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Category Archives "Football"

Playing on the big stage

January 31, 2023 By Football 3 Comments

Our gaffer Will Cromack moments after we won the League 1 BC Championship in August

Today I’m travelling from Vancouver to Columbus Ohio via Chicago to resume an annual trip to that city I did for many years before the pandemic. My friend Phill Cass invites me to discuss complexity with physicians in the Physicians Leadership Academy he has been running for nearly a decade now. I love the trip because I get to catch up with my Columbus friends, to try some new ideas out in person and to stop over in Ontario and visit family on the way back.

On the plane today, the TV is showing me endless panel presentations about American sports. There are three or four people talking in an animated way – sometimes laughing, sometimes faking outrage and anger – discussing American football issues like “Can the Eagles defensive line be breached?” and “What happens now that Brock Purdy is injured?”

I don’t follow the NFL, but what these conversations point out is how the American sports scene is so closed and the news cycle so short that these tiny tiny issues pass for life shattering existential questions. The conversation mostly revolves around players being traded between teams in the same league on a revolving carousel of talent, equalized by a draft that brings the most promising players to the worst teams every year and on and on it goes. Always the same opposition, the victors being the team that best used the available lego pieces that season.

One of the things I love about following soccer is that every team is a part of a global competition. Within most countries there are layers of competition and the boundaries between leagues are porous. You assemble a team of good players and good talent and you embark on an adventure every season. Win your league and you get promoted to the next level to try your hand against the better opposition. Lose and you are relegated to a level that befits your current level of play, and that drives the hunger to “go back up” next season. Promotion and relegation battles are stuff of legend and except for teams securely in the middle of the pack at year’s end, the competition is fierce throughout the league becasue there are rewards for success and consequences for failure.

Even in the closed leagues of North America, there is still the chance of something different if you win. The little club I co-own, TSS Rovers FC won the men’s division of our semi-pro League 1 BC last season and that qualifies us to play in the Canadian Championship in which all the professional teams based in Canada plus the winners of the three semi-pro leagues in Ontario, Quebec and BC play in a knockout tournament for the Voyageurs Cup. Today is the draw for the tournament and we will shortly find out which pro team we will play in the first round. It’s a dream come true for our 350 owners, our supporters and our players.

The winner of this tournament earns a berth in the CONCACAF Champions League, in which the top teams from North and Central America and the Caribbean face off against each other for continental supremacy. The winner of THAT competition plays in the Club World Cup against the winners of all the other continental Champions Leagues. So yes, our little TSS Rovers team is about ten victories away from facing the likes of Real Madrid.

Our chances my be slim, but there is real excitement around the fact that we are actually on this journey. We will play an opponent that we have never met before, from outside our league, in a tournament that is a meaningful part of the global sport landscape. Even in Canada where our leagues lack promotion and relegation, this situation is strange to those who follow the closed circuits of the NBA, NFL, NHL or Major League Baseball.

Much is made in the UK of the “romance of the Cup” referring to the fact that in a single game knockout tournament little teams like ours can effect a giant killing against bigger and better opposition. It happened in Scotland last week when a little team of amateurs called Darvel FC beat top flight Aberdeen, a club six divisions above them in the Scottish football pyramid. Instead of endlessly cycling through the same teams year after year, the integrated nature of the global football world refreshes and renews passion and hope and support.

The draw for our opposition is tonight at 5:00pm Pacific Time. We will find out then who our opponents are in the first step of our journey toward the FIFA Club World Cup. And our little band of pirates will be ready for the journey, mindful of the history we are making, and excited for the chance to try ourselves on the big stage.

Leadership enables gifts to make meaning

January 10, 2023 By Art of Hosting, Community, Featured, Football, Invitation, Leadership, Organization, Philanthropy 2 Comments

A box of donuts that Joanna Vervoza-Dolezal, the starting centre back for TSS Rovers, brought for the Swanguardians on the last game of the season. Reciprocity in support.

Yesterday I had an informal call with a person who is leading up customer relationships for a large local company. The company is both a profit-making venture but also is a community institution and has a profile and responsibility beyond just the bottom line. We were talking about how the organization was stuck and the different approaches that the organization was taking towards customer relations when we stumbled onto an untapped area that may help to get the organization unstuck.

For organizations with double or triple bottom lines, the moment your focus moves beyond a financial return on investment, your customers and clients stop becoming ATMs and start becoming friends. Yes. Friends. The lines between your organizational life and the community become blurred. Social license becomes a reality, and that means that customers suddenly make decisions out of love and loyalty to the bigger vision which they can help co-create. They become non-material investors and shareholders in what you are doing. Your sustainability does not solely rely on making a profit. It relies on how those people that buy your services AND how they help shape and co-create your mission.

Where we got to in this conversation was that the organization needed to find ways to allow customers and clients to offer something back. Rather than going out and catering to their needs constantly and trying traditional marketing methods of giving the illusion of being a part of something, customers and clients of the organization need to have a chance to be meaningfully involved. In fact there are probably at present lots of people who are trying to give back and be involved but haven’t been seen because the organization has no way to receive their gifts. This is a real shift for how this organization has grown to see its customers. As the connection to social license fades away, customers increasingly get seen as people to be catered to, responded to and served. On the surface that seems a noble customer relations strategy, but when challenges are met, there are very few people with a meaningful investment in the organization to help repair it and set it back on track. Customers can just walk away at any time. And if you have customers who have bought into the social bottom line but you are only chasing the dollar, those ones will feel the lack of reciprocity first. When they leave its hard to get them back.

Why? Because people want to give. They want to be a part of something. They want to do something meaningful with their lives, their time and their money. We love a good product, but we also crave being a part of making it. Witness the way Apple for example has created a Distinguished Educator network. This is a way that educators in schools who love Apple products can help create new applications for these products in their schools. These folks are often cutting edge front-line teachers who are exploring pedagogy and using technology in a way that supports good learning theory. They are no longer customers. They are helping the company grow its brand, for sure, by working with schools but they also helping Apple find new ways to use their technology in service of education and learning.

As the Chair of the Board of Rivendell, a non-profit spiritual retreat centre, we’ve been exploring this angle through fundraising. We are an organization that has been generously supported by a Foundation throughout our whole existence and we have decided that we want to start doing fundraising not because we need financial resources, but because we want to create a different relationship with the community of people who love and support us and for whom our organization has made a deep impact in their lives. None of us on the Board are skilled at fundraising, and for all of us the prospect of doing it is terrifying. So we decided to learn together. We worked with a friend of mine who specializes in fundraising in these kinds of situations and he said his job is not parting people from their money but rather “helping people with money them heal by giving them a way to make meaning.”

Heal from what? Partly from a world that has completely commodified us either as a customer or as a unit of productivity. I think humans have a deep need to give and to be a part of something, but those of us who live in capitalist market-based societies are primarily valued as transactions. Everything we do is tracked for the benefit of dominating our attention and ultimately our wallets. But when I am offered an opportunity to provide a gift of time or money because it enters me into reciprocity and relationship, suddenly my life has the meaning I have been seeking. It is truly healing to give a gift and have that gift received.

To refuse an authentic gift is dehumanizing to both the giver and the receiver. Over time, losing the opportunities to provide gifts causes us to lose touch with what fundamentally makes community.

You cannot build communities around transactions. If your organization has a social bottom line at all and your entire customer relations strategy is transactional, I reckon you will always fail on this score. I think many companies who start out with a social bottom line leave it behind if they can’t figure out how to do it and revert to the single financial bottom line. That is enabled with customer management systems and managers who are trained in this type of work. Through our Art of Participatory Leadership training, we seek to teach leadership practices that enable social sustainability through enabling contribution. I’d love to know if folks are seeing this meaningfully taught in MBA programs or inside other institutional management and business programs.

The sustainability of an enterprise with an implicit or explicit community mandate rests in the ability of the enterprise to create spaces for people to give and co-create. That leads to co-ownership which can be material – like with our TSS Rovers FC community-ownership model – or more intangible, like the feeling of connection people have to helping create a space for spiritual renewal at our Rivendell retreat centre. Our sustainability depends on financial security and community. TSS Rovers FC needs to make a profit to survive, but we cannot do that without a community of people investing their time and talent over the long term to create an organization that is about developing humans, whether on or off the pitch. We encourage folks to offer what they can to the enterprise with two principles:

  1. Assume your talents are needed and;
  2. Proceed until apprehended.

The result at Rovers is that we have a happy patchwork of folks who offer expertise, enthusiasm, money and sometimes just an extra body to move things around. We even have a tradition of our players helping to set up the stadium and prepare the supporters section before they begin their warm up routines. We try to provide opportunities for everyone to experience gifting, because that is fundamental to the game of football anyway. Giving, receiving, offering space and time, and enabling your team mates to succeed is what secure victory on a football pitch and so we try to bring that ethos into our lives off the field too. That is how we go from being a successful football club to being a place that makes better humans and builds community whether you come to a match, in cleats, boots, shoes, sandals or bare feet.

Think about that. In the place where you are involved as a formal or informal leader, how are you enabling people to give? How are you receiving and holding the gifts and intentions of those in your orbit who are already giving to you? How are you enabling reciprocity to build community and sustainability?

What’s in the Parking Lot #4

December 31, 2022 By Being, Democracy, Featured, Football, Links, Music, Uncategorized 2 Comments

As the year comes to a close, I think I have struck a nice balance with Mastodon. It really is a platform much better suited to micro-blogging than twitter ever was. It provides enough characters to properly comment on one link, and invites conversation. And so I THINK I will be mostly posting links from my daily reading there and summing them up here. So enjoy these gems I have found over the past few weeks. You can follow me there at @chriscorrigan@mstdn.ca.

  1. A little summary of some teaching I did earlier this year with Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier
  2. The Yard Sale game and why extreme wealth inequality is inevitable without intervention: Why the Super Rich are Inevitable.
  3. An interesting read about possible futures of Northern Ireland: How realistic is the doomsday scenario?
  4. A deep dive into four seasons of photos of TSS Rovers FC courtesy of our supporters’ group, The Swanguardians.
  5. If you have never discovered The Marginalian (formerly “Brain Pickings”) then you are in for a treat. If you are home with your kids this week, you will need this particular entry: How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself: A Timely Vintage Field Guide to Self-Reliant Play and Joyful Solitude
  6. Rating the best Colorado beaver dams of 2022: The Best Dam Year End List
  7. The Sky Don’t Have No Roof: The last Ornette Coleman interview
  8. William Shatner on his experience of the overview effect and how it changes you. I can relate, not from travelling to space (I wish!) but from working across many different organizations and sectors. Life lives in relationships.
  9. A reflection on how co-operatives might be the way forward for Medicare, as they were at the outset.
  10. The first Romantics. An engaging long read about the cultural effect of an 18th century German university town and its creation of Romanticism.

That is plenty for now. And so I leave you with this blessing which I wrote and put into a rare Facebook post along with the above photo:

When the mist rises up off the sea
After a day of rain and wind
And you lift your eyes into the falling darkness 
With a sigh on your breath
And weary in your heart 
May your eyes catch the sun 
That finds its way down the valley 
Creeps across the ridges
Filters through the trees 
And lifts the fog from the bottomlands
And fills it with diaphanous tendrils of beauty. 


May the light shine through for you in 2023.

End of year reflections

December 24, 2022 By Art of Hosting, Being, Bowen, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Football, Leadership, Learning, Music, Practice, Stories, Travel 10 Comments

Smelhmelhélch (Passage Island) at the mouth of Átl’ka7tsem (Howe Sound) before the snows came earlier this week.

Some notes on 2023 while I have a moment to review them.

The year began with the death of my father and is ending with worries about the serious and lingering health issues of other senior family members and so in a lot of ways this year has been split between personal grief during the first part of the year, and the waiting, supporting and attending in the second part of the year. Several times during the year, I haven’t found myself at my best. And that’s added on top of the persistent and low level background radiation that comes from the feeling that the world is slowly coming apart on this part of the planet and we are collectively ill-equipped to deal with it.

It hasn’t left me pessimistic, but I have noticed that I’m sad at what we have lost, which most of all appears to be the collective capacity to DO SOMETHING about the long term prospects for our planet and the community of living things that occupy it. as irrational as that thought is, because truthfully, it has been that way for my whole life, nevertheless, there is a feeling of loss. I’ve always described myself as an optimist because I believe that there is always something better we can do or embody, but the general prognosis needs power and wealth to radically change directions, and increasingly, I’m not confident that will happen. And so we push on.

Work

My work is changing, and has done throughout the pandemic. In the past I did much more face to face and one off facilitation work and delivered teaching through Art of Hosting workshops, for which I travelled the world. As I get older, I am more interested in teaching and supporting younger facilitators and so there is much more teaching now and one-to-one coaching and we are also taking work that is larger in scope than facilitating single meetings, in which we are focused on longer term support for leaders and organizations who want to be more participatory and more engaged with meaningful work. I like this as it means we develop longer term relationships with a few clients and are able to see the results of our work together over time. Additionally most of this work continues to be online, which suits me well as I have become more of a homebody and more introverted in the last three years. I do love face to face work, but as I get older I find it much more tiring, and I appreciate the ability to deliver quality content to folks and then turn off my computer and go to the garden or play guitar for an hour.

In 2023 I will turn 55 and I have a strong commitment that on my 55 birthday we will begin the process to scaling back and only working four days a week. We have been planning on this for a while, and I’m really looking forward to this shift. I feel like I need it for all kinds of reasons. In my calendar starting June 13, every Friday for the rest of my life has a recurring event that says “Fridays off for the rest of my life.”

This year Harvest Moon which consists of Caitlin Frost and myself along with our stellar assistant Laura O’Neil, had 27 clients. Many of these were larger projects working within large organizations and involving a lot of teaching and capacity building to support leadership and organizational change. We do this with a set of tools and practices that include participatory facilitation methods from Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development approaches, Participatory Narrative Inquiry, complexity work and personal practices for rigorous inquiry on limiting beliefs. This year we packaged these into bespoke programs in complexity focused participatory leadership for the Executive levels and senior leadership of a major university, a Crown corporation, an Indigenous government, a national labour union and one or two smaller organizations. We embedded several three day Art of Hosting/Art of Participatory Leadership workshops in these settings, and also used our course material we have been developing around complexity and personal leadership practices to complement the strategic conversations that we hosted. We have written four extensive workbooks for these programs and this might well turn into something more formal in the years ahead.

We amplified all of this work with story collections primarily using NarraFirma to gather stories and PNI to design sense-making and strategic interventions. This last capacity has become key to our work now and I have now run upwards of 30 story collection and sense-making projects through NarraFirma since the pandemic began. Although we have become really good at working with this material online, this work is most powerful in person, and it is one of the things I am looking forward to doing more face to face.

Partners

Over the past year we have worked with many partners and it is my usual practice to name them. They live in five different countries (Canada, USA, Netherlands, Moldova and Australia) and working with them makes it possible for all of us to do amazing work together. My gratitude to them all.

  • Harvest Moon partners Caitlin Frost and Laura O’Neil
  • Tatiana Glad
  • Meribeth Deen
  • Bhav Patel
  • Kris Archie
  • Kelly Foxcroft Poirier
  • Tiaré Jung
  • Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen at Beehive Productions
  • Phill Cass
  • Ciaran Camman
  • Amanda Fenton
  • Quin Buck
  • Corrina Keeling
  • Jodi Sanford
  • Kinwa Bluesky
  • Chad Foulks
  • Geoff Brown
  • Teresa Posakony.

Teaching

This year I offered several open enrolment courses with colleagues.

Learning

In addition to everything I learned from teaching these courses I also enrolled in two important programs myself to deepen my own practice.

  • Weaving It In: Making evaluation part of your work. This was an inaugural offering from my close colleague Ciaran Camman and combined their decades of evaluation experience with solid complexity and participatory practice. A nice combination of theory and practice and experiential learning.
  • Co-Resolve introduction to Deep Democracy with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson. After about 20 years of Sera challenging me to become friends with conflict, I finally came to study with her and this was a great course. The biggest shift in me is seeing how my conflict-averse tendencies have shifted from conflict resolution to what I’m calling “conflict preservation.”
  • This next year I have signed up for Cynthia Kurtz’s deep dive into Participatory Narrative Inquiry which is a 20 week long practicum during which my colleague Augusto Cuginotti and I will be running a PNI project with a client. I haven’t done any learning like this at this sort of scale since University. I’m looking forward to it.

Living on the web

My first website was a collaborative writing project with my old friend Chris Heald called Stereotype back in 1995. It was a proto-blog in the style of suck.com, which even 25 years later is a remarkable documentation of the shift of life from physical to online. So I’ve lived through a lot of iterations of web life. This past year I started a long wean away from the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter and began writing again on my blog with more frequency. I started a Mastodon account and have used that as an opportunity to rethink how I have compartmentalized my life online to suit various audiences. For the most part I have maintained a professional kind of look here and on my @chriscorrigan twitter account and I have devoted hours and hours of time to soccer life through my @salishsea86 twitter account. That is all changing slowly. I maintain some twitter accounts for the supporters group of the soccer team I co-own, but otherwise, I think everything will eventually be centralized back here with micro-posts on Mastodon. I will republish links to these posts through Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter as usual.

I’m slightly looking at LinkedIn again as there is some interesting professional content there that used to be published on blogs, but as much as possible I am integrating interesting content into my feeds at NetNewsWire. That is where I will be doing most of my reading, as the endless scroll of twitter and facebook are no long giving much value and Instagram is useless for my life, other than keeping up with our footballers who are half my age who only post there!

Avocations

This year has had three big commitments outside of family and work. As a founding member of the TSS Rovers Supporters’ Trust, I have spent the year selling shares to 351 co-owners of Canada’s first community-owned semi-pro soccer team. We have done some remarkable things this year including winning a League Cup on the men’s side and qualifying us for Canada’s national championship, the Voyageurs Cup, which is, mindbogglingly, the pathway to the FIFA Club World Cup. We will play a meaningful match in the first round of that competition in April against a Canadian Premier League professional team and the only thing better than actually getting this far would be effecting a giant killing in April. It has bee a remarkable journey all it’s own.

Another responsibility that I have devoted myself too is chairing the Board of the Rivendell retreat centre, a contemplative centre on Bowen Island. We have come through a pandemic and stayed afloat and are now beginning to engage in active fundraising for our longer term sustainability. This role is part of the way I live out my contemplative spiritual practice alongside a commitment to leading worship once a month at our little United Church on Bowen Island. I love that job. It helps us to afford our part time Minister and I get to dive deep into topics and scripture readings that are close to my heart. Perhaps I’ll post my sermon notes here in the new year if that’s of interest to you.

Music is my love and my third commitment. I have been singing with a renaissance choir doing medieval liturgical music and madrigals and studying jazz guitar on my own. My guitar teacher sadly died in April, and I miss him dearly. We had only a few lessons this year as he grew sicker. Learning jazz alone with only you tube videos and fake books is incredibly hard but incredibly rewarding and I’m hoping this year I might be able to study with another teacher and finally get a chance to play with folks.

Life on an island

I have lived on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) now for 21 years and seen many changes over that time. I have blogged about living here for most of that time. These days we are facing a huge population turnover and some rapid growth which has introduced lots of new folks to the place and radically changed the culture. Community events are returning which is essential if we are to repair the cohesion as a community that has been lost through the pandemic. I feel that we are fragmented in many ways, and we are being confronted with some very challenging situations including a ferry system that is crumbling under global staffing shortages, strains on our little island infrastructure, economic pressures from living in one of the most expensive places on earth with no level of government committed to radical change, tourism pressures and mindset that sees the places increasingly as an under served and under resourced suburb rather than a rural community. These changes have been steadily occurring over the past number of decades but social media and a lack of face to face contact has made them more pressing.

In the natural world, the big news is the tremendous numbers of humpback whales and orcas that have returned to our seas, and there are almost daily sightings of these mega-fauna. Ten years ago that was unimaginable. While that is happening, we have also witnessed some extreme weather, including long hot droughts in the summer which are the biggest threats to the place. Things change here and being grounded in place means that one can be a long-eyed witness of it all.

So that is the state of play on Christmas Eve 2023. At the end of a year in which I was not at my best, after three years of living in a strange new world, entering the half way point of my 50s. Thank you for sharing this year with me. Say hi. I hope we can cross paths next year.

How we have hidden women’s soccer from Canadians

November 27, 2022 By Featured, Football

Christine Sinclair, photo by Ray Terrill, CC AT-SA 2.0

I have been loving watching Canada back in the men’s World Cup for the first time since 1986. And while this has been going on on social media and in the broadcasts, a number of people have been insisting that we remember that this is the Men’s World Cup and that Canada has been long known as a dominant force in international soccer on the women’s side. There are two FIFA run World Cups for senior teams. And it’s mind boggling how invisible our achievements on the global stage have been because of the neglect of women’s soccer in Canada.

I’m a bit salty about this, because our women’s team has been AMAZING. Here are some interesting facts.

  • The Canadian National Women’s team is often referred to on social media as the “CanXNT” because we have a non-binary trans player, Quinn, who became the first trans athlete to win a gold medal last year when we won the Olympics.
  • The top scorer in world soccer of any gender is Christine Sinclair who has scored 190 goals in 310 performances for Canada. She eclipsed American Abby Wambach last year and has played and scored in five World Cups one of only three players ever to do that (the others being Marta and Ronaldo). Next year, she will likely play in, and hopefully score in, her sixth.
  • International women’s soccer in North and Central American and the Caribbean (the CONCACAF Confederation) is generally played in tournament settings, often all in one place,and hardly ever in Canada. THis is unlike men’s soccer where qualifying and Nations League games are played home and away. So despite appearing 310 times for Canada since 2000, Sinclair has only ever appeared in 13 competitive games on Canadian soil for Canada and the last time was seven and half years ago at the 2015 World Cup. The greatest international soccer goalscorer of all time has not played a competitive match in her own country since 2015. Just friendlies.
  • The USA has played 63 competitive matches at home during that same time.
  • And that isn’t just international matches too. Sinclair currently plays for the Portland Thorns and hasn’t played for a Canadian club team since she left the Vancouver Whitecaps in 2008.
  • And even if she wanted too, she couldn’t play a competitive club match in Canada because Canada does not have a domestic women’s soccer league. Of all the countries appearing in the 2023 women’s World Cup, Canada will be the only one without a national women’s league, and this is despite the fact that Canada hosted the 2015 Women’s World Cup, an event which usually results in the establishment of professional infrastructure. We have had seven years of not much happening. Well, we did finally start a men’s professional league in Canada, the Canadian Premier League. Yes our domestic men’s soccer league was only started in 2019, despite some failed attempts earlier in the century.
  • The highest level of women’s soccer is currently one of three regional semi-professional summer leagues in Ontario, Quebec and BC federated in League 1 Canada. League 1 BC features nine teams including TSS Rovers, the supporter-owned club I have written about before. We go into the World Cup behind in our development to Zambia, Vietnam, Nigeria, Morocco, and every other European, Asian, South and Central American country who has qualified.
  • I THINK we will be the only team at the 2023 World Cup that has no players playing domestically for their country. All of our national team players play professionally abroad, in the USA and Europe.

People are excited to start talking about Canada as a finally arriving as a soccer country, and while lots has happened to get us to this point, we cannot make that claim. Not while we have the greatest goal scoring in international history only playing a handful of friendly matches at home. We will be the last country in the world at the 2023 World Cup to be without a league.

This largely falls at the feet of the Canadian Soccer Association, but I’m not going to list all the ways that the CSA has screwed this up. Suffice to say that the best accomplishments of a generation of Canadian global sport personalities have been hidden, squandered, and wasted. We have built no legacy and every year, even as we propo up the illusion with an appearance in a World Cup here or there, with a big name signing to a European juggernaut here or there, we fall behind the rest of the world because we coasted on the talents of a century-level player whose achievements were lauded, but whose appeals for a legacy fell upon deaf ears.

My involvement with TSS Rovers is a small way that I can be a part of investing in the sustainability of long term development of soccer talent in Canada. As the saying goes, the best time to have done this was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. So let’s enjoy the Morocco game on Thursday and look forward to the Women’s World Cup in July and maybe, just maybe, we’ll get around to taking the “We’re a Soccer Country!” idea seriously.