I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice. We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of “What time it is in the world?” We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing. We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were emerging. At the end of the Cafe, the hosts gathered in a fishbowl in the middle of the rest of the group and shared their insights, sensing into the patterns that were emerging. I listened with a poet’s ear tuned to the harvest and this is what I heard:
You have to be ready to die on the hill atop which you have heard the deepest call of the world
When you open the smallest space in your life, passion can erode obligation. You become more social, unable to be unaware.
You cannot see yourself in the window of a rushing train but only for a second. You need to slow down so that the reflection can be studied, a life examined.
What would a world looki like that is flowing in responsibility, courage, reverence and wakanza?
Responsibility and courage are individual acts. Reverance and wakanza are products of the collective context, they are responses that are woken up in us by the times.
Our children our the gift we make to the future, they are the long stake in the long view, the holders of wisdom, those carriers of what we have learned about how we have lived.
We are the ones we have been waiting for, and we have been waiting for lives and times beyond our own, living in lives and times beyond our own. We see ourselves as the gift to ourselves when others make it clear in relationship.
Our conversations touch every single other conversation. The world unfolds as one point presses upon another in a great chain of implication and connectivity. The technology of interconnection is vulnerability – the capacity to be open to one another. In that small open space, influence takes root. Ideas enter in that seem to have always been there.
I move and leave pieces of myself behind, and I have no story of grieving? No way to midwife the new in the hospice of the dying? What is being born when things are dying, what enters in when there is a puase in the breath between generations, between conversations, between breaths and between heart beats?
In the moments of silence that open between sounds, there is a chance for the smallest voice to be heard. The babble dies down and there is a pause and a small call has its chance to invite. Judgement kills that voice – sometimes aborts it before it even ever enters the world.
All we have are ideas – take a stand, do what you can to help others to stand. You can reach back to the head of every river to see why it is full of what it is full of. Every tributary signs its joining with specific minerals, with salts and metals, with vegetation and fish. You can find home by simply following the taste of it.
Host others, but host yourself first. Listen to others but first learn to listen to the wind, to listen to the birds and the way the ground moves beneath the feet of the deer. Learn to listen to why people say the things they say. To what soil or water fills their syllables with longing.
Presence. When you host you can become the vehicle through which the world speaks its story. And you hear what you are built for and you speak what you see in yourself.
We are not too busy for change, we are instead addicted to avoiding what is real and what needs doing. People are the agents for their own freedom. But that freedom cannot be won without something being let go. We are in a culture that doesn’t end things very well, but instead loads layers and layers of more on top of the foundation. With no rite of passage available, nothing gets completed and ushered out, there is no way to make space for the new. Honour and reverence.
We are crying for passages through and for the rites to understand them and to be invited into them.
Can you be authentic in your work if you’re not authentic in your personal life? How do you discover you are not aware of yourself without rites of passage and ceremonies that acknowledge what is coming and what is gone, what is to be picked up and what is to be put down.
How do we foster self-awareness when we perceive crises and emergency? We tell the truth and we tell all the stories, even the ones that represent success and resilience and that buck the trend of the depressing scarcity that keeps us embedded in fear, we insert pauses where previously we would rush to solutions.
We are a greedy culture, but we can be greedy for community and that hurts no one because it only activates the abundance that sleeps in a cradle of scarcity. We can’t afford to throw a few things on the grill and offer some to the neighbours? Come to me in the late sun of the evening when the wind is still and the birds think before they sing, and cars pass by quietly in the languid air. Come and share a meal, and tell me what is in your heart.
Like Meg says,
Notice what is going on.
Get started.
Learn as you go.
Stick together.
Analyse this...!
Yesterday I had a chance to grab lunch with Dave Pollard in our local coffee shop on Bowen Island. One of the things we talked about was the supremacy of analysis in the world and why that is a problem when it comes to operating in complex domains.
I have been intentionally working a lot lately with Dave Snowdon et. al.’s Cynefin framework to support decision making in various domains. It is immensely helpful in making sense of the messy reality of context and exercises like anecdote circles and butterfly stamping are very powerful, portable and low tech processes.
Cynefin is also useful in that it warns us against a number of fatal category errors people make when trying to design solutions to problems. The most serious of these is remaining complacent in a simple context which has the effect of tipping the system to chaos. Nearly as infuriating and problematic to me is the applicability of analysis to complex domains.
Analysis has a dominant place in organizational and community life. It provides a sense of security that we can figure things out and operate in the space of the known. If we just analyse a situation enough we can identify all if the aspects if the problem and choose a solution. Of course in the complicated domain, where causes and effects can be known even though they are separated in time and space, analysis works beautifully. But in complex domains, characterized by emerged phenomenon, analysis tends to externalize and ignore that which it cannot account for with the result that solutions often remain dangerously blind to surprise and “black swan” events.
The Cyenfin framework advocates working with stories and social constructed meaning to sense and act in complex spaces. Where as analysis relies on objective data and meaning making models to create rules and tools, action in complex spaces uses stories and patterns to create principles and practices which help us to create small actions – probes in the system – that work in a nuanced way with emergence.
In this respect culture matters. The stories that are told and the practices thy are used to make sense of those stories is the method for acting in complex space. This distinction us helpful for me working with indigenous communities where program management may rely on analytical tools (and culture is stamped out in the process) but practices need to be grounded in culturally based responses. Using stories and social meaning making restores culture to its traditional role of helping groups of humans move together in complex domains while using analysis more appropriately.
Just off a call where we were discussing what it takes to shift paradigms in indigenous social development. We noted that we hear a lot from people that they are busy and challenged and they need clear paths forward otherwise they are wasting their time.
I have a response to that.
We don’t know what we are doing. Everything we have been doing so far has resulted in what we have now. The work of social change – paradigm shifting social innovation – is not easy, clear or efficient. If you are up for it you will confront some of the the following, all of the time:
- Confusion about what we are doing.
- A temptation to blame others for where we are at.
- Conflict with people that tell you you are wasting their time.
- A feeling of being lost, overwhelmed or hopeless.
- Fear that if you try something and it fails, you will be fired, excluded or removed.
- Demands for accountability and reprimands if things don’t work out.
- Worry that you are wasting your time and that things are not going according to plan.
- A reluctance to pour yourself into something in case it fails.
- A reticence to look at behaviours that are holding you back.
Social change is not easy. Asking for it to be made easy is not fair. Leadership in this field needs to be able to host all of these emotional states, and to help people hold each other through very trying times. It is about resilience, the kind that is needed both when things fall apart AND when things take too long to come back together.
Everyone needs to be a leader here, everyone needs to recognize these states in themselves and hold others in compassion when they see them arising in others. Working with the emergent unknown requires pacing, a big heart, and a stout challenge. To create the experiments that help us forward we need to be gentle with judgment, but fiercely committed to harvesting and learning. We need to cultivate nuance, discernment, advocacy and inquiry rather than jumping to conclusions and demanding rational analytical responses to every situation.
You up for that?
This is state representative Cory Mason in Wisconsin fiercely and gently outlining what has gone wrong in that state and standing up for the rights of citizens, workers and the media against the tyranny of Gov. Walker’s plans.
What is going on in Wisconsin is big and important. Have a listen and see what you can learn.
This past week I have been in Minnesota working with colleagues Jerry Nagel, Ginny Belden-Charles and Mandy Ellerton. We were conducting a second residential training in collaborative leadership with a number of planning grantees working in communities to make impacts on the social and economic determinants of health.
In this residential we spent a fair bit of time working on tactical community organizing, exploring how to teach this from the perspective of the Art of Hosting. The traditional tactics of Alinsky-style community organizing operate by creating strategic targets for action and mobilizing community power against those targets. It’s a zero-sum game. In the Art of Hosting community and the Berkana models of community organizing, we generally focus on purpose and seek to build strategic relationships and structures that create longer term, resilient and sustainable responses to changing realities. The challenge for us as teachers in this was to explore and find a way to teach both so that we could help people become resourceful practitioners of a multitude of strategies.
Both have value. Recent events in the Middle East, as well as down the road from us in Wisconsin showed the need and power for traditional community organizing to respond to acute injustice and to take advantage of timing. And while mass occupations of public spaces and state Capitols have their place, they will flare out if the participants cannot find a way to use power to sustainably and wisely over time. The danger with many revolutionary movements is that they seize power and later exercise it without changing the nature of the power dynamics itself. Top-down remains top-down, and the patterns of leadership and power-sharing remain in place. For revolutions of any kind to be truly transformative they have to work on both levels – visible power dynamics and underlying patterns that generate those dynamics.
There is a great temptation to reduce this space into a dualistic “love vs. power” choice. Adam Kahane’s recent work has explored this dichotomy from a position of how love and power can be complimentary resources in leadership practice. If you ask people, many will privilege one over the other. “You can’t expect autocrats to be toppled by love alone – you need to gain power.” Others will say that “the destructive exercise of power is what got us into this situation, and only building relationships based on love and respect will get us back.” Or as Martin Luther King famously said: ““Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.” In our group we had people who reacted in a strongly negative fashion to a discussion of power, because they perceived themselves as victims of power. In other situations I have found people will dismiss love as “sickly and anemic” and unable to make any real change at all. Reducing any of these dimensions to an either/or proposition will immediately drop you into a space of unresourcefulness, and that is NOT what we were after.
On our teaching team, we were well set to explore this dynamic. Both Jerry and Mandy have experience in traditional community organizing tactics, Alinsky-style tactical work in communities and organizing traditional political campaigns. Ginny and I are both students and practitioners of relational community development, both of us working a lot lately with using community building principles to work with change. And each of us has experience and curiosity about the other end of the spectrum so we were well placed to figure out an inclusive and transcendent framework that could be useful for our participants.
We began by defining some of the dimensions of a leadership space in which tactical action for mutual influence takes place. In other words, what kinds of strategies are useful for influencing people and participating pro-actively in change? We found three dimensions of action, which we set up as polarities:
Inquiry – Advocacy. From the world of systems thinking, this set of skills is well known. Balancing advocacy and inquiry is a key area for personal mastery to participate in deeper and transformational dialogue. Advocacy requires clear speaking, storytelling and compelling argument on behalf of oneself or a group. Inquiry requires openness, curiosity and a willingness to listen and be changed by what you hear. It is the domain of good, clear, non-judgemental questions.
Transactional – Relational. A transactional view sees the world as a space for negotiation, for winning and losing and where separation is useful. Relational practices and worldviews on the other hand bring us into each other’s sphere of influence in a way that builds sustainable alliances and systems of influence. It is important to engage in transactional activity sometimes, escaping from dangerous situations, demanding that an autocrat hand over power (and even seizing it from the person), negotiating and creating separate spaces of safety such as women’s centres, immigrant services, Aboriginal choice schools or First Nations governments. But for sustainability and co-evolution, relational tactics are important, building community around purpose. reintegrating a movement with society, letting go of a defined community of practice to allow emergence to take social innovation to the scale of an influential system.
Individual – Collective. Another key dimension that we discovered that gives the model a great deal of power and depth. There are times for individual actions and times for collective actions. Individual leadership can be power and visionary, the image of Obama as President. A powerful speaker can invoke what is called in Halkomelem “nautsamaut” – a powerful holistic collective single mindedness. On the other hand, people cannot work alone, and collective intelligence and effort is needed to undertake large scale and meaningful transformations.
If you place these three axes in relation to each other, you get a sphere, and that sphere becomes what we called “a space for action.” Within that sphere, many tactics and actions can happen, and depending on context, the actions will be considered right or wrong. Our goal then became exploring this space with an eye to creating resourcefulness in any given moment.
For example, the revolution in Egypt last month was a result of collective action based on relational strategies which took a transactional approach to shifting power in the state. Collective leadership assembled, demands were articulated, and Mubarak’s resignation was demanded. There was no place for relationship building with the old regime. By the time Mubarak held out his olive branch it was too late. The people wanted him gone and they wanted the power that was concentrated in his office to be moved to the people through a democratic constitution-building process. In this example there was no room for individual, relational inquiry. It was not the time for solo self reflection. Nor was there much in the way of a sole leader of the opposition movement. Democratic revolutions of this nature tend to have the occasional figure head (ElBaradei, Mandela, Havel, Gandhi, King,Tsvangarei) but the movement is run by groups and really powered by a mass of people. In situations where autocrats are overthrown by powerful individual figures (think Haiti, Cuba, Soviet Union, China, Liberia, Afghanistan, Zaire, Yugoslavia) the results become less democratic than autocratic, and often result in civil war rather than a peaceful transition of power.
Another example. On my home island, Bowen Island, we are currently engaged in a process to determine the feasibility of establishing a national park on our island. This has been a controversial proposal as it emanated not from a groundswell movement, but from a few hard working municipal councillors, some community advocates and the federal government. For the citizens of Bowen, the conversation has been vigorous and at times acrimonious as we faced an apparently dualistic decision between a future with a national aprk, or a future without one. We are a small community and relationships are very important. Many islands and small bounded communities have been torn apart by poorly handled land use processes. For us to succeed we need to not fall into the trap of advocacy for positions (especially as there is so little that can be known about the implications of either a park or a parkless future). It is not smart to be working alone, as we need collective intelligence and connection to come up with creative paths forward under either scenario. And if the work is transactional then we will be left at the end of the day with people who feel they have either won or lost something, with the serious implications for community sustainability over time. It seems to me that our choice is to balance advocacy and inquiry, to work primarily relationally and to engage as much as possible in a collective manner rather than by having individuals submit competing ideas. As an individual acting in this debate I have been less influential than times when I have been part of a collective voice.
So you can see that acting in this space is not about choosing the ends of any of the axes but rather about finding a sweet spot somewhere within the sphere of action where these three dimensions are balanced against the purpose and need of action.
In general what we teach in the Art of Hosting or arts of participatory and collaborative leadership, are strategies for leading in the relational half of this sphere, biased a little towards inquiry and balancing individual and collective practice. From this base, we can move to teach more advocacy by teaching storytelling models that build relations. We generally privilege work in the relational half of the sphere, because in general, the tactical world of change and development is not very proficient in these skills, and yet the transactional worldview is dominant in development work at the moment. People take transactional approaches to inquiry – needs assessments, gap analysis, studies, technical modelling – and transactional approaches to advocacy – report writing, lobbying, results based funding through RFPs. These activities are very familiar to community and organizational developers around the world. The leading edge of balancing that practice is seeking sustainability through relational strategies that help create restorative community and long term viability, which is work we do through the Berkana Institute All of these strategies and activities are useful, but there are times and situations in which some are more useful than at other times.
Practically applying this model should be very straightforward. Like any good framework it comes with a caveat that you can be in multiple places in this model at the same time. Defining and continually clarifying needs and purposes is very important. Sensing the call of the context is also very important. Waiting – a particular kind of active waiting, sensing the conditions and timing – is important too.
Action then proceeds using tactics and strategies that are appropriate to the times and the context. The leadership capacity needed to use this framework well is resourcefulness and a willingness to work with others who bring complimentary skills to the effort. It is also important that everyone remain open to mutual influence and inquiry so as to sense the best time to deploy appropriate strategies and leadership frames. Timing and trust is very important. Used well, I can see that this framework can be a powerful tool for mapping strategies and for generating and designing new ones.