent deaths that have occurred in the past, you end up outlawing all but the deaths that will surprise you in the future. We look at reviews of child deaths as if they were expected and predictable and create highly ordered accountability mechanisms to prevent them from happening again. The problem with this, as anyone knows who works with complexity, is that you create a break between good social work practice which is sensitive to nuance and context, and rigorous accountability standards. While no one is arguing that social workers should not be accountable, what is required is the ability for social workers to develop and rely on their practice, because no amount of rules will prevent children from dying in novel ways, but good social work practice does have an effect. In fact, checklists over practice almost ensure children will die in increasingly novel ways because as social work becomes constrained simply to what is on the checklist, social workers narrow their gaze too much and are unable to detect the weak signals in a situation that would otherwise anticipate a problem before it happens. This is the dilemma between anticipatory and predictive awareness and getting it wrong is costly.
It’s a brutal example, but I do believe it points to the the consequences of accountability models that assume that all outcomes are predictable and negative effects can be prevented with best practices even when its proven that they can’t be. (the confusion in that link is perfectly illustrative, by the way. “Child deaths are preventable” on the one hand and “we lack the most basic information about why children die” on the other.) That can be true in ordered systems but not in complex ones. This particular problem has a major implication for philanthropic organizations that are seeking to have “impact.” In many cases, the impact is a pre-defined outcome of a process taken largely in a narrowly defined strategic context. Real life is messy but logic models are sweetly and seductively clean.
Messiness is important and working in messy ways is a critical skill of philanthropic workers, donors and directors. In this recent article Martin Morse Wooster argues for a loosening of constraints on philanthropic work and although he doesn’t provide a solid theoretical basis for his assertions, but good theory on the limits of managing and measuring impact backs him up.
Many front line philanthropic workers – grants administrators, programs staff and consultants – know this approach but they are often constrained by donors, Boards and executives who demand simple outcomes, simple metrics and clear impact. I’m increasingly interested in putting together specific trainings and learnings for boards and donors that will increase their literacy of messiness in support of making smart changes and supporting good in a way that is much more aligned with how community actually works.
One such offering is currently open for enrolment. We are gathering in June in Glasgow and will be repeating the workshop in October in Vancouver. If you’d like it in your neck of the woods, let me know.