I’m just coming home from a couple of days in Victoria where Caitlin and I were with colleagues Rebecca Ataya, Annemarie Travers, and Kelly Poirier. We spent two days working on what I can only call “polishing the core” of the Leadership 2020 program that we offer on behalf of the Federation of Community Social Service of BC. We have run this leadership program for 8 years now, putting around 400 people through a nine month intensive program of residential and applied learning. The program has built collaboration, trust, and connection between the Ministry of Children and Family Development, indigenous communities and organizations and people working in the social services sector.
The program has evolved with every one of the 13 cohorts that has come through. Our core team has changed and this new configuration is our latest version. We are playing with a new set of constraints and ideas as we take the core need and purpose of the program and discover other ways we can offer it to meet the demand in the sector for leadership training that strengthens resilience, creativity, and the ability to thrive in complexity.
When we arrived on Thursday morning to begin our work, we had no agenda on tap, but instead had a compelling need. We started talking and discovered the path as we went being very careful to harvest. Our insights emerged in very deliberate conversation. As skilled dialogue facilitators, we are also skilled dialogue practitioners and we have a refined practice of hosting and harvesting our own work. When we get in flow, it feels like ceremony. With attention to a practice, working this way is extremely productive. Here are a few principles that I observed in working this way:
- Tend to relationships. As we were both building a new team and developing new ideas and products for our work, the most important focus in on relationships. We always build in social time in our work, and enjoyed a nice dinner out at 10 acres bistro, an excellent local foods restaurant in Victoria.
- Nourish bodies and minds. Working like this is physically and mentally draining, and we are very careful to nourish each there when we are working. This meant good snacks (bananas, nuts, and chocolate), ample time for tea and coffee breaks, a lovely prepared lunch by Rebecca and physical breaks to walk, or maybe even dance to Beyonce songs a little!
- Don’t silo the conversation, but structure the harvest. Our conversation wandered from program content, to context, to history, to practicalities, to new ideas for structure. We were all over the map. But as we went, Caitlin made good use of our supply of post it notes and we harvested into the Chaordic Stepping Stone categories that we are using the structure the evolution of the program. Sometimes the best hosting is good harvesting, and Caitlin took on that role beautifully.
- Don’t control the outcome. It sounds almost absurd to think that we would have controlled the outcome. Pure dialogue is about following the energy of the conversation and seeing what emerges. There was no facilitation tool used beyond the ability to listen carefully and address the need and purpose of our work. We stumbled on many beautiful ideas over these past few days and we constantly look for ways to incorporate them in our work. This leadership program has the quality of a polished gem, reflecting years of attention to what is needed, and what is no longer needed.
- Stay with the flow until it doesn’t flow anymore. In Open Space we talk about the principle of “When it’s over it’s over” meaning that all creative work has a rhythm and flow to it. When the brains are no longer engaged and the mental and cognitive tiredness sets in, it’s time to stop. Two intense six hour days of work can produce tremendous results, but when the flow stops, there is no point forcing it. Wrap it up, make a date for some next steps and celebrate the work.
Working like this has the feeling of working with the simplest and most ancient way of talking about what to do. For tens of thousands of years, this is mostly how humans have talked about need and purpose in the world. Long before there were professional facilitators and methods for strategizing, decision making and evaluating, there was dialogue.
Sometimes all you need is a powerful need and purpose, solid relationships, a good way to listen, and time. When it takes on the feel of ceremony, you know you’re getting it right.
Another two friends died yesterday. They were well known men in our community and both part of the hosting world on our little Bowen Island, integral to providing experiences for visitors that allow us to provide well hosted learning experiences for people here. They didn’t always do it loudly, but they left legacies that are so important to what we are able to do here.
It has been a really strange few months with 9 deaths of people I know to various degrees; from close friends to intimate strangers. Two from suicide, one from a heart attack, the rest from cancer. Several “before their time.” It’s numbing. There are moments I’ve lost count of who has died since July.
I have been thinking lately – especially reflecting on the suicides – that perhaps my job might be to pick up the unclaimed portion of joy that my friends left in the world. It is a crazy world. There is suffering all around us and I understand the idea that “remaining normal in an insane world is insane.” Yet I feel strongly how life moves in me and through my friendships, and communities. I feel immense gratitude for fleeting moments and I realize that I am at times a fierce practitioner of play. Whether I’m playing soccer with my son in our local recreational league, playing music with my daughter and friends, creating workshops, supporting my local soccer teams by singing with hundreds in support of our players – I feel the intense surge of life that comes with the portion of joy that is left to me to claim.
These days I sing for Kay and Dan, the two Shannons, Kieran and Chris, Matthew and the three others (wow, I just remembered one more.) I sing and play for me, find sensemaking in a crazy world in the presence of connections with friends and strangers over the long cadence of lives intertwined or the fleeting moment of random encounters on the buses, sidewalks and trails.
Bernie de Koeven, a master practitioner of play, who himself is dying publically, shared this quote from a comment on his blog followed by his own reflection:
“Speaking of the very end, I recently read a modern classic, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. It explains culture (which I think includes play) as an outcome of this denial. In a sense then, we should not “be calm and carry on” to the very end, but arbitrarily, playfully, insistently dedicate ourselves to the never-ending. I think this is what many people mean by “love” and maybe what Bernie means by play.”
So we have on one side love and play; and on the other, the dead and dying; the somber and despairing. We mustn’t let ourselves get confused by any of these. Love and life, after all, are manifestations of each other. Love is the invitation to life. As is play. It’s all a matter of perspective, don’t you know. From this side, it’s all so obvious: love, play, life. Fear. Dread. Death.
You stand here. The rest there.
Feel the embrace.
So that’s where I am these days. I know the world is crazy right now. I know it’s hard to find the good in the news but you won’t find it there because the news asks you to be only a passive consumer of the world’s pain and joy. What we need to do is rise from our seats and participate in the world as fully as possible. Life is the ultimate infinite game. The joy we seek is located in the little interactions and small kindnesses initiated or received; in play.
My wish for all of us is that we can claim the portion of unclaimed joy that others have left for us, and especially those who rode who claimed more than their share of suffering and rode it to their their end. I know clearly what they want for us, those they loved and whom they left behind. It is to continue living.
I’m here, playing, hunting joy, embracing it when it comes. Not always finding it, but cultivating the eye that sees it in the small and subtle currents of living. And you’re there too, doing your thing, but now reading this and playing along, at least in this moment.
I’ve begun Stuart Kauffman’s latest book, which will be a little heavy summer reading, and he states his purpose very clearly in the preface:
“If no natural law suffices to describe the evolution of the biosphere, of technological evolution, of human history, what replaces it? In its place is a wondrous radical creativity without a supernatural Creator. Look out your window at the life teeming about you. All that has been going on is that the sun has been shining on the earth for some 5 billion years. Life is about 3.8 billion years old. The vast tangled bank of life, as Darwin phrased it, arose all on its own. This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative. So, too, are human history and human lives. This creativity is stunning, awesome, and worthy of reverence. One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures. Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know.” (from “Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion” by Stuart A. Kauffman)
For most of my carreer I have worked with complex systems. I am not an engineer or a planner. I have taken to calling myself a strategist and a host of strategic conversations. In other words, I use dialogue to help people with processes to make sense of the emergent complexity that they are dealing with. Enough sense that they can make decisions about what to do next.
The problem with complex problems though is this unknowability and unpredictability. This can create a kind of cognitive stress. We like to be in control, and to know what we are doing. Our image of competence is founded not only on our ability to take action in the present but to know what to do in the near future. The truth is of course that we cannot know what to do because the future is possibly surprising on a level of novelty that challenges everything we know. That seems to have been the lesson of 2016, anyway: we never really saw it coming.
Living with this uncertainty can elicit a kind of existential crises, and I speak from experience. One can become depressed and hopeless and despairing that one’s contributions are meaningless. I’m working through those feeling now in my own life and work (and not in any way fishing for validation). It is partly down to having inherited an excellent grounding in a rational world view that I find myself struggling for Kauffman’s imperative: that we must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world that we can never fully know.
I’m curious how many of you struggle with that, and realize that when the scales fall from your eyes, your attachment to reason becomes inadequate to face what life and work is handing to you. Our desire to be in control and competent blocks the surrender we need to fully enter into the promise of this creative and unfolding world. I’m working through it, but the promise of an emerging and ever creating world is a hard one to appreciate when my own mind desires a lock on certainty. How’s it go for you?
As Bronagh Gallagher and I have been musing about our offering on complexity, facilitation and social justice, we have been discussing the shift in activism from ideology to evolutionary. Ideological movements try to coalesce activities and people along a line towards a fixed end state. Evolutionary movements start with intentions, principles and move outward in multiple directions along vectors. They adjust and learn as they go, and they both respond to and change their context.
This nice post from Network Centered Advocacy capgtues what I’m talking about by first looking at how a lacrosse player’s artistry evolves in changing contexts and then concludes with these important paragraphs:
Being labeled a “movement” is a reflection of evolutionary status. One person or organization does not qualify as a movement, yet there is no set size of a movement. Movements are messy, complex and organic. The movement label is shorthand, an inclusive term of many independent leaders and supporters, their support structures, all that they can tap into, as well as their capacity to disagree as often as they align on work.
Movements are a reflection of self-directed, adaptive, resilient, self-sacrificing, supported and persistent initiatives to work on complex problems. There are no movement structures, but instead a movement is a mass migration of people, organizations, businesses and communities unified in common story, driving to shift culture, policy, behavior and norms. Successful movements build and transform the landscape as they progress providing a base for further progress. A quick scan of the first few pages of google news for” movements” produces a snapshot of the current movements that come to mind, including the movement against fracking, the climate change movement, the tea party movement, Occupy, #blacklivesmatter, the anti-austerity movement, the dump-Trump movement, the maker-movement, the LGBTQ movement–the list goes on.
A key evolution point in a movement’s trajectory is the transition away from any single point of failure, to be loosely structured and resilient enough to absorb setbacks. The agility and adaptive characteristics of movements are fueled not only by personal stakes, individualism, driven leadership, passion and local control, but also by unpredictable solidarity and a distributed organizing approach that resists centralization. The difference between an organization, coalition, centralized campaign and a genuine movement is the way each fuels smart local initiatives and the ways leaders align power.
Building a movement is actually more aptly perceived as unleashing a movement, creating new spaces that help the movement surge in wider, expansive and still supportive directions. As a movement gains organizing momentum, strategies shift to broadly unfold and push a wide set of actions that draw opposition thin rather than clustering and making defense easy. This distributed layout requires a shift in thinking and strategy.
The key thing to notice here is that culture is changed by evolving movements, not linear programs. Movements are not led TOWARDS a goal, but rather emanate from a set of connected and coherent stories, actions and intentions, and self-correct, fail and adapt as they go. This is true whether the venue of action is organizational or societal. Cultures are complex and require complexity to change them. Diving more into the examples given in the quote will give you more insight into how these movements have become a part of, and transformative agents within, the cultures they are aiming to change.
I remember when I worked in the federal government, one of my roles was acting as part of an internal facilitation team. This team was put together by a director in who had an interest in organizational development. This was back in the late 1990s and we didn’t really have in house OD units which was a blessing. Instead we had this team of people that were interested in systems thinking, development and facilitation and we were made available by our bosses to do work within the organization. I cut a lot of my hosting teeth in that context.
I remember that we once led a little informal experiment. We were finding that much of what we heard when we ran sessions in the organization was platitudes of a kind of aspired set of values and stories. But when you went on the road with people, especially senior people, you’d get the real stories. This is where anyone wanting to go into management was going to get their real mentorship training. My job involved a lot of travel so I heard a lot of these stories.
We called these “tie off” stories, because when senior managers travelled in the public service at that time, they used to take their ties off and just wear an open collar shirt and a blazer. (This seems to have become a mark of high status these days, but back then it was a kind of relaxing of protocol) When the tie came off the stories flowed. And travelling around remote British Columbia communities pre-World Wide Web and smartphone, means you get a lot of time kicking back in hotel bars and airports and avalanche detours. With no Netflix to watch, no mobiles to check and no email to get through, there was nothing left but storytelling. (By the way, I rarely learned anything deeply personal about people in these settings. Personal stories were strictly available only when your senior manager was completely casual. I learned early on that the uniforms of business are like the gels used in the theatre lighting to change the colour of the stage light: suits and jeans and ties filtered the person. People were always “authentic” but their uniforms constrained and shaped what was coming through.)
A small group of us resolved to spend a year listening to these stories and comparing them to stuff we heard in formal planning processes and at the end of a year we basically concluded that there were two different organizations: one that was a performance for the bean counters and the accountability police, all tidied up into reports, memos and budgets and the other which was a mess of story, rumour, gossip, cobbled together work-arounds, covered up failures and surprising results. When citizens wonder why government seems to be such a mess of bureaucratic boondoggle, saying one thing and doing another, they are noticing an actual phenomenon. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is that the second set of characteristics and stories is how things actually get done, but the first set is the story the public (and the Minister) wants to hear.
You cannot have innovative change without a mess. And very few organizations, especially it seems in the public sector, allow for mess making to happen. Whatever we learn, it has to be packaged up into something neat and simple, and preferably replicable. It bothers me to this day that citizens demand one without the other. I think citizens need to be a bit more grateful about the way public servants get things done in spite of the overwhelming demand to simplify processes and guarantee results in what is a massively complex job.