My friend Kenoli Oleari on the possibility that the conversation can be changed:
We are finding that there are lots of opportunities for public meetings, town halls, task forces, etc. as well as a lot of dissatisfaction with the way things are done. People fear new approaches, but we are finding if we don’t buy into those fears, rather working with them to stay focused on outcomes and the best way to achieve what they want, that there is some degree of receptivity. In many cases people do care about good outcomes and let this desire assuage their fears. There is certainly huge gratitude when they see the amazing results they had never imagined.
We are also finding that little process tweaks can have huge impacts on the quality of results.
In the Art of Hosting world we call this “chaordic confidence” the ability to stay in the heat and fear of chaos and uncertainty and hold space for collaboration and participation to unfold.
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Sometimes we describe what we do with practing the Art of Hosting as bringin participatory leadership to life. THis can be a major shift in some people’s way of thinking. To describe it, Toke Moeller sent this around a few days ago – an explanation of participatory leadership in one sentence.
| How do you explain participatory leadership in one sentence? |
o Imagine” a meeting of 60 people, where in an hour you would have heard everyone and at the end you would have precisely identified the 5 most important points that people are willing to act on together.
o When appropriate, deeper engagement of all in service of our purpose.
o Hierarchy is good for maintenance, participatory leadership is good for innovation and adapting to change.
o Complements the organigramme units with task force work groups on projects.
o Look at how well they did it in DG XYZ – We could be the ones everybody looks at.
o Using all knowledge, expertise, conflicts, etc. available to achieve the common good on any issue.
o It allows to deal with complex issues by using the collective intelligence of all people concerned & getting their buy-in.
o Participatory Leadership is methods, techniques, tips, tricks, tools to evolve, to lead, to create synergy, to share experience, to lead a team, to create a transversal network, to manage a project, an away day, brainstorming, change processes, strategic visions.
o Consult first, write the legislation after.
|
Traditional ways of working |
Participatory leadership complementing |
| Individuals responsible for decisions | Using collective intelligence to inform decision-making |
| No single person has the right answer but somebody has to decide | Together we can reach greater clarity – intelligence through diversity |
| Hierarchical lines of management | Community of practice |
| Wants to create a FAIL-SAFE environment | Creates a SAFE-FAIL environment that promotes learning |
| Top-down agenda setting | Set agenda together |
| I must speak to be noticed in meetings | Harvesting what matters, from all sources |
| Communication in writing only | Asking questions |
| Organisation chart determines work | Task forces/purpose-oriented work in projects |
| People represent their services | People are invited as human beings, attracted by the quality of the invitation |
| One-to-many information meetings | A participatory process can inform the information! |
| Great for maintenance, implementation (doing what we know) | When innovation is needed – learning what we don’t know, to move on – engaging with constantly moving targets |
| Information sharing | When engagement is needed from all, including those who usually don’t contribute much. |
| Dealing with complaints by forwarding them to the hierarchy for action | Dealing with complaints directly, with hierarchy trusting that solution can come from the staff |
| Consultation through surveys, questionnaires, etc. | Co-creating solutions together in real time, in presence of the whole system |
| Top-down | Bottom-up |
| Management by control | Management by trust |
| Questionnaires (contribution wanted from DG X) | Engagement processes – collective inquiry with stakeholders |
| Mechanistic | Organic – if you treat the system like a machine, it responds like a living system |
| Top down orders – often without full information | Top-down orders informed by consultation |
| Resistance to decisions from on high | Better acceptance of decisions because of involvement |
| Silos/hierarchical structures | More networks |
| Tasks dropped on people | Follow your passion |
| Rigid organisation | Flexible self-organisation |
| Policy design officer disconnected from stakeholders | Direct consultation instead of via lobby organisations |
| People feel unheard/not listened to | People feel heard |
| Working without a clear purpose and jumping to solutions | Collective clarity of purpose is the invisible leader |
| Motivation via carrot & stick | Motivation through engagement and ownership |
| Managing projects, not pre-jects | Better preparation – going through chaos, open mind, taking account of other ideas |
| Focused on deliverables | Focused on purpose – the rest falls into place |
| Result-oriented | Purpose-oriented |
| Seeking answers | Seeking questions |
| Pretending/acting | Showing up as who you are |
| Broadcasting, boring, painful meetings | Meetings where every voice is heard, participants leave energised |
| Chairing, reporting | Hosting, harvesting, follow-up |
| Event & time-focused | Good timing, ongoing conversation & adjustment |
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This summer I have been gifting myself a weekly learning session with my friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk who are leading a TaKeTiNa workshop here on Bowen Island. TaKeTiNa is a moving rhythm meditation that provides a learning medium for dealing with questions, inquiries and awareness. In many ways it is like a musical version of the aikido based Warrior of the Heart training that we sometimes offer around Art of Hosting workshops. It is a physical process that seeks to short circuit the thinking mind and bring questions and insights to life.
We do this by creating difficult situations, polyrhythmic patterns using voice, stepping and hand clapping. This exploration of the edges of chaos and order is powerful, even in the short 90 minutes sessions we are doing.
Each session is offered as a learning journey, and so I have been coming the past two weeks with questions and ideas that I wanted to pursue. Yesterday I was think a lot about community and how people get left behind. In our group there were six of us, stepping, singing and clapping in ever increasing complexity. There were times when I lost the pattern and laid back into the basic drum beat, the basic vocal sounds and found my way back into the complicated rhthyms. It brought to mind a question: what violence do we do to groups of people when we have no heartbeat to come back to?
For any community or group, this heartbeat could be their deepest passion, their shared purpose or the thing they care most about. When those things aren’t visible, people get left behind, and chaotic circumstances lead to alienation and despair. So working a little with sensing the heartbeat, and arriving at a solid home place to return to.
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Thank you Euan.
Now, there is a time and a place for judgemental skepticism and cynicism (I suppose) but somehow there is a widespread sentiment that associates these two stances with expertise and prudence. Now I don’t want you to think that I am all about squashing opposition or creative tension, but I have to say that when I am working with groups of people to create processes that will help take people out of their comfort zones, there is a particular cynicism that does not help. Euan Semple calls this “pomposity” and that certainly seems to capture the holier than thou effect that this kind of stifling aloofness has on groups of people. And Euan names the price that it takes:
- Every time someone is faced with a pompous response to a suggestion or idea they take one step back and become much less likely to ever offer their heartfelt thoughts again. Imagine the impact this has on the creativity and innovation that organisations depend on.
- Many, many meetings could be done in less than half the time if there wasn’t a need to feed the ego of the chairperson or more vocal participants. How many times have things gone on way too long because someone likes the sound of his own voice?
- How many millions and millions of pounds have been spent because someone was too pumped up and full of themselves to admit that perhaps the major project they are sponsoring should be aborted?
- How many fledgling social media projects get squashed by IT departments because “professionals” have had their nose put out of joint at “amateurs” thinking they know better?
- How many bright, committed and intelligent potential senior managers have failed to step up to the mark because they couldn’t face the antler clashing and ego massaging that goes on in the boardroom?
I have recently had the experience of people saying to me that the work I do would never work with such-and-such a group of people. My response to them is nothing will work with people if you don’t believe them capable of doing something different or trying something new. I have been responding to these kinds of limiting beliefs with two questions:
- How do you show up with a group of people when you believe they are not capable of something?
- How do YOU show up when something thinks YOU are incapaable of something?
That tends to take care of the holier than thou attitudes. A little empathy, a little creative tension, a little mutual compassion for the other helps makes designs for new and difficult things easier. These questions force us to really consider whether we are more capable than someone else. It forces a conscious awareness of the choice you are making when you adopt the pompous stance.
I choose to believe that people are capable of engaging in all kinds of things, from sitting in circles (the scariest thing in the world, if you would believe some) to radically letting go of huge projects they were working on because they weren’t going anywhere.
Lately I have been making an explcit request of clients that we create design teams for events and processes that DON’T include cynics. That is not to say that we don’t need people bringing concerns and challenging questions to the work, it’s just that when you have someone in a design team that does not believe in the possibility of what you are trying to create, so much energy gets taken up catering to the unhelpful pomposity of the rightous skeptic that the design suffers and in the worst case scenario, the result is a design that just serves the status quo. I have, in the last couple of years actually “fired” a client who wanted me to help create the illusion of a participatory event but who could not allow himself to actually let a participatory event unfold. He was completely unwilling to let go of control and unwilling to trust people. He even described the people he was working with, government employees in First Nations communities, as “children that need to be shown the answer.” There is a huge cost to this kind of stance in time, trust and the ability for groups to actually hold the real fears and concerns that they have. What do you think is possible when you work with someone who considers an important policy gathering to be like a daycare?
So start with possibility and create the space for inquiry, curiosity and yes even judgement to arise. But if you start with these things, you will not be able to create creative spaces of possibility because you will get mired down in the energetics of unhelpful politics, posing and pomposity. Staying in possibility is hard, but it is the only way we get to new places. More of the same is too deceptively simple.
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I am helping to design an interesting gathering in June of next year that will be part of a bigger initiative to shift the values conversation around sustainability. It’s interesting for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the conscious invitation of indigenous peoples, social entreprenuers and leaders who are firmly connected to the biggest and most influential systems in our world. We’re seeing what we can do together.
The initiative is called Beyond Sustainability: Cultivating a community of leadership from a platform of reverence. After an intense and creative weekend of designing, here are some of the propositions that we cracked, and some of the architecture needed for shifting values. These propositions are offered as principles for this community od leaders. They are in development, and this is version 1.0. Please let me know what you think:
7 basic propositions for shifting values
- We must operate as a community. The era of the lone wolf is over. There are no single heroes who will bail us out of the situation we have created for ourselves. Together we must act in community, bringing the values of our ancient understanding of the village to play on a modern global stage and never forgetting that as human beings we are built to work together and not in separation of one another.
- We must operate from a platform of reverence. Collectively, many of us who have been responsible and influential in the systems that shape our world have done so divorced from the consciousness that our ancestors held for the deep connections we have for the natural world. Reverence has been a capacity of human life that has kept us accountable to each other and to our environments for hundreds of thousands of years. Many of us have shed that reverence and have dulled our sense to the awe that is inspired by a deep connection to the earth, to each other and to ourselves. Reverence is our operating system, and connection is our practice.
- We need to embrace the practice of crossing boundaries. The answers to our questions lie outside ourselves, in the wisdom of community and collective intelligence In order to access this wisdom and offer ourselves fully, we are prepared to cross boundaries, to travel to unfamiliar places and be there as learners and contributors to an emerging sense of direction. The boundaries that exist between peoples, cultures and lands are artificial and constructed and they have unnecessarily divided us and deprived us of inspiration, wisdom and co-creation.
- We have time only to act and learn. We don’t have time to create a long term plan, develop consensus and choose only one path forward. The hubris of this approach makes any plan subject to the political machinations of the interests embedded in dying systems. Those machinations took the last great global attempt at Kyoto and scuttled it and now we are out of time. The time for planning is over, and the time for a myriad of experiments and activities is upon us. Indeed, the future is already beginning to speak through the millions of activities, social entrepreneurs, community organizers, cultural practitioners, business leaders and teachers who are not waiting for the sanction of the whole, but who are instead addressing the challenges head on and devoting their lives to saving humanity from it’s own stubborn refusal to change. And they are also showing the way forward by sharing what they learn in novel and accessible ways.
- Our way forward is a conversation about values AND tactics. Exploring values without tactics is wishful thinking and employing tactics without values is reckless. We need to employ the tactics of hope from a platform of reverence, supported by a community of influential leaders who are connected to the systems that need to change.
- Social entrepreneurs and traditional peoples are the sources of the world views and practices we need for the world. There are people in the world whose lives are devoted to practices of accessing the sacred source of reverence, crossing boundaries, collaborating with others, seeing themselves in relation to the natural world, and sharing and giving away what they know and have acquired. These fundamental practices represent both the foundation of many traditional indigenous communities and represent new ways of doing business, governance, education and social development. We have tools that will allow us to be in deep connection with one another face to face and across oceans, and these tools amplify and make possible the practices that stem from a platform of reverence Social entrepreneurs and indigenous peoples are sources of powerful and generative world views, guides on the path, and leaders to the future of a shift in the values that underlie global systems of domination, exploitation, disconnection, violence and greed.
- As a community we seek to become a system of influence. Only by seeing and experiencing our connections to the global web of human endeavour can we truly appreciate our resourcefulness to this call. All of those involved in Beyond Sustainability are deeply embedded in powerful systems and many have channels and connections to the underlying architecture of power in its many forms. Now is the time to put those resources to work, to help hospice the old systems so that they may die gracefully, to midwife the new and to steward the nascent so that we can accelerate the emergence of a set of values that restores right relationship to the the earth and to each other.
The architecture of reverence
Reverence – a profound awe and respect – is the word we are using for the fundamental set of values that we embody. The platform of reverence is based on three fields: reverence for the earth, reverence for the other and reverence for oneself. Cultivating this reverence is the key to growing a set of values based on deep belonging, deep listening and deep presencing. It is a set of values that connects us fundamentally to the source of life and community that lies trampled by humankind’s unrestrained race to modernity. It is a set of values that is generative and is our biggest asset in helping to create and nurture the systems that will restore balance to human life on earth.
The Beyond Sustainability initiative is an invitation to explore and practice together in this cultivation of reverence, noticing what is born in doing so, and devoting ourselves to helping new ideas grow in fertile and creative ways.
Reverence for the earth – cultivating deep belonging
Human beings are prone to forgetting that we are of the earth, children of the universe, embodied and born out of the mingling of material and spirit, containers for the conscious work of the cosmos. When we forget what we know in our deepest indigenous selves, we grow too big. We engage in the suicidal pursuit of domination and exploitation of the land, air and sea, and we become inhumane in our treatment of others, creating and tolerating unimaginable suffering among all living things. This is no mere appeal to sentimental and romantic back-to-the-earth mindset. We are now acutely aware that the brutal dismemberment of human beings from the natural world has made possible our own destruction and the destruction of many other species.
Deep belonging is captured in the Ojibway word dineamaganik, “I belong to everything” or “All my relations.” It is reinforced in the Hawaiian story of the Kumulipo, in which the very pattern of the universe is imparted to the sources of the material world and the increasingly sacred story that western science tells of evolution and the interconnectedness of all things.
Our first practice therefore, is the cultivation of deep belonging, an intuitive and unshakable understanding of where we come from and who we really are, of how the land and the natural world holds us, and of the patterns of nature that flow within us when we open to them. From that place comes the source of new values and new practices.
Reverence for each other – cultivating deep listening
We rush to judgement, take things at their surface value, outsource meaning making to experts and rely on rumour and innuendo to form our opinions of one another. Human beings have a remarkable ability to refuse to see what is right before us, to hear deeply what is being deeply said, to hold each other in the highest respect and compassion. When we cut ourselves off and stuff our ears full of rationalizations, we become inoculated to the pleas of others to be heard and seen as human beings.
Deep listening makes possible aloha, the Hawaiian art of sharing breath, hishook ish tsawaak, the Nuu-Chah-Nulth awareness of interdependence, and k’e, the Navajo concept of being tied together in a weaving of relations.
Deep listening means being with others in a way that allows us to see ourselves in the other, that invites us to open to the wisdom that is held in the centre of every person, that contributes to an emergent experience of community. Traditional communities cultivate this deep listening through ceremony that makes the communities most precious wisdom available to all. We are prepared to listen in that way.
Reverence for oneself – cultivating deep presence
We cannot come to the work as spectators, bystanders or skeptical cynics. Cultivating the shift in values that we seek is work done by people who show up fully, authentically and devoted to the service of life. It is only out of deep presence that we can become teachers of one another or that we ask the questions and seek the help that we need to move our work forward in the world. Reverence for ourselves and for our preciousness is critical for being fearless and helpful in whatever way we can.
A commitment to the practice of presence means that we invite collaboration in this work from a place of deep intent, offering what we can, and asking for what we need, and not holding ourselves back out of fear or arrogance. We are a community of fully present learners AND leaders, comfortable with not knowing the way forward, but confident in our own abilities to discern and act powerfully from a place of deep and interconnected reverence.