
On the Art of Hosting email list last month, there was an inquiry posted by Monica Nissén asking about scaling the Art of Hosting as a leadership practice through levels of engagement. By “Art of Hosting” Monica means the four fold practice, which is the basic framework for leadership that gives our community a coherent centre of practice, around presence, participation, hosting others, and co-creation. Monica asked whether hoping these practices would just go viral in a networked way is enough, and I replied with the following, tracing a couple of long term projects I have been involved in that have supported systems change in child and family services in British Columbia.
It’s definitely deliberate and networked. For me, it’s about building capacity. Our biggest work the last 9 years has been providing the Leadership 2020 program to social service workers in British Columbia working with children, youth and families in agencies, indigenous communities and government.
(You can read a summary of our five year evaluation of this program here)
We continue to developmentally evaluate as we go, and as a result, each cohort is different, each curriculum is slightly changed and we find new and more relevant ways to introduce people to this practice.
The basis of that program is a leadership approach that is very similar and deeply informed by what we in the Art of Hosting community know as the four-fold practice: that great leadership is personal, practice-based, participatory and perceptive. The program is structured in cohorts made up of people that have to apply. We mix “legacy” leaders with experienced and emerging leaders to show that learning never ends. Each cohort participates in two 5 day residencies – which are basically extended Art of Hosting workshops – and a nine month program of learning in between, featuring webinars and coaching and peer support for the application of tools and methods.
Over the past eight years we have brought about 450 people through the program. While it’s about learning in participatory ways, the program has a kind of hidden agenda. We are very clear that, about every 20 years or so, the child welfare system in our province goes through a massive restructuring, often provoked by a crisis, but not always. We have always invited our participants to both practice their leadership on the issues that are immediately in front of them, but to do it in a way that builds their capacity to respond when that later transformation happens. We want them to be the first to run to the centre when the old system is dying, eager to use their capacity, relationships, and practice to create the new.
In these days, the system is now beginning that deeper transformation, and fortunately it hasn’t been preceded by a crises. Instead, the woman who founded the Leadership 2020 program, Jennifer Charlesworth, was appointed to a five-year term as the Representative for Children and Youth in British Columbia, a very powerful position that is independent of the government and that can make powerful recommendations about systems change, usually as a result of different issues or events. Jennifer is bringing a collaborative approach to her work and to be successful in that, she is partly relying on the 450 Leadership 2020 graduates that are spread all through the system. There is a built-in capacity that is being invited into its biggest calling, reaching across traditional divides of indigenous/non-indigenous and government/community. Jennifer’s appointment to the position was received with widespread enthusiasm and optimism. We are hoping to see that the system is able to evolve faster with this capacity embedded in a way that is less painful than a collapse and transformation.
Participatory practices have been used for a long time in the field of social work and child and family services. In 2003 I started working with David Stevenson to use Open Space, Cafe, Circle, and the four fold practice to begin to build an indigenous governance systems for child and family services in BC. Our colleagues Kris Archie and Kyla Mason, Pawa Hayupis and many other indigenous Art of Hosting practitioners came into and out of that work. Toke Moeller and Monica Nissen and Patricia Galaczy joined us to teach Art of Hosting to families and community members who were participating in that work: http://www.turtleisland.org/healing/healing-cousins.htm. Between 2003 and 2009 we did something important on Vancouver Island. We started something and then had to abandon it for a different form, because not every idea works. But David later took that work with him into his work in executive positions in government. Kris has now become the CEO of the Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada and Kyra has become an extraordinary executive director of Usma, a Nuu-Chah-Nulth agency on Vancouver Island. Pawa is currently doing her Masters of Arts in indigenous governance and she and David continue to offer Art of Hosting trainings locally, as do Caitlin and I. In each of these new settings capacity building for participatory leadership has been used.
Meanwhile, Jennifer and a small group of us began Leadership 2020 in 2011. It has taken 15 years of developing leadership at the grass roots level and seeing that leadership grow into positions of power that has allowed us to work with the system this way. There is capacity in BC now, hopefully enough to take the system through the changes that are now coming, the ones we have prepared for, the ones we are waiting for, the ones we are making, and the ones that will surprise us.
It takes courage, patience, time, power, stewardship, relationship, and community to do this work. It takes a common language and shared perspectives and it takes massive diversity and difference to build resourcefulness and resilience. It is costly, politically, emotionally and materially, and it is not easy work. It requires a fierce commitment to relationship and a willingness to be at the edge of safety, with one foot out into the dangerous world. You get uplifted, hurt, angry, and joyful. But it’s a long game and you cannot sacrifice the depth of the work for ease and comfort. And no one person or team can do it alone.
It is not enough to do some trainings and walk away. The viral network does not just magically appear. Beautiful workshop experiences are only useful for systems change if they are connected to power. It requires staying in.
I just realized a few weeks ago that, although I never intended to work in the field of child and family services, that this may indeed be my life’s work. It has been nearly 20 years since I first walked into Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services to take on a job organizing their negotiations to become a “delegated agency” able to make decisions for and with indigenous children and families instead of government doing it. I think in that time I’ve learned a bit about what it takes to create the capacity in a large system that gives us a chance. That’s all I can say we’ve done at the moment, but I’m an optimist, so I live with the hope and gratitude that the legacy of the work we have done will make the world better for the kids who suffer the most in it.
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I’ll be away for a couple of weeks, so here is the last set of links for the year. Happy New Year.
I am worried about democracy these days. Our electoral politics are ravaged by social media manipulation, an absence of policy discussion, and the influence of money. Governance affords very little opportunity for meaningful citizen participation. Harold Jarche is worried too, and in this pots he tackles the question of how to save democracy head on.
Our institutions are failing us. They were designed for the age of print, not an electrically connected one. We need new structures and the current wave of returns to tribalism manifested as populism will not save us. As the advent of the printing press helped usher in an age of inquiry, first in the Christian religion and later in the enlightenment and scientific revolutions, so we have to engage in creating new organizational and governance structures for a global network era.
If print enabled democracy, will the emerging electric/digital medium destroy it?
How Complex Whole Emerge From Simple Parts
Another stunner from Quanta Magazine. This is a great introductory video to emergence. I could listen to excellent basic introductions to complexity all day. Enjoy this one. This is the phenomenon that my life’s work is devoted to.
Maria Popova’s favourite books of 2018
Maria Popva runs Brain Pickings, which is an amazing blog. She shares some detailed reviews of a couple of dozen books that grabbed her attention this year from authors including Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, Audré Lourde, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Zadie Smth among others, including some terrific children’s books. She calls this list “New Year’s Resolutions in Reverse.”
Advice for Emerging Evaluators
My colleague Ciaran Camman, a developmental evaluator has recently revamped her blog and there are some brilliant pieces on there, including this one which provides advice to her future colleagues from five things you should learn how to do, and one Max Ehermann Desiderata which begins
Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Onaubinisay at the World Parliament of Religions
Onaubinisay (Jim Dumont) is an important teacher of Anisinaabe governance and spirituality. I met him first in the 1980s when I was studying Native Studies at Trent University, where he visited as a guest during our annual Elders and Traditional People’s conference. He was an influential supporter of the effort to re-establish the Midewiwin religion in southern Ontario, an effort I got to be a small part of along with Paul Bourgeois and a little army of his students from Trent at the time.
Here is is speaking earlier this year at the World Parliament of Religions.
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I was happy to be able to spend a short time this week at a gathering of Art of Hosting practitioners in Columbus, Ohio. People had gathered from across North America and further afield to discuss issues of racial equity in hosting and harvesting practices. I’ve been called back home early to deal with a broken pipe and a small flood in my house, but before I left I was beginning to think about how to apply what I was learning with respect to strategy and evaluation practices. I was going to host a conversation about this, but instead, I have a 12 hour journey to think with my fingers.
My own thinking on this topic has largely been informed by the work I’ve done over thirty years at the intersection between indigenous and non-indigenous communities and people in Canada. Recently this work has been influenced by the national conversation on reconciliation. That conversation, which started promisingly, has been treated with more and more cynicism by indigenous people, who are watching non-indigenous Canadians pat themselves on the back for small efforts while large issues of social, economic and political justice have gone begging for attention. Reconciliation is gradually losing its ability to inspire transformative action. And people are forgetting the very important work of truth coming before reconciliation. Truth is hard to hear. Reconciliation is easy to intend.
As a result, I’m beginning to suggest to some non-indigenous groups that they should not think of their work as attempting to get to reconciliation, but instead to focus on work with indigenous communities that has a real and tangible and material impact on indigenous people. Reconciliation can then a by-product and a way of evaluating the work while we work together to achieve positive effects.
So my question now is, what if reconciliation was one of the ways we evaluated work done with indigenous communities, and not as an end in itself?
x x x
“Every action happens within a frame and the frame is very important.”
— Maurice Stevens, on Sunday prefacing a story he told about race.
Evaluation is a very powerful tool because it is often a hidden frame that guides strategic work. Ethical evaluators work hard to prevent their work from becoming an intervention that determines the direction of a project. In work that involves social change, poorly designed evaluation can narrow the work to a few isolated outcomes, and leave people with the impression that complex problems can only be addressed by linear and predictable planning practices.
Wielded unconsciously, evaluation can be a colonizing tool introducing ways of knowing that are alien to the cultures of the communities that are doing the work. Sometimes called “epistemic violence” this kind of intervention devalues and erases the ways participants themselves make sense of their world, know about their work and the standards by which they value an action as good.
Complexity demands of us that we work towards an unknowable and unpredictable future in a direction that we agree is good, useful, and desirable. Agreeing together what is good and desirable for a project should be the work of the people upon whom the project will have a direct affect. The principle of “Nothing about us without us” captures this ethical imperative. In complex adaptive systems and problems, outcomes are impossible to predict and the ways forward need to be discovered. Imposing a direction or a destination can have a substantial negative impact on the ability of a community to address its issues in a way that is meaningful to the community. Many projects fail because they became about achieving a good evaluation score. It is a powerful attractor in a system.
Evaluation frameworks are based on stories about how we believe change happens. I have seen many examples of these stories over the years:
- An orderly sequence of steps will get you to your goal.
- The people need to be changed in order for a new world to arise.
- Leadership must go tot the mountain of enlightenment and bring down a new set of brilliant teachings to lead the people in a different direction.
- We are feeling our way through the woods, discovering the truth as we go.
- Life is like navigating on a storm tossed sea and our ability to get where we are going relies on our ability to understand how the ship and the weather and the ocean works.
- If only we can put the parts together in a greater whole, then the collective impact we desire will be made.
You can probably name dozens of the archetypal stories that underlie the way you’ve made sense of projects you are involved in. But how often are these stories questioned? And what if the stories we use to frame our evaluation and ways of knowing about what’s good are based on stories that are not relevant or, worse, dangerous, in the context in which we are working?
I once sat with Jake Swamp, a well known Mohawk elder who told me a story of the numerous times that he met with the Dalai Lama. Jake said that he and the Dalai Lama often discussed peace as that was a key focus of their work, and their approaches to peace differed quite substantially. To paraphrase Jake, for the Dalai Lama, peace was attainable through individual practice and enlightenment, mainly through personal meditation. Jake offered a different view, based on the Great Law of Peace, which is the set of organizing principles for the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. In this context, individuals achieving a state of peace separate from their family and clan are dangerous to the whole. For Jake, peace is an endeavour to be worked on collectively and and in relationship and the difference for him was critical.
Imagine an evaluator then, working with the Dalai Lama’s ideas of peace and applying them to the workings of the Haudensaunee Confederacy. A de-emphasis on personal practice would get a failing grade. The story of how to achieve peace determines what the evaluator looks for and, if the evaluator was a practicing Tibetan Buddhist for example, they might not even be able to see how Haudenosaunee chiefs clan mothers, families, and communities were working on maintaining peace.
This happens all the time with evaluation practice. The stories and lenses that evaluators use determine what they see, and their intervention in the project often determines the direction of the work..
x x x
Recently several colleagues and I attended a workshop with Michael Quinn Patton who was introducing the new field of principles-focused evaluation. I got excited at this workshop, not only because Quinn Patton is an important theorist who has brought complexity thinking into the evaluation world, but also because this new approach offers some promise for how we might evaluate the principles that actively shape the way we plan, work and evaluate action.
Interventions in complex systems rely on the skillful use of constraints. If you constrain action too tightly – through rules and regulations and accountability for unknowable outcomes – you get people gaming the system, taking reductionist approaches to problems by breaking them into easily achievable chunks and generally avoiding the difficult and uncomfortable work in favour of doing what needs to be done to pass the test. It doesnot result in systemic change, but a lot of work gets done. However, if you apply constraints too loosely and offer no guideposts at all, work goes many different ways, money and energy gets stretched and the impact is diffuse, if even noticeable at all.
The answer is to guide work with principles that are flexible and yet strong enough to keep everyone moving in a desirable direction. You need a malleable riverbank, not a canal wall or a flooded field. Choose principles that will help keep you together and do good work, and evaluate the effectiveness of those principles to achieve effective means and not simply desired ends.
Quinn Patton gives a useful heuristic for developing effective principles for complexity work. These principles are remembered by the acronym GUIDE (explanations are mine):
- GUIDING: Principles should give you a sense of direction
- INSPIRATIONAL: Principles should inspire new action
- USEFUL: Principles should help you make a decision when you find yourself in a new context
- DEVELOPMENTAL: Principles should be able to evolve with time and practice to meet new contexts
- EVALUABLE: You should be able to know whether you are following a principles or not.
Because principles focused evaluation – and I would say principles-based planning – are context dependant, one has a choice about what principles to use. If I was evaluating the Dalai Lama’s approach to peace making I might use a principle like:
The development of individual mindfulness practice twice a day is essential to peace.
If I was working with Jake perhaps we might use a principle like:
A chief must be in good relation with his clan mothers in order to deliberate in the longhouse to maintain peace.
Principles are then used to structure action so that it happens in a certain way and evaluation questions are designed to discover how well people are able to use these principles and whether they had the desired effect. Using monitoring processes, rapid feedback, story telling and reflection means that the principles themselves become the thing that is also evaluated, in addition to outcomes and other learning that goes on in a project.
The source of those principles are deeply rooted in stories and teaching from the culture that is pursuing peace and peacefulness. It is very useful for those principles to be applied within their context, but very ineffective for those principles to be applied in the other context.
And so perhaps you can see what this has to do now with reconciliation – and racial justice – as a evaluation framework and not necessarily a stated outcome. If reconciliation and racial justice is a consequence of the WAY we work together instead of an outcome we know how to get to, then we must place our focus on evaluating the principles that guide our work together, no matter what it is, so that in doing it, we increase racial equity.
It is entirely possible for settler-colonial governments to do work that benefits indigenous communities without that work contributing towards reconciliation. The federal government could choose to fund the installation and maintenance of safe running water systems in all indigenous communities, and impose that on First Nations governments, sending in their own construction crews and holding maintenance contracts without involvement of First Nations communities. The outcome of the project might be judged to be good, but doing it that way would be against several principles of reconciliation, including the principle of working in relationship. Everyone would have running water – which is desperately needed – but the cause of reconciliation might be set back. Ends and means both matter.
x x x
So this brings me to practicalities. How can we embed racial justice, equity or reconciliation in our work using the evaluation of principles?
Part of the work of racial justice and reconciliation is to work from stories and ways of knowing of groups that have been marginalized by privilege and colonization. We often work hard – but often not hard enough – to include people in the design of the participatory strategic and process work that affects their communities but it is rare in my experience that those same voices and ways of knowing are included in the evaluation of that work. If reconciliation and justice is to ALSO be an outcome of development work, then the way to create evaluation frameworks is to work with the stories of community and question the implicit narrative and value structures of the evaluators.
This can be done by, for example, having Elders and traditional storytellers share important traditional stories of justice or relationship with project participants and then convening participants in a workshop to identify the values and principles that come through the teachings in these stories. Making these principles the core around which the evaluation takes place, and including the storytellers and Elders in the evaluation of the effectiveness of those principles within the project over time, seems to me to a simple and direct way to embed the practice of racial justice and reconciliation in the work of funding and resourcing projects in indigenous communities.
I am not a professional evaluator but my interest in the field is central to the work that I do, and I have seen for years the impact that evaluation has had on the projects I have been involved in. Anything that disrupts traditional evaluation to open up frameworks to different ways of knowing holds tremendous value for undermining the hidden effects of whiteness and privilege that threads through typical social change work supported by large foundations and governments.
But from this reflection, perhaps I can offer my own cursory principles of disrupting evaluation to build more racial equity into the work I do. How about these:
- Work with stories about justice and relationship from the communities that are most affected by the work.
- Have members of those communities tell the stories, distill the teachings and create the principles that can be used to evaluate the means of social change work.
- Include storytellers and wisdom keepers on the evaluation team to guide the work according to teh principles.
- Create containers and spaces for people of privilege to be stretched and challenged to stay in the work despite discomfort, unfamiliarity and uncertainty. As my friend Tuesday Ryan-Hart says, “relationship is the result.”
I’ll stop there for now and invite you to digest this thinking. If you are willing to offer feedback on this, I’m willing to hear it.
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We were working with a local government client last week in a meeting that had a very contentious subject matter focused on the return of land and uses of that land, to First Nations owners. There was an important conversation as a part of this work that involved removing a structure that had some historical significance to the community but was seen as a mark of an oppressive history by the First Nations owners who could not contemplate it remaining on their land. It is a wickedly complicated issue right at the heart of what reconciliation really means: returning land, transferring ownership and working with history.
Our client did an incredible job of preparing multiple stakeholders to participate in this discussion, by meeting each group personally and hearing their thoughts on the situation. All the stakeholders, twenty in total, agreed to come to a two hour dialogue to discuss the issues at hand. Our client put together a beautiful 8 page booklet with much of the technical information in it about proposals and process and sharing some of the things they had heard in the pre-meetings. The format of the day included a presentation from the First Nations about what they were proposing and why, with most of the meeting involving a World Cafe for dialogue.
It went well. We received a couple of really powerful pieces of positive feedback.
These kinds of conversations are the sharp edge of the reconciliation wedge. It is one thing to conduct a brief territorial acknowledgement at the beginning of a meeting or event, it is entirely another for people to sit down and discuss the issues around the return of land.
In debriefing with our client this week, she made the following observations about what contributed to the usefulness of the container for this conversation:
- Very small groups – no more than four at a table – meant that there was no need for people to “take their best shot” as they would have in a larger plenary format. Groups smaller than five reduce the performative nature of conversation and allow dialogue to fully unfold. This enabled people who needed to invest a lot of emotional energy and attention in their speaking and listening, to operate in a more relaxed way.
- The questions for the dialogue were very broad. Sometimes the most powerful question is “what are you thinking and feeling about what you just heard?” This question kicked off 45 minutes of intense learning, listening and story telling at the tables.
- The invitation process is everything. We helped our client design an invitation process but she took the lead in going to each group separately and talking to them about why they were needed in the conversation.
- There were no observers. Everyone in the room was at a table except for me and our graphic recorder. Everyone at a table had a question they needed answered or a curiosity about the outcome. there was no certainty in the room, no positionality, and yet, each person spoke about their own experience and their own perspective and listened carefully to what others said. Also, everyone in the room had to stretch their perspectives to participate. This was not comfortable for anyone, because this work isn’t comfortable for anyone. It is literally unsettling.
- The First Nations leadership pulled no punches in explaining their reasons for their proposal and why it was important that the structure be removed from their lands. This can be a very tricky thing because while it is important for non-indigenous stakeholders to hear First Nations perspectives, there is a tremendous amount of emotional labour involved in talking about traumatizing history. We had one of our own team prepared to talk about the history and emotional legacy of the structure. She had interviewed people from her community and was well positioned to share the rationale but on the day we didn’t need to her to tell the story as the leadership were willing to tell that story themselves. Enabling this to happen well is important.
Reconciliation is nothing without the return of the lands or the influence over the lands which we acknowledge as “unceded territory.” What stops people from going much further than territorial acknowledgement is the fear of being unsettled in the conversation. But we can’t do this work without holding containers that allow for people to be unsettled. Only that way to we share perspectives and find possibilities and to do so in small, deep conversations where stories can be shared, perspectives understood and . Or sometimes not. But the path to reconciliation requires us to try, and these few notes and observations might help in that.