My friend Robert Oetjen was a key member of our hosting team at Altmoisa. He brings a lovely capacity to the work, being the head of an environmental learning centre in southern Estonia, he understands the deep connection between human and world, and is a practitioner of the most ancient arts of human kind: tracking and fire building. He is a man who is a beautiful learner from his environment. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, he moved here in the early 1990s as a Peace Corps worker, teaching English in the days in which Estonia was hungry to claim it’s relationship to the west. But like all good improvisers, he allowed the climate to change him, and he began deeply intimate with Estonian culture and language, married and Estonian woman and moved into becoming a steward of Estonian natural places. He speaks the language fluently and beautifully and Estonians, who are normally wary of outsiders, embrace him and respect him, and always forget that he wasn’t born of this land. I can imagine, after being here for only a week, how it must have happened that he became so quickly embraced here. The land and the people are reserved but when they open to you and you open to them, the embrace is deep and multi-layered.
Robert brought this consciousness to the beginning of our third day, leading us in a check in exercise on the land that taught so many things on so many levels. We simply stood for a while in the cold gloom of an early Estonian autumn morning. The air was very still, but an occasional light breeze reminded one that one still has bones. Robert invited us to first of all become aware of the extent of our vision, noticing how wide it extended on either side of us, and how high and low a soft gaze can perceive. From there we closed our eyes and let our ears open to the subtle soundscape around us. For me this was wonderful because this is my morning practice at home. here the soundscape is similar, but the sounds are totally different. Many birds were quietly moving in the trees and shrubs around us, among them bullfinches, bushtits, creepers and hooded crows. A raven called far away and a dog barked softly across the fields. Deepening into this sense of place, Robert invited us to smell the mud, and the leaves on the ground, the apples that had fallen from nearby trees and were slowly decaying, turning sweet and pungent on the ground. Our senses fully awakened, Robert then taught us how to walk again.
One foot softly in front of the other, gaze open, like a hunter becoming aware of every sound and movement around us. Each foot develops eyes of its own, feel its way on the land, so sensitive to what is underfoot that it’s is possible to walk without making a sound . You become a part of the landscape, joining it completely, becoming enmeshed within it, so that everything that happens happens WITH you rather than as a RESULT of you being there. This is a huge and important teaching about harvesting. As you learn to walk in this way – Robert called it “foxwalking” – you become a little quicker, a little more sure footed, you are able to move deliberately and yet not disturb anything around you. It was a powerful way to experience hosting and being hosted, joining the field and harvesting in the moment, becoming fully present.
And it was just the first of two morning acts. Following a walk on the land in this way, Robert invited us inside and proceeded to make a fire, using his tools of a fireboard, a firestick, a bow, a handhold and some dry moss tinder. He gave a beautiful teaching about the archetypal elements of this practice, the fundamental unity of male and female with the firestick and fireboard, the notch that allows dust to come into the space that is created by the friction to birth the spark, the notch is the womb and the spark emerges from the union, the bow that turns the stick through the four directions, gathering the energy of the circle to create powerful life. Such a rich practice, such a beautiful fundamental teaching about application. It continued to resonate through our final day. As I left Estonia this morning, Robert gifted me a set of these tools for my own, a deep invitation into practice and learning this ancient art, the first act of survival to build a fire out of nothing, and the primal act of community building. the spark begins the possibility of coming together.
The rest of the day flowed. Toke and I gave very simple teachings on application. I talked a little about the improv principle of “notice more and change less” speaking about the fact that what we had experienced is a more profound way to open to possibility than feeling that we need to change all the time. the world changes enough as it is. If we can simply stay still long enough in one place, everything we need will flow past, timing will present itself and pass away, the possibilities for action become expansive.
The group went into Open Space to work through their design questions for projects that they are deep within. We rolled and flowed and talked and drew and at the end of the day, ran a little intention grounding exercise that involved milling around and collecting questions on our next steps, and then we checked out with voices of appreciation and gratitude and an eager commitment to meet again in February when this cohort of learners will assemble for their final co-learning journey.
It has been a great pleasure to spend time with this group, to make many new friends who are cracking good work in Estonia, exploring the leading edges of participatory leadership in a country that is slowly coming back to life, and to remembering its deepest gifts and resources. Many stories, practices and inspiring thoughts are coming home with me, right into work with First Nations on the west coast of Vancouver who are reclaiming their own resources of cultural strength and the renewed use and management of the marine ecosystems on which they depend. My big learning is that the skills and practices of participatory leadership are all around us, deep in the ground of the cultural legacies we have inherited as humans on this planet. And when we can talk and learn and share between traditional indigenous peoples, we discover so many modalities that are from the same root.
Sad to be leaving, but happy to be coming home from four days of teaching, fuller than when I left.
This group we are working with in Estonia is cracking a lovely design for a six month learning journey around hosting, harvesting and participatory leadership. They began in September with a little Art of Hosting retreat, are together now in the Art of Participatory Leadership and in February they will gather one more time. In between workshops, they are working on projects in their organizations and communities, deep in real practice and real life. As a result they have much to share with one another and it is only up to Toke and I as teachers to offer a few bones and move out of the way so they can accelerate their learning.
These guys are not afraid to go deep with their work either. This morning we checked in by working with a little ritual. We had everyone go to sleep at the end of Day One with a pillow question: what do I need to let go off to take my work to the next level, and what do I need to embrace? When we began, each of us wrote down the thing we needed to let go of, and then we very carefully placed it in the fireplace. This is always a powerful ritual, and it was for me today too. Following that we wrote a note or two on what we need to embrace, and we joined another person to speak that aloud. The conclusion of those little dyads ended in an embrace of one kind or another: a handshake, a hug, a touch on the arm. It was about making connection and seeing each other in the vulnerability of opening to what we need to let come.
Toke and I offered a little teaching on the art of hosting and harvest conversations and the group released into a set of conversation about the applications of various methodologies. In many Art of Hosting trainings, we refer to this as a knowledge camp, or a knowledge cafe, where people dive deeper into a method or a design tool. Usually we have experienced practitioners host these conversations, but today the learners themselves hosted these conversations. The learning was deep, and each table (Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe, Circle and Powerful Questions) produced some insights which Toke and I riffed on a little. One thing that became clear was that in Estonian there is no word for “Purpose” at least not in the sense that we have been using it. It seems that it is usually translated as “goal” or “aim” and we have been struggling to understand that instead of a goal that lies outside of yourself, it is more like the inner engine that drives you forward. It has been fun playing with the translation of concepts finding that no one word seems to capture the concept, but many words will do!
After lunch, Open Space, and the participants dove into their projects and their questions, also very rich. We finished with a little check out and retired for dinner.
What happened next was astounding. We dined on salmon and carrot salad and rice, and beer and wine and “snaps” began to flow. Conversation was pleasant, but at one point one of our participants, Margus, rose to his feet and began to tell the story of his people. He is a Setu, a tribal indigenous group from southern Estonia, a people that have been in the way of Estonians, Russians and others for thousands of years. They have a tradition of every year electing a “king’s master” who is responsible for producing a type of vodka produced from rye. The drink is very strong and the tradition is that the one who carries it pours a glass for party goers and asks who you are and where you come from. Margus travelled the room offering shot after shot of the spirit, in a powerful and ritual way. That loosened up the voices of the Estonians who broke into song and we sang for hours afterwards. Song after song flowed around the table, folks songs, Eurovision songs, novelty drinking songs (one of which involved us standing on our chairs and singing a verse and then sitting under the table singing a verse!). We sang and told poems and played tunes until the wee hours. As some drifted off to bed, a group of us went down to the sauna and indulged in that Nordic ritual for the rest of the night, singing and drinking and sweating together. It was four in the morning by the time I finally got to bed.
This is the joy and pleasure of a field, of a shared culture, of a group of people who cling to their learning and to each other, and who can explore any territory together. It was a sweet, sweet day.
(Photos are here and the group has started a blog too.)
From Bernie DeKoven, funsmith: Four freedoms of play:
Scot Osterweil (MIT Comparative Media Studies, Education Arcade Project) has observed this truth: play has no agenda. Freedom is central to the experience of play. To understand the anatomy of play, Scot has identified four components that he calls the “four freedoms of play.” If these freedoms are not respected, the play experience is severely compromised or even ruined.
Freedom to Experiment
The player’s motivations are entirely intrinsic and personal. The process is open-ended.
Freedom to Fail
Losing is part of the process.
Freedom to Try on Different Identities
Players aren’t necessarily limited by their bodies or surrounding physical context.
Freedom of Effort
As described in Peter and Iona Opie’s classic ethnography of playground culture, children may scramble around in a game of tag, avoiding being caught for twenty minutes, and then suddenly stop and allow themselves to be tagged once they have reached a certain degree of effort or perhaps want to move on to another activity.
Useful rules for everything from setting up improv exercises to doing rapid prototyping of new ideas and products.
A Harvard business professor asks his students to think about elBulli, a fascinating restaurant near Barcelona
To eat at elBulli, customers must navigate a mysterious reservations system. If they are lucky enough to be one of the 8,000 who get a booking that year, they are then given a date and time to show up. Reaching elBulli’s coastal perch involves traveling to Barcelona, then negotiating two hours of narrow, twisting mountain roads. But then they enjoy a five-hour meal of thirty-some completely original, whimsical dishes prepared by Adrià and his team of thirty to forty cooks. The meal costs roughly 230 euros and represents hours of laborious research, testing, and preparation. In addition to engaging a diner’s five senses, Adrià and his team hope to evoke irony, humor, and even childhood memories with their creations…
Norton asks students to consider the operations and marketing of elBulli. There is much about the restaurant that is inefficient, as MBAs are quick to note: Adrià should lower his staff numbers, use cheaper ingredients, improve his supply chain, and increase the restaurant’s hours of operation. But “fixing” elBulli turns it into just another restaurant, says Norton: “The things that make it inefficient are part of what makes it so valuable to people…”
Because Adrià [the owner] doesn’t adhere to business norms, the elBulli case shows just how broad the spectrum for marketing a “product” can be–and that’s not a bad thing for MBAs to learn. “Marketing is a science, but it’s also an art,” Norton remarks.
“Adrià says he doesn’t listen to customers, yet his customers are some of the most satisfied in the world. That’s an interesting riddle to consider.”
First off, marketing IS NOT A SCIENCE. And art is not marketable, not in the traditional Business School sense anyway. The fact that Adria’s customers are content is not a surprise to anyone that understands how quality works. Norton’s comments strike as either disingenuous or naive.
So MBAs of the world, please look at what Adria is doing and think about what it really means, and use your prodigious talents and influence to fix the bland homogeneity of western consumer culture.
From How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic:
I was intrigued by this line from a new paper by John N. Ivan, Norman W. Garrick, and Gilbert Hanson titled “Designing Roads That Guide Drivers to Choose Safer Speeds”:
The aesthetics or “beauty” of a road environment has also been investigated in relation to traffic safety. Drottenborg (1999) studied the impact of speed on streets that appear as “beautiful” due to the blossoming of cherry trees along the streets in Lund during springtime, and similar streets that lack such beautification. She found that the free-flow mean speed decreased by about 5 percent and the number of vehicles traveling at high speeds between 50-60 km/h decreased by about 12 percent during the cherry blossom period.
One imagines a whole new sub-field of traffic engineering, with myriad questions: Do certain buildings or even architectural styles affect driver behavior? Can beautiful people literally “stop traffic”?
This is a lovely observation.
Lately I have been working as much as possible with graphic recorders who bring a level of beauty into a meeting that has a similar effect. When people work with graphic recorders, they approach the wall reflectively, take care to choose their words and make sure that what they are adding to the record is somehow commensurate with the aesthetic experience being captured.
People want more effective meetings and gatherings and I think a key way to get to effectiveness is to slow down. Slowing down can only happen in a physical environment where there is beauty that can catch our eye, catch ahold of the flow of conversations and cause little swirls and eddies that invite it to loop back on itself, become reflective and therefore effective.