Two good friends of mine, Roq Gareau who works for the Canadian Border Services Agency and Orlando Pioche who works for the Indian Health Service in Shiprock, NM. Men doing serious work who work together as deep friends.
From Wendel Berry:
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health.
It heals with grace.It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no ear hears it except in fragments.
Sent out to all my friends, especially Steven, Kathryn, Tenneson and Beverley, with whom I did some good work this week. And to those good friends I will be working with this coming week in Phoenix at the Good Food Gathering – Toke, Monica, Tim, Phil and Tuesday.
Working with friends is perhaps the wisest thing one can do in pursuing larcge scale change. Only with the ears and hearts of friends tuned to one another’s needs can we hear more of the wholeness of the music that only comes to us in fragments.
I’m in some big work these days, whether it is in the child and family services system here in British Columbia, or hosting a 500 person World Cafe and Open Space at the Good Food Gathering to help the good food movement find it’s way with renewed leadership and vigour. None of this is remotley possible alone. I am working with close friends.
While it may be true that one person can make a difference in the world, I believe that the difference one person makes is choosing to work with others. We have long since exited the age of heros, and I wonder if we were ever in that age.
I once sat with Tenneson Woolf on a beach on my home island and we gazed across the Strait of Georgia. We talked about how huge everything is, how small we are in relation to the vast world. And we asked this question: if we are born of this world, knowing deeply the scale in which we live in relation to everything else, why do we feel like we can make an impact? What put that impulse there? We are the only creatures that entertain the delusion that we can shift things, and yet, we persist. AND, it’s true, to the extent that we can even shift the climate of our home world. There is almost a drive to do it.
There is nothing around you right now that is not the result of a group of people working together. No structure, no machine, no community, no idea exists because one person thought of it. Everything is born in relationship, and to the extent that our relationships are filled with quality, the work we do will be filled with quality. I choose first of all to work with friends, and from there to find the work that we can do together. When we attend to this quality of relationship, everything else becomes possible. Nothing around you has ever emerged otherwise.
So thank you to my friends who make it possible for me to satisfy my personal version of the human drive to make an impact. Together, as we tune to one another and reach into possibility, we can find the holy chords of that fragmented music, and sing.
From Nancy White, a brilliant video of Tom Sparough juggling cigar boxes and talking about courage. And from Jon Husband, with whom I had a lovely conversation today related to my 30 day learning journey, an mp3 from Ben Zander about possibility.
An important post, observation and question from George Por: How well can collective self-reflexivity scale?
For conversations that matter to grow into communities of practice and social systems at increasing scale, they have to be able to absorb the increased complexity involved with those systems. What does it depend on whether a community or a network of communities is capable to do that? One of the factors seems to be the trust and appreciation that flow among the participants in the conversation, besides their capacity for double loop learning in real-time, on the spot”
Part of the challenge of working with shift in systems is finding the time to create the containers in which this trust and appreciation can flow. It takes time, and it’s not always time that is seen as productive time. Most people that are paying me to facilitate a meeting for them have definite outcomes that they want to see. Often they want more than can be acheived in the short period of time they assign (how many conferences are scheduled for three days but everyone leaves at lunch on day three?) Building trust and appreciation is real work and it requires a real committment of time.
The cost of this came clear in work with a recent client. We are working on something which could result in a major public policy shift in a contentious field with many diverse and irreconcilable stakeholders. What they are discovering is the closer they get to implementing the policy changes they are working on, the more people retreat into old and unhelpful patterns. What is absolutely needed in this context is a retreat of all of the major stakeholders to create a container to build trust and appreciation. Without a collaborative process, the initiative they have designed will fail.
And yet, such a retreat is so far from their usual practice that it seems like they can’t see it at all. For me, I see clearly what needs to happen, but there is only so much I can SAY, only so much I can TELL them. In my work with them we tried to create some conversational process but I felt we fell short in creating any kind of relationship that can hold the complexity of what they are trying to do.
So this is the scope of my challenge. I’m now wondering if I should even take on these kinds of facilitation gigs. I’m not sure that the reification of old patterns in cases like this actually helps, and in fact it may well hinder efforts to move to the shift everyone wants.
Hey reader(s). Wondering if you would join me in a little exercise…
A few months ago I was sitting with Christina Baldwin in a World Cafe on the question of “What question, if asked, would change everything?” and we realized that the answer for us was something like “What would it take for you to be curious?”
That question is powerful because a curious person is a non-judgemental person. A curious person is a learner, not a passive participant in the cultural stream. If people practiced not only asking questions, but being curious about the answers I think that would change everything.
Last month, I was in Ontario with a friend of mine and he asked “what are your goals? What would I see if I talked to you in six months?” I told him that I don’t have any goals, but instead I run these little research projects. I get curious about things and start noticing them in my life and work and I usually use a combination of this blog and a moleskine journal to record my results. It keeps me moving forward.
So, I’d like to invite you to try this approach out and see if there is something that gathers your attention and piques your curiosity enough that you’d be willing to engage in a a somewhat public 30 day research project. For myself, I am looking at the question of how to be of service in large scale change work from the perspective of someone who has limited contact and influence. As a facilitator, I come into processes, but often I am not involved in a day to day role. So how do I help encourage shift where I can?
I’m going to be thinking and reflecting over the next 30 days on this question and I invite you to choose a question and engage in a research project as well. See what we can learn. Everything I post here will be tagged “Shift”.
You in?
(PS…two sources to get me started…Debra Meyerson on Tempered Radicals from last year’s Pegasus Conference and a site on patterns for introducing new ideas into organizations)
Photo by jurvetson
Being a Canadian means watching US politics like most people watch major sporting events. You admire the players, ooo and ahh at the spectacular moves they make, but ultimately you know you will never have a chance to play. It’s all entertainment.
Except that it isn’t. The President of the United States is often styled as the “leader of the free world” which is true in some ways, although the leader the rest of us in the “free world” might choose for ourselves is very often not the ones Americans choose for us. So, in case any of my many American friends and colleagues are curious about the opinions of those of us who have to live with whoever you elect, here is my most concise redux on Barak Obama.
Obama matters because he is inviting us to see the world differently. He is bucking the trend of western society by offering hope instead of hate, by challenging us to be better rather than to be afraid, but encouraging responsibility rather than dependancy. And if we needed any further evidence of that, along comes his masterful speech of yesterday in which he addressed the real life racism and divisiveness that plagues American society and rests just beneath the surface.
The world right now is about segmenting everything – market share, demographics, political polarities. In the corporate world, we are subjected to team building exercises that using various typologies to label what kind of thing everybody else is. We are not seeing each other clearly. Prejudice, be it economic, racial, demographic or whatever, fuels everything. Companies and campaigns reach out to different groups in different ways to get them to buy into the same thing, leaving people divided, bitter and suspicious about the “other” even as we all end up drinking Coke.
If Obama is doing anything – inviting anything – he is inviting us to rise above the ways in which we have been segmented, and the ways in which we segment ourselves and find partners, collaborators, creative sources of tension and cohesion by USING the diversity that exists everywhere. Diversity and multiculturalism in the America I know currently holds that country back. It is exploited for gain, whether political, social or economic. Obama is calling for it instead to take the country forward, and as a citizen of America’s closest neighbour, I applaud that call and hope it resonates in November.
I think Obama is raising the stakes with the magnificent speech. If his campaign dies because his message is destroyed by the very things he is calling out, it will represent a Pyrrhic victory for the the winner, be it Clinton or McCain. Whoever defeats that message of hope and cohesion will have inherited a country which glimpsed the light of possibility and lowered the shades against it.
So I invite my American friends to think about the kind of leadership that is being offered in this moment and imagine what it will mean not only for your country but for the rest of the world as well. If I was voting, I’d throw it to Obama. To the extent that any of these three candidates can, he has the best chance to really help things shift. That shift, as I see it, can only be a good thing for America and the rest of the world.