We are deep in the rainy season here on the west coast of North America. I’ve been reflecting on my year of work and noticing a few patterns that are coming to mind as I think about the kinds of questions that our clients have been confronting this year. I don’t know that these observations are especially novel, but they do represent patterns that I have seen this year. they also represent places where I think our work can be helpful.
Something of the bigger context.
As it always has been. But that bigger context is currently full of austerity, fear and polarization. Much of our work is within the non-profit and public sector, and our clients have all been facing declines in funding, uncertainty about the future, skyrocketing need from their own clients and a deep questions about using their leadership to confront polarity and division in their organizations and communities.
It used to be that we were confronting a “scarcity mindset” where we feel to recognize the wealth of ideas and leadership that we actually have. This leaves leaders and organizations retreating into their own shells as they try hard to shoulder the responsibility of the work. Often in our organizational development work, we could do things that lift our eyes up a bit and help activate the leadership throughout the organization.
These days, on top of that dynamic, I think we’re facing an “austerity mindset” whereby that wealth of talent, attention and money is still present but it is actually locked away and not available to us. It has been concentrated elsewhere and everyone seems to be preparing to simply do without it.
I’m certainly not 100% sure of this shift, but it feels like the issues leaders are confronting are shifting in ways that we continue to explore with them and their teams, and my colleagues as well. What helps at this time is continued connection and sophisticated situational awareness to see and name what is happening and to be honest about what is available to work with. Maybe, dear readers, you are seeing it too. All work happens in a context and being able to name this context is important, without getting lost in it. I wrote about this back in September.
Five year strategic planning is dead.
The Covid-19 experience seemed to finally put to rest the typical five year strategic planning process. Everyone now has practical and tangible experience of how the best laid plans can be knocked sideways. And in the last year or two, as organizations have been recovering from Covid, they have no been hit with massive uncertainty in the world, including cuts to their funding. And it very much seems irrational, arbitrary and determined by bigger dynamics that are outside of the control of the organizations we get to work with.
In response, the kind of planning I have been asked to do more and more this year is about scenario planning and arriving at a set of practice principles that can help organizations lead towards a variety of futures. I do love this kind of work. It has relational benefits of visioning and dreaming together, but is rooted in deep and practical need for on the ground responses. I’m not an expert at operational planning – and there is always a need for that kind of work – but bringing people together to think about futures and develop some shared resourcefulness about responding to what might happen is useful.
Connection is needed but trust is shaky at the centre.
I have had a blog posts sitting in my drafts for a little while that talks about how we can move from centralized planning and control towards a more networked form of leadership. Ever since I ran across Open Space Technology in 1995 I have seen the need for this, because as Harrison Owen (who we lost in 2025) observed, Open Space activates an organizational structure of shared leadership and responsibility that is latent in any group of people. He called it “The High Performance Organization” and it checks a lot of boxes for what leaders want: engaged staff, ideas and responsibility sprouting up all over, connected and self-organizing teams that are working in a common direction, but meeting challenges where they are at.
The problem is that such networks really depend on the ability and willingness of organizational leaders to open up space for that to happen. We spend a lot of time in our longer engagements working with senior leaders to help them sustain their ability to truly trust the folks in their groups to do the work. It is sometimes a hard thing to bootstrap, but once it gets going, these types of networks can be quite powerful. Central leaders and organizations become conveners rather than resource sinks, and work becomes meaningful. It requires leaders to do the work they are uniquely positioned to do but to release to the community work that can be better done at the edges.
In the little supporter-owned soccer club I am a part of we do this but having our core leadership care for the fiduciary and technical responsibilities or the club and the rest of us live by the principles of “Assume your talents are needed, and proceed until apprehended.” In this way we activate community and true ownership over what we are doing.
And speaking of polarities…
This kind of things means that polarities abound: centralized control and distributed responsibility; continuity of tradition and new responses to emerging conditions; maintaining fiduciary obligations while stretching beyond; focus on the core external offering and building interior connections and development. Every planning process I have been involved in this year seems to hang on one or more of these polarities. Often the conversations about need and purpose start with an acknowledgement that both sides of the polarity are needed and the challenge is to lean into the skills and talent we have to do both. As contextual uncertainty has increased, our clients seem more willing to wrestle with these polarities rather than simply seeing their current conditions as a problem to be solved.
As always, we need to be thoughtful about how we think about change.
We are living in a world which seems to be revelling in ignorance about complexity. Every problem now seems to have a simple answer, with predictable and brutal results. We are fed this line in our civic conversations too, organizational realities and personal lives too. Social media algorithms have shaped our ideas about what is happening in the world and what we should do about it. I think complexity literacy is more important than ever. Just being able to think about the different kinds of change out there TOGETHER helps us to make sense of things in a more useful way and in a way that builds more relationships and therefore more resilience. Some of my go to frameworks for helping folks understand how change happens, the Cynefin framework and the Two Loops framework, continue to be extremely useful for helping people describe the spaces they are in, and chaordic planning has stood the test of time for collaboratively designing responses to these kinds of conditions.
AI is helping us delude ourselves into believing that we don’t need craft, or the ability to confront uncertainty with relationality.
It used to be fairly common that a client would discover that I was a facilitator and hand me an agenda and ask me to facilitate it. Its the reason I wrote the chaordic stepping stones guide in the first places, so that we could explore the possibility space together and design something that was fit to needs instead of simply rolling out a best practice. This year was the first time I received agendas generated by ChatGPT and asked to facilitate those. It took me a moment to figure this out, but I think that many people are probably asking their favourite large language model to give them an agenda for a two day strategic planning process. We are witnessing a massive cultural crises stemming from the destruction of craft across all the arts including music, writing, visual arts and process arts. Designing and facilitating participatory work is a craft. the two go hand in hand. One would never give an accomplished artist a paint-by-numbers set and ask them to use their technique to fill it out the way one wanted. Or hand a musician a piece of music to play that has notes in it, but no sense of development, harmony or rhythm.
Artificial intelligence is excellent at giving one the impression that the uncertainty they are confronting is easily solved. The tools that we currently have access to are extremely powerful aids to help with facilitation work, but they simply cannot replace the craft of relationship building and the time it takes to do work that generates meaningful contribution and ownership and sustainability. Facilitators and participatory leaders need to continue to develop the skills to work with groups of people in increasing complexity, within decreased time frames and a climate of austerity, polarization and uncertainty. Our chatbots are incapable of understanding what we know when we enter a space like that, but those of us that fear the ambiguity of these spaces can find ourselves retreating into the comforting certainty of a set of answers that come from what appears to be a divine and omniscient source. We just have to be careful not to lose the ability to sit together and figure something out. Keep watching sports like soccer and hockey. Keep making music with each other. Exercise the feeling and abilities that we have to make and undo things together without knowing where we are going or what might happen next. Move together, slightly slower than you think you should be, and seeking surprise along the way.
Stories and shared work are helpful.
I had a lovely call the other day with Cynthia Kurtz and Ashley Cooper are some folks Ashley is working with around using Participatory Narrative Inquiry to work with stories in communities and organizations. I continue to use that collection of methods for dealing with difficult and complex situations, including future scenario planning, because my experience has been that making sense of grounded stories together is the best way to engage with the uncertainty and opinionated conversation that passes for civic dialogue. I’m interested in methods and processes of civic deliberation and address conflict with process design. How can we bring difference into governance without confusing it with conflict? How can we work with conflict without confusing it with violence? This is not an area I have ever been comfortable in, but I have found that stories and circle are the best way to have a group of people dive in together on shared work that helps differences become resources and helps conflict become co-discovery. In watching the current kinds of conversations we are having in Canada around things like Aboriginal title, it’s clear that folks with opinions not rooted in actual experience have a hard time even beginning to understand issues, let alone seeing ways in which reconciling differences can be the work of a mature politics, and a potentially defining characteristic of the Canadian project.
So these are some of the things I have seen this year and I expect that these are threads that will continue to grow and bloom in the coming year too. I’m really interested what YOU have noticed?
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.