Here comes community!
I’m on a flight home to Vancouver from Ontario. It has been a mix of family and business on this trip. This past weekend I joined my colleagues Jennifer Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle for our third Reimagining Education Art of Hosting. Thirty-one people in total gathered at the Queens University Biological Station in Elgin Ontario on the most beautiful fall weekend. The leaves were bright yellow and a little red – more muted this year from drought than usual, but still beautiful. The water and air was warm enough for swimming and canoeing. And the skies offered us moments of crystal clarity during the night. The land was – as it always is – the first and final host.
While we were teaching the chaordic stepping stones yesterday, a very powerful conversation broke open in the group about invitation. In my practice the whole point of using the chaordic stepping stones is to slow down the conversation about process design to really name the shared urges necessity and purpose of a meeting. It is from this place that a quality invitation arises. And when a person is deeply and sincerely invited to a meeting, it makes all the difference for how they show up.
The conversation yesterday contained a thread of grief. Participants were sharing how painful it is to have to go through meeting after meeting in their day without any genuine invitation. Many meetings aren’t even necessary and, like weekly staff meetings sometimes, just occupy a regular hour every week on the calendar help with minimal intention. Because so many of these gatherings are on line now it is becoming common practice for participants to divide their attention between what is “mandatory” and what is more interesting or more pressing. My heart breaks when a participant in a meeting says hello and then turns of their camera, mutes their audio and never appears again. What a waste of their time.
This bleeds into community life too, and I was especially moved by one of our participants, an Elder who cares very deeply about her community, who witnesses public meetings, community gatherings and politics as being hurtful, disenfranchising and a place where people come and work out their own pain and trauma often in laterally violent ways. There is no healing, no restoration, no creativity, no sense of shared purpose and no call for people to offer something. The meetings are corrosive and toxic. We talked about the kinds of room set ups in meetings like that – rows of chairs, no one looking at one another, exchanges only between “the people at the front” and “the audience” as if citizens were actually a mix of paying customers and school children.
When this Elder was speaking, she was expressing the grief of this state of affairs. It occurred to me that this grief is everywhere. Very few of us in any public or community setting feel invited to community work. We might go along to a public information session. Or we might go along to a Council meeting and make a presentation. We might take part in a shouting match over a controversial decision or course of action. But I think many people are mourning the fact that we are never invited into active, creative community with one another. Some don’t even believe that is possible. “Oh a community meeting,” they will often say, folding their arms. “That’ll be…interesting.”
(As an aside, “that’ll be…interesting” is one of the most Canadian ways I know of saying “that whole thing is going to be a complete disaster.”)
Communities are full of talent and resources. How many times have you been asked to serve your community with what you know or what you do? Where are the opportunities for people to participate in community work that also builds community? At the very least, can we do this work together without poison relationships and eroding the promise of democratic and community participation.
The erosion of democracies, the professionalization of decision making and the capture of legislative bodies by huge commercial interests has been going on for my whole life. But when I look around my own home community – which has seen its fair share of divisive conflicts – I can see initiatives that were citizen-led that built things that we need. We now have a health centre on our island, a credit union, a recycling depot and second hand store, and playing fields for fast pitch, soccer and ultimate. We have preserved forest and coastline with the Nature Conservancy. We have institutions like the Arts Council and the Fabrc Arts Guild and the Nature Club and community choirs and the Legion and the Food Bank that all bring us closer together and weave our connection to one another and the place.
In small communities the chance for that kind of thing is higher because we know each other a little better and we can put our finger on the folks that can contribute, and ask them to show up. And we can do it in a way that invites the community to come along and be a part of something. Not every small community is this lucky. Some are in terrible moments of division and conflict that are violent, harmful and probably irreconcilable.
Peace and reconciliation at any scale is not possible without people being genuinely invited into it. The dehumanization of our world in conflict, at work, and in governance leaves us mourning for something that we may not ever have experienced: a genuine invitation to form and join a field of belonging that gives our lives meaning and connection.
I think this is why dialogic work is so important. Anywhere people gather is a chance to correct that tyranny of dehumanization that sees persons as cogs in the machine, to be counted, corralled, manipulated, avoided, lied to or disposed of. As Christina Baldwin has said, you treat a person differently once you know their story. You invite them, you get curious with them, you wonder what they have to offer and you might even make something together.
Here are four key insights from a conversation on designing good invitations for Open Space meetings. This is the real work of hosting self-organization. It’s not JUST about facilitation.
Some notes from three days of teaching a small cohort of leaders in the art of participatory leadership.
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When we teach the four fold practice of the art of hosting (also the art of participatory leadership) I’ve taken to doing it in a World Cafe. We use Cafe to essentially recreate the conditions that created the insights of the four fold practice 25 or so years ago. We invite people to tell stories of engaging and meaningful conversations they have experienced, look at these stories together for insights about what made them engaging and meaningful and provide and three pieces of advice to aspiring hosts and leaders about how to create engaging and meaningful conversations.
This not only helps a group discover the practice – which we teach only AFTER the World Cafe – but it also shows that the World Cafe is itself a powerful process for sharing stories, collective sensemaking and knowledge creation. In the context of our work this week, with academic researchers , leaders and administrators at a university, this can be a powerful experience as they experience first hand what it feels like to be hosted in what is essentially participatory research.
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Tennesson’s check in questions this morning featured a question that I love. “Who is a person for whom you are here this week?” I love a question like that. It focuses a learner for a moment on the fact that leadership development is not just personal development. It is learning you do to make the world a better place for others.
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Chaos and order and the Chaordic path is an important and basic introduction to complexity. It is the basic teaching that helps folks to see the polarity between ordered and unordered systems and how our work as hosts is essentially determining what move is required to bring a process into more or less order so that good work can be done. Complex facilitation, a term from the Cynefin world, is all about working with constraints, to loosen or tighten, to expand or contract, in order to create the conditions to catalyse actions or behaviours that take us in a preferred direction of travel. Its is about working with constraints to fashion a container that can become a place for emergence and then managing that emergence by harvesting, shaping, grounding or eliminating it.
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Personal work is critical for people working in complexity, or walking the Chaordic path. When confronting uncertainty and emergence, we run into reactions and emotions. Understanding the reactivity cycle and having a tool to create a subject-object shift that can first recognize the connection between the emotion and the situation and then examine that reaction helps to interrupt the cycle of rumination or fixation that can reinforce unhelpful patterns of behaviour which can make a person less resourceful in a space of uncertainty, leading to reactions like controlling, fleeing or tearing it all down.
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Adrenaline does not just create a flight/fight response. It can also induce freeze, appease, control, and comply response. None of these are helpful in leadership situations especially where there are triggering events like conflict, chaos, tough decisions, accountability and other issues on the line. Understanding the reactivity loop is the first step in shifting our responses. Working consciously with our patterns of reaction is how to disrupt those patterns and discover better ones. And it helps us stay more present and aware when we are in situations in which we are more likely to become reactive.
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My father in law Peter Frost, in his book Toxic Emotions at Work, worked from the premise that leadership creates pain. Decisions create lines and boundaries and good leaders make good decisions with an awareness of some of what will NOT happen while being committed to what will happen. This commitment to a core, once a decision is made, can free a leader up to handle the turbulence at the edge of the chosen path. There will always be those who disagree or dissent from a decision. There will sometimes be winners and losers, at subtle political levels as well as more obvious material levels. Taking the time to hear voices and build as much collaboration as possible before hand, and then working at managing the pain afterwards while committing to the decision is a really key skill. It’s never either or. It’s a dance. And the moment of a decision is a kind of madness, but some of the best leaders I have seen in action are able to do it this way.
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A half day spent on Chaordic design. There is nothing more indicative of the intention to create truly participatory meetings than the willingness to make design them collaboratively. As one young person once said to me about Open Space “I love this process because I know that whoever controls the agenda controls the meeting.” Collaborative design is fractal and can happen at all levels of an initiative. It can also be initiated at all levels of an initiative. My hypothesis is that the extent to which people will participate in a meeting is directly related to the extent to which they are connected to the necessity for and purpose of a meeting. Taking time to name these helps ensure high degrees of engagement. Literally, nothing about us without us.
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A good question that came after I taught the Chaordic stepping stones: “This seems like it would work in an egalitarian environment but what about when there are real issues of power?” Mapping the urgent necessity of the moment should surface that reality. Naming the people who need to be involved is an important moment to name who has the power to say “no” and shut this down. In my experience every new initiative has a window of opportunity and a sponsor who will keep it open for a while. Until they don’t. Knowing you have limited time is helpful to focus on what’s really important and WHO is really important to include and HOW.
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How is Open Space a leadership practice? The moment of posting and the hosting a conversation that matters is what does it. A person responds to a call and takes responsibility for something important. For calling a conversation that needs to be called. They write it up and stick it on the wall and then show up to host. In these simple acts are the hallmarks of participatory practice. Post and host. Take responsibility for what’s important.
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One of the features of things like Pro Action Cafe is the way the constraints some times force naive expertise to be present. Having four at every table means sometimes people don’t get their first choice of projects to work on. They might end up a table where they have no idea what’s happening. We always encourage them to participate anyway because these are where the oddball questions, the “dumb questions” and the new ideas come from. Never underestimate naive expertise. If you want some try to explain what you are doing at work to our 16 year old niece. You will instantly learn some new things.
Today, I was working with a client designing a one-day conference for their members. As always, my focus was on the chaordic stepping stones as a way to design, which defers decisions about structure, agenda and logistics until after we have focused the groundwork of the event.
Participatory events are not highly engaging without tapping into the group’s urgent necessity and a clear sense of purpose for the gathering. From that point, design becomes easier, and invitation becomes alive.
Today, we focused on necessity and purpose. I kicked us off by asking, “What is happening that makes this gathering important? What conversations are you expecting to have?” in this sense, the question places people at the centre of the participant experience. Immediately, they feel the emotions of the gathering and connect with the obvious sensations present in the current context. That helps them to find the language to invite others into a gathering that will address the energy of the current moment.
For the second exercise, I had them tightly constrain their purpose statements for the gathering. I asked them to give me one word describing the purpose of the gathering given the context conversation we just had. Each of the six people typed a single word into the chat and we went around and had each person describe what that word meant and how they saw us doing that at the conference.
This led to a set of really focused insights on what we should be doing and how, and it helped to flesh out some of the other stepping stones: the outputs, architecture of implementation and some of the preliminary structure.
As I considered this technique, I reflected on how I study jazz language. I love learning licks and phrases of melody that people use to express different things. On their own, licks are just the building blocks of bigger phrases of meaning (although some licks, like the Salt Peanuts lick, convey A LOT of information). But a lick opens up possibility. It suggests something else, it even recalls past experiences. It comes from what your fingers or voice has done before, what is natural, what is top of mind.
The point is that licks are small units of language that an improviser can use to expand upon. Starting small and simple is incredibly helpful. From a one or two-bar phrase, you can develop variations and different kinds of tension and release. Writers know this from the prompts that are used to stimulate creativity. No one gets activated staring at a blank page. But give me a prompt, and we’re off.
In our meeting today, starting from a one-word purpose helped develop a grounded rather than abstract purpose for the conference. After an hour and a half together, we had a lot of good material for an invitation, some ideas for how to be together and the stuff we would create together, and the beginnings of a structure. It was a lovely improv session.
A detail from the monastary at Mont St Michel in Normandy showing a person overwhelmed with ripening fruit. He’s probably rushing off to his next zoom meeting.
So much has changed since the pandemic began, and it is hard to notice what is happening now. I feel like my ability to perceive the major changes that have happened to us since March 2020 is diminished by the fact that there is very little art that has been made about our experience and very few public conversation about the bigger changes that have affected organizational and community life in places like North America and Europe. All I seem able to grasp are fragments of patterns. Because I work with all kinds of clients in all sorts of different sectors and locations and situations, I do find myself getting struck with similar patterns that seem to transcend these differences, and it makes me wonder a bit about what is creating these patterns.
One of those repeated patterns is “we don’t have time” or “I’m too busy.” The effect of this is that convening people together is becoming increasingly difficult. I used to do lots of three-day planning sessions or organizational retreats where folks would come together and relax in each other’s company and open up a space for dreaming and visioning and building relationships. It was not uncommon for three or four-day courses to take place. Between 2011 and 2019, When we ran the nine-month Leadership 2020 program for the BC Federation of Community Social Services, we began and ended with five-day residential retreats on Bowen Island. We had two-hour webinars every fortnight. While some organizations found it hard to give up that amount of time (10 days away from the office on professional development training in a year!), we nevertheless put nearly 400 people through that program. Nowadays, when we do similar programs, the most we can get are three-day in-person retreats, and usually only one throughout the time together.
This is costing us big time. I am working with organizations where folks are meeting constantly but only spending time together a couple of times a year. The pandemic threw us into an emergency stop-gap approach to remote work that served the purpose of the times: to keep things going while we remained isolated. However, much of what happened throughout 2020 and 2021 was just stabilizing and concretizing these emergency measures. There wasn’t much thoughtfulness to how to make remote work and schooling work well. As a result, I think that many organizations made an over-compensation to being back together in person, and we are seeing some of that backlash now. Some people are six and seven years into their working careers who have only ever really known remote work. Their engagement patterns are radically different from those of us who came up in the days of long off-sites, of days spent in offices and work sites developing relationships and figuring things out together. And that isn’t even to mention schooling. Before the pandemic, there were some excellent programs in BC to support distance education for elementary and high school students, thoughtfully prepared and designed. When the pandemic began, teachers and professors were thrown into a completely new pedagogical context, and very, very few had any practiced ability to work in these contexts.
Of course, what makes this even worse is that we did a terrible job of managing the pandemic. Had we been able to return to office in the summer of 2020, with the virus squashed by a good public health response, it would have been an interesting time. We would have been equipped with experiences of different ways of being, what it felt like to work from home or support communities with a universal basic income. We would have run an experiment without entrenching structural constraints that made it hard to un-run the experiment. Instead, as the pandemic dragged on, temporary structural changes took hold. People moved away from their homes near their offices into cheaper and more distant communities. Public transportation funding shifted as ridership disappeared, and office leases were let go as companies and organizations realized that they could save on overhead and facilities costs. It is now far too late to be thoughtful about integrating the lessons of a global three or four month experiement into an existing society.
It feels to me that the urgency hasn’t gone away. Every day is a slew of online meetings, stacked back to back and on top of each other without any rest between sessions. Work hours are extended beyond a reasonable day, and those of us who are neuro-divergent are tipped into a world of near-constant distraction and dysregulation from the various and persistent demands on our time and attention. My first wide open day on my calendar for which I have no work committments at all is November 27, two months away. Since I turned 55 I have started taking Fridays off which means that I occasionally book full day sessions for that day. And I can move calls around and make time and space when I need to, but in general, I think my calendar probably reflects yours.
Our time and attention has been divided into hour long units, largely dictated by the default setting on our videoconferencing software. A half hour meeting feels like a blessing, as does a three hour session when we can take breaks and slow down.
My relationship to time is changing. Our relationship is changing.
I’m lamenting the loss of deep long engagement. Pre-pandemic we used to even have great online meetings that were rich and deep. People saw them as special and treated them like face to face meetings, giving the work it’s full attention. Cameras were always on.
Nowadays I bet there are heardly any meetings where everyone is focused on the task at hand. There are browser tabs open, phones to play with, tasks to accomplish while the meeting is going on. In some cases when we are doing workshops in organizations, and people have simply accepted the calendar invitation without giving any thought to how participatory it is, folks will just ghost the whole meeting. We have presented to zoom rooms full of black boxes with names in them, every camera off, every mic muted. One meeting I was involved – with elected officials no less, on the subject of engagement – I simply cut it short. No one was paying attention, no one was participating. There was nothing to do. Clearly the work wasn’t important enough, and so I just said something like “Instead of pulling teeth, I’m just going to suggest we finish this session.” A couple of people took a moment to say goodbye, and most just blinked off. I billed them my full rate.
I reallize that my life history as a facilitator has left me ill equipped for these kinds of meetings where attention is splintered into shards and no one seems to have the time to prepare or follow up becasue the next task is coming right up. Instead what I end up doing is focusing deeply on the invitation to the gathering so that everyone who comes has placed the time we have together at the top of their list. Sometimes this means shortening the meeting from two days to one day, or a half day to an hour and a half. I always warn clients that we can’t do the same quality work in half the time, so we make do. If we need a large amount of time together, we will plan something for a few months out so folks can clear their schedules. It’s now all about invitation and preparation, even more so than it ever was.
So…how are you with time and attention? What adjustments are you making to deliver quality in the meetings in which you are participating?
PS. If you want to read a good literature review on this stuff, check out “Remote work burnout, professional job stress, and employee emotional exhaustion during the COVID-19 pandemic.” i need not remind you that we are still in the pandemic; we are just pretending we aren’t.