Sts’úkwi7 is the generic name for salmon in Skwxwú7mesh, and in our second module in the Mi tel’nexw leadership program, Lloyd Attig offered practical grounding in his teachings on the medicine wheel as a way of exploring balance.
My home island is a rock rising out of the fjord that makes up the southern half of Skwxwú7mesh Temíxw. We have a few lakes here and creeks that swell in the fall when the rains return and fill the sea with fresh water infused with the taste of our island. Salmon, who have been living their lives in the Pacific ocean for 2, 3, or 4 years since they hatched in these creeks are able to discern the taste of their home stream in the great mix of waters that fills the Salish Sea. They use all of their senses to find their way home at all costs where they spawn and then die, for their life cycle begins and ends in the same stream, and a powerful drive returns them to their source.
Because of this symmetry in their life cycles, the faithfulness of their return to their places of origin, and their crucial role in the ecology of the Pacific coast, salmon are deeply important animals in both traditional and settler cultures here. They are powerful symbols of active balance and they are essential to the health of coastal forests. Up to 30% of the nitrogen used by the giant trees of our temperate rainforests originates in the ocean and is carried to every part of the land through the capillary network of salmon coming home to spawn and die. In this sense they literally connect land and sea, trees and ocean, erasing the boundaries, mixing nutrients and diversifying the health and wellbeing of the entire ecosystem.
Lloyd Attig, used the salmon as his inspiration to lead us through a series of exercises based on the medicine wheel, to examine interconnection and balance in our own lives. Leadership of all kinds demands that we place ourselves in challenging positions where we are likely to be knocked around, knocked off balance and create damaging dynamics for ourselves and others. I know Lloyd is an accomplished boxer, and so his sense of balance and grounding is born of years of experience in the ring. Tip off balance and the moment you are pushed, you collapse and fall.
For Plains Cree people, and many other indigenous cultures the medicine wheel is a powerful symbol of balance and renewal, just as the salmon is here. Breaking the wholeness of the world into four quadrants, it gives meaning and coherence to the stages of life, the seasons of the year, and the interdependence of the human faculties of spiritual, mental, emotional and physical well being. In our course last week Lloyd led us through an exercise to look at how balanced our every day lives are. Working with the mundane – fine granularity and plenty of examples – helps to reveal patterns of behaviour that indicate where to place our attention to address a current imbalance. This kind of inventory is helpful not as a one time thing, but in an ongoing way, reflection within a framework to see where the attention needs to be.
But the medicine wheel is not simply a tool for personal self-development. Individuals are not solo practitioners in a world without influence. We are embedded in high and higher levels of organization, teams, families, circles of friends, organizations, communities, nations. And we are also embedded in time too, as products of everything we have inherited and living ancestors to the thousands of generations yet to come. For me, practicing the balance and interconnection of salmon is to place oneself in relation to everything upon which I am dependant and which, even in some small way, is dependant on me.
Pacific salmon really are amazing creatures because they embody this teaching so perfectly. All five species that make our coast home exhibit the same circular life cycle of hatching in freshwater, growing and travelling over thousands of kilometres during their short span and then fiercely making their way back to the very gravel bed where they were hatched. Their entire life cycle is in service of the next generation, and becasue they die right after spawning, they never meet their young and never pass on knowledge or guidance. As we say, salmon are born orphans and die childless and yet the cycle of life continues over generations.
As individuals, salmon do everything in their power to grow strong and healthy while they are at sea. Some species, like sockeye, stop eating once they return to freshwater, meaning that they face an upstream journey of sometimes hundreds of kilometres against an autumn freshet with only the fat and muscle in their bodies to power them. Their singular drive and commitment to return assures the survival of their line. When they die, their bodies decay in the river and become food for the tiny creatures upon which their offspring will feast, or are carried away by animals into the forest to feed to soil and provide fresh sources of nitrogen and minerals to the hungry trees of the temperate rainforest.
In terms of a model for living balance and interconnection, there is no better standard than the pacific salmon. Tools like Lloyd’s medicine wheel give us gateways through which we can explore this deep relationship our own self has to all the systems in which we are embedded. Leadership which is in the service of life, at a minimum, requires this perspective and practice.
I live in Squamish traditional territory, Skwxwú7mesh Temíxw, and I have spent the last 19 years of my residency here as an uninvited guest trying to learn a little about the land and sea, and the traditional teachings that have found a home here for tens of thousands of years.
This month I have joined dozens of others in taking a course from my friend Ta7táliya and her family and friends called Mi tel’nexw which in Squamish means “figure it out.” It’s a leadership course that is rooted in Squamish ways of knowing and being (you can join anytime at that link.)
Our first class was last week, listening to the teachings of Skwetsimeltxw, who spoke about Squamish history and teaching from the perspective of sp’ákw’us, the eagle. As part of the course, we are invited to articulate takeaways and giveaways, naming the gifts received and how we will offer gifts as a result. This cycle of reciprocity is essential.
So here are a couple of takeaways and giveaways that are sitting with me.
Everything starts with the land. As obvious as this one seems, it’s important to remember. I take away from this insight the idea that when doesn’t know what to do, stop and see where you are, what is the land or sea saying about this. It is the ultimate source of everything. The other day I was up at Rivendell Retreat Centre, where I am a Board member, and we were talking about the gardens and outdoor space there. People come to Rivendell from all over the world to experience contemplative practice through silence, hospitality, simplicity and prayer. The practice of simplicity invites us into a powerful, open and basic relationship with the natural world, and my friend and I were discussing how we could make the gardens of Rivendell embody the hosting that the land does so that visitors to our centre could practice outside of our beautiful rooms and sanctuary, attuned to the blessing of the natural world. This territory begs to be loved through every expression of the land and the sea and so my giveaway is to put that lens back on the land at Rivendell and to work with folks to help us help spiritual seekers find the simplicity in that teaching.
Ceremony strengthens you so you can stay positive. My takeaway here is how important practice is. Ceremony that ties me to the land and to the community, brings me into a relationship with the natural world, the supernatural world and community in a way that makes me accountable for the way I spend my time in this life. Skwetsimeltxw shared a teaching of revered Squamish Elder Louis Miranda: “Don’t be afraid of death – we are only here camping for a short time. Don’t waste a day while you are here.” Ceremony gives us names, helps us over the transition of life’s markers, through grieving and loss, through celebration and abundance. Daily practices helps us to live well so that we can take care of what we have. My giveaway is to a practice that shares the beauty and goodness of my life and to this end I have deleted my social media apps from my phone to manage my energy and attention.
Take care of the things in your temporary possession. Squamish culture, like most west coast traditional cultures, is heavily based on property and ownership. The myth that indigenous people don’t have concepts of land ownership is patently false everywhere. Here on the west coast where potlatching is the governance system, all of the property of the nation – including land and places, stories, names, responsibilities, and resources – are placed in the care of someone. The laws and the rules are very strict because care for these fundamental things is essential to the survival of a people. (and yes removing these systems is a form of genocide, set on destroying a people through banning potlatching and ceremony, and stealing these possessions). Skwetsimeltxw said that when a person is given a name, it is not theirs to own but theirs to carry for a while and “polish during your life.” The takeaway for me is a teaching about stewardship and how we are to care for the things that come into our possession. For me this means that names I have like “Art of Hosting steward” confer responsibility to ensure that when I no longer carry that title, it has been made better for those who pick it up. My giveaway is to examine the various names and identities I carry – Board member, Bowen Islander (Nexwlélexwm uxwimíuxw), settler, Canadian, father, husband, facilitator, – and to live them in a way that people encountering these identities in others – especially in those I teach, train and raise – will recognize them as honourable. It is my work to transform an identity like “Canadian” conferred by my birth into this colonial land, or to try to live up to the high standards of a word like “father” that has been given to me by my dad and children.
“Prayers and love, once they are put down, stay where they are put.” This is a direct quote from Skwetsimeltxw and it refers to how Squamish people, living in this territory for tens of thousands of years, have prayed and loved every inch of it from time immemorial. The love and prayers of every ancestor lie upon the rocks and mountains and waterways here and my takeaway is that this land is soaked in blessings. Everywhere you walk or sit is a place that has been stewarded since the beginning of time with care and affection and deep spiritual connection. My giveaway is gratitude and an attuned sense of this sacredness. When Skwetsimeltxw uttered this sentence, I felt a complete and overwhelming sense of gratitude for the fact that I live in a place that is literally covered in love and prayer. Open to the sacred appreciatiation of the stewards and owners of this territory, inspired to attune myself ever deeper to what is really here.
It’s my birthday on Saturday. Join me in donating to:
- Ta7talíya Michelle Nahanee’s work on Decolonizing Practices
- Teara Fraser’s work to fly essential services and goods to indigenous communities during the pandemic
On Saturday it is my 52nd birthday. It seems to be a feature of getting older that birthdays and other gift-giving holidays become less about the stuff and more about the relationships.
For this birthday, I’d like to invite any of my readers, friends, and colleagues to join me in donating funds to two local indigenous women who are doing powerful work for others. We can gift to them and through them to support a better world. For my birthday this year, I’m donating $200 to each of their initiatives and I invite you to join me and give what you can. In these times, and perhaps always, the work of indigenous women is critical to support.
One of the gifts I receive all the time is the gift of living in Squamish territory on a little island called Nexwlélexwem (Bowen Island) in the Squamish language. I am grateful to live here and grateful to have so many friends and colleagues from the Squamish Nation who have schooled me on the cultural landscape that surrounds me.
The word “Chenchénstway” is a Squamish word meaning “to lift each other up” and it’s a key value in Squamish life. It is one of the values that permeate the landscape where I live and it’s the core of the work of one of my friends, Ta7talíya (Michelle Nahanee), who has assembled a powerful collection of teaching and practices in the service of decolonization. Her work is opening eyes and building capacity and she holds it with the energy of a matriarch. Donating to Michelle’s work helps her to develop new resources and grow the impact of her work. You can learn more about her work and offer a donation at the Decolonizing Practices website. You can also sign up for a 4-week online program there, so consider that too.
The other woman I’m donating to this year is Teara Fraser. Teara is a pilot and an entrepreneur who is single-mindedly focused on indigenous women’s leadership development, including her own. She created the first indigenous-women owned airline, Iskwew Air, which flies out of Vancouver. During the pandemic, along with the Indigenous LIFT Collective, she has been raising funds to fly essential goods and services to remote indigenous communities along our coast.
I’ll be donating to that initiative this year too and hope you will join me in supporting this work.
I’m grateful to be living and working on Squamish land, and deeply grateful for the work these two women do in the world.
I’m in trouble. In the best way. So get ready for a long and rambling post about geeky dialogic philosophy and complexity practice.
I’m a little bit known in some communities as a person that is writing and working with the notion of “container” in dialogic organization development. The word and concept itself comes from a lineage of thinking about the spaces inside which dialogue takes place, and there is certainly lots written about that. I think I first learned the term from the work of William Isaacs whose classic work, “Dialogue,” is a seminal reference in this field. He describes a dialogic container as the “sum of assumpitions, shared intentions, and beliefs of a group.”
While that was the first place I learned of the concept of container in dialogue, my learning about it was also informed by reading about complexity science, and especially learning about dissipative structures and autopoiesis, two key concepts in self-organization in living systems. Furthermore, I learned of the notion of sacred space in both Christianity and indigenous ceremonies, especially the Midewiwin, to which I was exposed in my University years. Finally, my thinking about container with respect to complexity has been heavily influenced by both Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang‘s work, as they have explored how these concepts and dynamics from the natural sciences show up in human systems. In this context, Dave’s work on enabling and governing constraints is incredibly useful and Glenda’s broad palette of tools helps us to illuminate and work with containers.
So that is a brief survey of where my understanding has come from. I find the concept incredibly helpful in understanding the dynamics of self-organizing systems and it helps us to find places to intervene in a complex system with a rigorous approach to explore and change the patterns of self-organization and emergence.
So I use the word “container” with a very specific meaning, but it’s not a meaning that is shared by everyone and it definitely not a meaning shared by folks who have a history of being contained. Occasionally I get scolded for using the word, and I own that. We must be VERY thoughtful about language in this work so this is a long post where I think about the implications of this troublesome word which is used to describe a useful concept badly.
The word and concept are useful in understanding and describing dialogic practice. But it has some SERIOUS baggage because in contexts of oppression and colonization the history of colonization, enclosure, and imprisonment is entirely the history of containing people; on reserves, in jails, in schools, in groups defined by race and marked by lines, in ghettoized neighbourhoods, in a million places in which people are contained, enclosed and deprived of their agency and freedom to create and maintain boundaries.
In these contexts, the word “container” is often heard as a reference to places that are created by people with the power to contain others, and very often they contain people who have a lesser amount of power to change or free themselves from that container.
It is true and important to note that any discussion about how to manage dialogic spaces – containers – is entirely dependant on the power one has to create and influence the boundaries, and manage the connections and exchanges. Creating a dialogic container is an act of privilege. Using the word “container” will almost always trigger a negative reaction in people that have been SUBJECTED to containment, against their wills, against the interests, and in the service of depriving them of power.
Liberation movements all over the world in all moments of history are about creating alternative spaces to the oppressive culture and conditions of the present. These are expressed in all kinds of ways. In land reform movements, for example, colonized lands are recovered and returned to their original owners. In movements to free people from enclosed and coercive spaces like exploitative labour, prisons, residential schools, oppressive child welfare practices, or human trafficking, alternative spaces are built for equality, justice, freedom, learning, self-actualization and growth. And the metaphor and reality extends to spaces where people change the language to talk about their conditions and create spaces where conversation, dialogue, and organizing can happen in a way that draws a line between the oppressive practices of the past and the liberating spaces of the future. Socially constructed narratives can provide alternative stories that begin to link, connect, and differentiate people in a way that helps them organize their conditions of freedom.
So one major problem with this troublesome word is how it works in English. The word “contain” can be brutal, because in English it is a transitive verb that is not continuous, meaning that it implies an action conducted upon a object and then arriving at a resting place, where the object is contained and the action is done. That is a troubling truth of the word “container” and partially explains why it rests so uncomfortably on a dialogic practice that is intended to create spaces of generatively, creativity and life. It objectifies the object of it’s action and it acts upon that object to bring about a final conclusion. There is a lot buried in the particular grammatical function of the word. There is no room in the English definition of the word for self-organization and emergence.
Truthfully, the space required for dialogic practice needs a type of verb that doesn’t come so easily to English: a collectively transitive verb that is generative, continuous, and describes something that changes in its use. I suspect, having been a poor student of Anishinaabemowin and a bit of Skwxwu7mesh snichim, that there are maybe such verb forms in these languages. In my long study of the Tao te Ching, I’ve come to understand the concept of “yin” to be this: the form that life takes, in which creative energy is contained so it can do it’s work. It is created and changed in its interdependent relationship to what happens within it, like the way a river bed both holds the river and gives water its form of “river” instead of “lake” and is changed by the river being in it. It implies “receptivity” to creative energy. In Japanese where there is a sophisticated vocabulary for these kinds of spaces, “ma” (?) might be the word I’m looking for: a word that my friend Yurie Makihara defines this way: “Ma is the time concept expressing the time between something and other thing. We say how to create Ma is really important to encourage you to speak or “it’s kind of nice to have this kind of Ma.” For me Ma is the word to include some special sense to say, so we don’t use it just to express the time and the place.” Even though Yurie’s English is quite good, it’s clear that translating this into English is nearly impossible! But I think you get a sense that Ma is a collective sense about the shared time and space relationships that create a moment in which something is possible. Ma describes that moment, in a spatial way.
So. As is often the case, I’m left with the hidden poverty of English to give me a word that serves as both verb and noun and that is highly process-dependant. Over the years folks have suggested words like “nest” “hearth” and “field” to describe it. These are good, but in some ways they are also just softer rebranding of the word “container” to imply a more life-filled space. The terms still don’t ask the question of who gets to create, own and maintain the container nor do they fully capture the beauty and generativity of a complex adaptive structure in which meaning-making, relationship, healing, planning, dreaming both occur and act to transform the place in which they occur.
If we cast our eyes about the culture a bit wider, they quickly land on the word “space.” We use the word “space” a lot in social change circles, but it has its own troublesome incompleteness. The problem with “space” is that it often tends to turn attention towards what is between us and away from the boundary that separates us from others. This can be the way in which creating space for social change can fall victim to an unarticulated shadow: inclusion always implies a boundary between what is included and what is not included. Many social change initiatives falter on an unresourceful encounter with the exclusion that is implied by radical inclusion. A healthy social system can speak as clearly and lovingly about this boundary as it can about the relationship within the system. And for me this is the important part of talking about dialogic practice. So I can understand the helpful neutrality of the term “space” because it can be a result of a tight and impermeable boundary or it can simply be what we give our attention too as we come into relationship around attractors like identities, ideas, purposes, or needs. It can beautifully describe the nature of the “spaces in between.” But it still doesn’t do enough for me to describe the relationship between the spaces and the forces – or constraints – in the system that give rise to a space and enable self-organization and life. Still, it’s a pretty good word.
So perhaps what is needed is a true artistic view of the problem, to look away from the problem and towards the negative space that defines it. That is indeed what I have started doing in my work, by focusing more on the factors that influence self-organization and emergence and less on naming the structure that is created as a result of those factors. This is a critical skill in working with complexity as a strategist, facilitator, manager, and evaluator. These constraints include the interdependent work of the attractors and the boundaries which help us create a “space” for sensemaking and action, whether dialogic action or something else. There is a place where you are either in or out, and there can be a transition zone that is quite fluid and interesting. There is also an attractor at play, which can be a shared purpose, a goal, a shared identity, a shared rhythm or something interesting and strange and emergent that brings us into relationship. Anywhere you find yourself, in any social space, you can probably identify the attractors, the boundaries and perhaps even the nature of the liminal space between completely in and completely out.
This brings us back to the power conversation, rather more helpfully I think. If we let go of the “container” and focus instead on the factors that shape it, we can talk about power right upfront. Attractors and boundaries are VERY POWERFUL. They are created by power and maintained and enforced by power and the negotiation about their nature – more or less stable, more or less influential, more or less permeable and mutable – is by definition a negotiation about power. As a facilitator one carries a tremendous amount of power into the design of dialogic spaces. The most energetic resistance I have ever received in my work is always around the choices I made and the nature of the attractors and boundaries I am working with. I have been told I am too controlling, or not controlling enough. I have been told that we aren’t asking the right question (“who are you to say what we should be talking about?”). I have been removed from my role because what I was doing was far too disruptive to the group’s culture and norms of how they work, and in enforcing the disruption, I was actually depriving people of accessing the power they needed in the work.
(See the stories from Hawaii here and here and this story from Nunavik. Being an outsider with this power is perilous work.)
So yes, the terms we use to describe dialogic spaces matter. Finding a word to describe these spaces is important, and this is an important piece of critical pedagogy for anyone teaching dialogue and facilitation.
But don’t let your work rest on the definition of the space. Understand where these spaces come from. Actively work to invite more self-organization and emergence into these spaces that are in service of life, love and liberation. Become skillful at working with boundaries and attractors, limits and invitations, constraints that enable life rather than govern outcomes, and get good at knowing what kinds of relationships and constraints are the best fit for what is needed. That is what we need as we co-create spaces of radical participation and liberation and to transform the toxic use of power and control so we get more and more skillful at inviting us all into life-affirming moments and futures.
What do you think?
One of my mantras that helps keep me focused when I’m designing a process is “I’m not planning a meeting, I’m planning a harvest.” This helps me focus on need and purpose and helps me choose or create processes that make good use of our time together.
Facilitators can be guilty of the sin of falling in love with their methods and tools. Especially when we learn a new thing, we are desperate to try it out, sharing our zeal for this fresh thing we’ve discovered. In my own experience, many times that results in the meeting being about my needs and not the needs of the group. If I design a session based solely on the method – even if it is ostensibly in services of outcomes – I can find myself suffering from intentional unawareness and missing what the group wants or needs.
Because I am a process geek and love my tools and methods, I have found it necessary to disrupt the tendency to suggest a structure before fully fleshing out what is needed. This is why I organized the planning tool I use, the chaordic stepping stones, in a way that saves final decisions about structure until the very end of the planning process.
While it is essential to start the design with need and purpose, equally important is having a strong sense of the outputs, or the harvest of a process. In participatory work, outputs are not merely the tangible record and artifacts of the meeting. They are also intangible. Another design principle I use is “leave more community than you found” which demands that whatever we are doing, we build relationships and social connections in a group as much as possible and at the very least do no harm to social relationships. Building relationships is essential if the outputs of group work are to be sustained after the meeting is over.
Keeping these principles straight is aided by this handy framework I helped develop years ago, inspired by Ken Wilber’s integral theory. It recognizes that every meeting produces outputs that are both tangible and intangible, as well as individual and collective.
Harvesting and Collective Sensemaking
Tangible collective outputs include meeting artifacts, such as data, reports, visible shared purpose, decisions action plans, structure and organization, and records of the event. Intangible collective outputs include social relationships, collective learning, and social cohesion.
Tangible individual outputs can be skills, personal takeaways, a clear personal workplan, or a knowledge of one’s role and responsibilities. Intangible individual outputs can include belonging, encouragement, clarity of purpose, enjoyment, and a sense of purpose.
All facilitators spend time working on the tangible collective outputs of a meeting, but sometimes we give the other three quadrants short shrift. If we don’t pay attention to these things, especially the intangible outputs, we can often create good artifacts but at the expense of relationships or trust. How many times have you been a part of the process where the facilitator delivered on the work, but everyone felt worse afterwards? Harvesting needs to be reciprocal, not extractive.
I use this framework by asking my clients to choose two or three desired outputs in each quadrant. These are things we want to happen as a result of the meeting and they become constraints for choosing our tools and designing a flow for the process.
Recently I helped design a meeting process for the First Nations Technology Council to invite First Nations social development managers to come together and work on an investment strategy to improve the use of technology in their work of providing income assistance to individuals in their communities. It would be easy to make this an extractive consultation, but my client was clear that we needed to build community between these people, encourage learning and peer coaching and ensure that going forward the work was supported and stewarded by the participants themselves..
When I came on to the project, we had a good draft agenda that was tailored towards getting information from the participants to include in an investment strategy being prepared for the federal government. But in checking against the intended intangible outputs, we realized that the process was too dependant on the facilitator and presentations from the front of the room. We made some significant changes to build more community, more peer support, and more ownership of the work. These included:
- Changing an environmental scan to a world cafe in which participants shared their stories about their work and the way they were able to provide services in spite of the technological challenges they faced.
- Moving from a sterile user profile process to a peer process in which participants interviewed each other on the steps that each manager goes through in meeting, processing and reporting on income assistance. We made a process timeline and participants coded their work to show where they used technology, where frustration existed in the system and where the process was bottlenecked. These became key points for the investment strategy.
- Instead of the FNTC writing the strategy themselves, each of the five consultations will appoint two participants to be a part of a sense-making group whose job is to review the work of the entire process and design the investment strategy alongside the Technology Council. This group of ten will convene to produce the final product, and hopefully deliver it to Ottawa, preserving the voice of participants in the work.
The meeting took participants by surprise and many were thrilled to be engaged in a participatory way and have their knowledge honoured. Because these people don’t often get a chance to meeting others in the same job, they were hungry for network building and sharing solutions with each other. Supporting this community will be an important part of the work going forward.
Focusing on the harvest in all of its aspects helps to create a set of enabling constraints that helps me to be a better process designer and provide a better overall experience for participants. Give the tool a try and let me know how it changes your practice.