I’m back from Bella Coola, and reflecting on the remarkable three days of learning and Open Space we did there.
Saturday, we held a small community Open Space gathering around the issue of what the community needs to do to prepare for assuming full responsibility over child and family services. This is a provocative question in the Nuxalk Nation. The Nation is a strong and independent community and putting children and families in the centre of any conversation brings heart, passion and commitment.
We had a small group of people present for our Open Space. 20 people began the day with us and more came and went. There was a flurry of activity to post sessions in the morning, much of it spurred by pressing community needs. The conversations had a kind of solid adhesion to them that I haven’t witnessed in every community gathering like this. People sat in very well formed circles, and very little bumblebeeing was seen.
There were two incredible pieces of action that flowed from this gathering – one immediate and one long term. The short term project that arose came out of a conversation on the safety of children and youth. At the outset of that conversation a young man, Stephen, told a story about what happened to him the previous night. He was waiting to be picked up by his mother at 2am after being out with friends. While he was waiting a young girl, who he estimated to be between 10 and 12 years old, came out of the bushes, pulled out a crack pipe and started smoking it. Crack and crystal meth are just beginning to make an appearance in the community, but it was the age of this girl that was shocking to Stephen. He told his mom that no matter how he felt the next morning, he was going to that community Open Space to talk about what to do. Stephen’s story inspired the group on the spot to create a network of parent and Elder patrols. Parents signed up to take turns driving around the reserve all night, looking out for kids and helping them get home or stay safe. If it wasn’t possible for them to go home, Elder’s offered to open up their houses so the young people could stay with them until it was safe. The first patrol happened Saturday night.
The long term project involved further development of the idea of a community house that came out of our World Cafe on Friday. A group met to discuss what came next and they committed to open a bank account, begin fundraising and to meet in a week to flesh out a more detailed todo list. As a result of the concreteness of their invitation and willingness to work together, the group raised $260 just by passing a hat in the closing circle, a tangible investment of money that arose very much as a koha, which is the Maori word for what happens when people commit money to an idea at the end of a meeting.
One of the reasons why this Open Space seemed so “adhesive” was that it came at the end of two days of training, and the folks who came through that experience together ended up co-hosting the invitation for the Open Space – by directly inviting two or three other community members to show up on Saturday – and they took responsibility for co-hosting the conversations and the action in the Open Space. We came up with these two concrete projects without even doing any action planning.
As usual I learned much about community and Open Space in this process. The most important thing for me was noticing what happens when a community enters Open Space with some preparation. In the past I have facilitated these kinds of events in a way that was completely self-contained within the Open Space. It has long occurred to me that simply doing that is not leveraging all the potential for leadership and change that is present in a community. I have been thinking for a while about how to combine training and capacity building with Open Space events to maximize this high potential.
On this score, Michael Herman, Julie Smith, Judi Richardson and I developed an approach in 2002 in Alaska that addressed this by holding an Open Space event and then following up immediately with two days of Open Space training to further explore applications of the process and to develop ideas that were started in the Open Space. In Alaska in 2002 we had great success with this approach and Open Space became used fairly widely within the school system, and in some quite surprising places. The advantage of this approach is that the community gets to experience Open Space first, develop ideas and then refine them further.
This alternate approach is based on the work that I am doing with The Art of Hosting community. The Art of Hosting is a training event that covers many aspects of leadership, process design and methodologies and is built around the core of Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe, Circle practice and Open Space. In wanting to give participants a more realistic experience of Open Space, we have been adding more and more time in the Art of Hosting to the Open Space events, and typically putting them at the end of the three or four days of training. The advantage of this approach is that it begins by building a broader sense of leadership, design and process and then uses Open Space to create the kinds of projects that flow from the learning work. In the context of community-based leadership development, this approach works beautifully, to give people a variety of tools, host conversations that are at times theoretical and at times deeply experiential and to sew it all together with a concrete experience of Open Space which actually gets so-hosted by the community members themselves.
I hope to get back up to the Nuxalk Nation in the not too distant future, to check in on where they are at and contribute where I can. You can contribute too if you like, by donating money to the community house fund, the project which started entirely in Open Space. If you could even spare $10 that would be fantastic, and to have it come from far flung parts of the globe would be an inspiration for the community members working hard to improve the lives of their children and families.
Yesterday, in preparing for two days of teaching and training I spent the morning over breakfast reading some of th stories of Clayton Mack, the grandfather of my friend and client Liz Hall. I was reading about the way in which Nuxalk people gathered food from the land, whether it was the fish, game or plants and berries. He talked about the way the amlh – the spring salmon – were harvested using fishtraps. At one time there were 22 traps on the river. These traps would form barriers that the salmon would need to jump. When they jumped they were caught in a trap on the other side. There they would wait and the fishers would just gather them up. Whatever was surplus was let go upriver to other traps and villages.
This is a beautiful way to harvest fish, because it preserves life and delivers fresh animals to all who need them. It is the essence of a Nuxalk way of doing things.
Later that morning in the opening circle I asked why people had chosen to be in this training rather than anywhere else. From that conversation came a powerful statement. One woman, who works at the transition house in the community said quite simply and powerfully that leadership is simple revealing our own beauty to each other. We talked about the profound nature of that statement with respect to individual leadership but also in terms of the way communities lead as well. What would it mean if an organization within a community revealed it’s beauty in it’s work? What if communities exhibited leadership that way too?
From there we dove into a deep exploration of the power of appreciative inquiry. We went through the 4D process and then played with the Discovery phase by pairing up to look at another theme that emerged in the opening circle: the idea that Nuxalk culture should be at the centre of everything. A community reveals its beauty through its culture, and so we asked the question of each other: tell a story about a time when Nuxalk culture inspired you?
In encouraging people to interview on another, I invited people to practice the role of the Elder and the student. All of us will be Elders one day and the mark of an Elder is when you are called upon to tell your story as a teaching. And so, especially with some of the younger adults in our group, being invited to tell a story as if it is a teaching is a powerful invitation. And be invited to listen to a story as a student is a gift. When appreciative interviews are structured this way it creates a mutual relationship of gifting and support, and invites us to practice being both teacher and student.
The response to this set of interviews were very powerful, including stories of people who first saw their culture in all it’s glory after they were liberated from residential school. From those conversations we harvested a small set of principles around the teachings that we jokingly called “How the Nuxalk Nation saved the world.” The wisdom contained in these teachings is ancient, powerful, reality based and available. It provides a concrete set of principles around which people could design Nuxalk programs or organizations that are in line with a cultural perspective on the world.
On the second day, we spent time looking at leadership as an act of courage. We are playing with etymology in these days, looking at heart based leadership that proceeds from seeing. Heart-based leadership has courage at its root, derived from the French word coeur, meaning heart. We talked about the chaordic path as a path of finding the courage to encourage others and keep moving in the face of discouragement. Strengthening heart is a powerful leadership capacity and one which is in short supply in indigenous communities that have lived through decades of discouragement.
Leadership also comes from seeing. Spectare is the Latin worked that gives rise to the words speculate, inspect, respect and perspective. These are leadership capacities, the ability to see something that touches your heart and convene a conversation around it is a leadership moment available to all in which any member of a community can step up and start something. In fact it is truly the only way anything does happen.
This afternoon, we concluded our day with a world cafe on the question of “If you could do one thing to improve the lives of children and families in this community what would that be?” The idea was to demonstrate how The World Cafe can be a powerful process for getting a group through the groan zone by building shared perspective. What I didn’t expect was the harvest we took from this cafe. In an hour the group hatched an idea for a community house, in which people would be able to come and shine – radiating their beauty and their leadership, to cook and eat together, hang out together and learn the Nuxalk language and culture. Such a building could be built by the community and an enthusiastic team of people may well step forward in our Open Space tomorrow to lead the way on this project.
It has been a good two days of teaching and learning here, and tomorrow we run an Open Space with the community on what it will take reclaim control over child and family services for th Nuxalk Nation. With the capacity that is building here and the enthusiastic leadership, I’m looking forward to the day.
Readers who have been with me for a while will know that I have taken great inspration from Vaclav Havel over the years. An artist, playwright, dissident and peaceful democrat, his writing on totalitarianism and post-totalitarian ways of being have influenced much of my work and thinking on working towards post-colonial First Nations communities and organizations.
Yesterday in the Globe and Mail there was a great interview with Havel and it was rich with quotes about what it takes to move from the idealistic state of a dissident to the hard work of institutionalizing large scale social change. Because the Globe suffers from link rot, I’ll print the best ones here:
“We had no precedent for this experience,” he says in a slow Czech monotone. “There was nowhere to learn, nowhere to take lessons from, in a situation where everything was state-owned and in state hands.”
His dissident movement is often caricatured as a group of hard-partying slackers who suddenly found themselves with the keys to the palace. He isn’t entirely eager to demolish this image.
“We were a group of friends from various branches of the arts who had suddenly found ourselves in a world we had known only from a distance, and which up till then had been merely a target of our criticism and ridicule, and who had to decide very quickly what we were going to do with this world.”
It soon became apparent that a revolution, however bloodless, quickly turns into horrendous work.
“We had a clear idea about our ideas, about our visions, but the technicalities of the actual execution, that was a different matter. I mean, there was a lot of improvisation involved. And that’s my advice that I give to foreign dissidents; it is a lesson that they can learn from us so that they can avoid our mistakes, ” The ideas are important, but it is equally important how you implement these ideas, and to make sure that they correspond to reality.”
This was a hard lesson for anyone who had spent a lifetime in the idealistic world of resistance, and he is certainly not the last to experience it. The authoritarian governments of Europe disappeared almost overnight, but after a year of shocked celebration, what was left was hardly a paradise. Here was the question that the world has still not been able to answer: How do you move from a regime-controlled society and economy to a free, liberal democracy without damaging lives, casting millions of people into peril, giving birth to vast private-sector tyrannies of mafia capitalism? In Iraq, Afghanistan, China and Russia, this remains the central question. Even in Prague Castle, it wasn’t quite answered.
“The most unpleasant experience was how difficult and what a long time it took for the political culture to renew itself, to regenerate itself, to get rid of all the deformations coming from the totalitarian regime, how long a time it takes for a society to change, not externally but from within, because of course not everybody can be an entrepreneur.”
All of what he is saying here applies to First Nations communities as well, from the point that it is impossible to have a grand plan for how it will all work out to the need for internal decolonizationas well. He elaborates on the idea that all of the change can be known:
“Somebody who is completely prepared for the course of history is a little bit suspicious,” he says slowly, raising his eyebrow in a faint smile. “Sure, you can ask yourself, ‘Why didn’t you have the whole democratic constitution written in advance.’ Or, ‘Why didn’t we have a complete set of laws ready in our hands?’ “You can’t just outline history in advance – I mean, this is something that the Communists and the Marxists always wanted to do. That was, of course, wrong, and it then ended up creating a prison situation, a gulag-type scenario, because they thought that the world could be designed in advance, and then whatever doesn’t fit into the framework they’ve designed should be chopped off.”
In the end though, the kind of change Havel began – and the kind many of us are engaged in across Canada – will be completed in generations.
“I don’t think that one generation is better than another generation – the ratio of good and bad character features are much the same in any generation,” he says. “But the specific type of damage that was caused by communism, the damage to human souls, of course it is something that this new generation of young people won’t be tainted with.
In our case, it seems to me that there is a need to create momentum that will undo the damages wrought especially by residential school, and I think this means one or two more generations during which it is important that First Nations communities retain their essence, build forward from their deep strengths and survive a couple of more economic cycles that may well result in more focus on local economies. If we can do that without succumbing to the toxic forms of authoritarian leadership that sometimes arise as the shadows of this kind of change, then I think we are well placed for First Nations communities to survive and thrive in place. It may be a dream, but so was Havel’s and this is why he stands in a central place in my pantheon of inspiration as the artist who clung to a vision that translated into a bloodless transition. There is much to learn from his path.
[tags]vaclav havel[/tags]
You know how it is when you are so busy that you don’t have time to even think about your blog much less compose an erudite post about everything you are learning?
That’s me right now. But here’s a bit of what I have been doing and some things I’m thinking about:
- Deepening our work with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team including a board strategic planning retreat this weekend where we have asked board members to bring one or two people that support them in their work to contribute to the wisdom in the room. How cool a design is that?
- Working with 60 leaders from across the spectrum in Columbus Ohio where we witnessed the emergence of the “fifth organizational paradigm,” which is a fancy way of saying that we put hierarchy, circle, bureaucracy and network to work to begin a process of making Columbus a leader as a learning city. I have much more to write about that, with a paper in the works, actually.
- Cracking open the question of the “art of governance” within this new model and creating some inquires with CEOs around how to do that.
- Teaching, training and practising the art of hosting in many guises. My work this month is almost entirely in a teaching context.
- Changing my practice of “consultation” with community based on what I am learning with VIATT and other work.
- Working deeply with the art of harvesting, including collaborating with Monica Nissen and Silas Lusias on a new workbook with our thinking in it, soon to be available.
All of this is rich and fresh and finding the time to sit and reflect is hard. But if these inquiries interest you, drop a comment in the box and let’s get started on the conversations. What questions are alive for you with respect to the above?
My friend Kathy Jourdain out in Halifax recently published a nice set of thoughts on inclusion prompted by an experience she had at a leadership network meeting:
…we need to stop patting ourselves on the back about how inclusive we think we are being and begin to look at our own assumptions and beliefs and look into where the tension resides within each of us around this topic.
When asked, how will we know we are being inclusive there were quite a range of responses. To me, it’s becoming very simple. We will know we are better at being inclusive when we stop responding to the statement we are not being inclusive with all the reasons why we are and begin to ask – with honest curiosity – why that question is being asked so we can learn from the perspective of the person who made the statement who may be someone who is feeling excluded.
This is hard for most of us to do because it requires us to challenge our own assumptions about we are and how we really respond when confronted with what we consider to be accusations about not being inclusive. We want to believe we are inclusive and welcoming and it is hard to face a reality where that might not be the case.
A big question to confront when one makes a true commitment to inclusion is “Am I willing to live in a world that includes what I think I hate?”
I had a great conversation with a young activist at a recent gathering. She was talking about the need to have a world free of war and that is what she works for. She was objecting to the idea that warriorship could be a practice or that any kind of agreesiveness or violenece was acceptable in her world view. Her world view was one of peace and inclusion, except for warriors and racists. I challenged her on that and appealed to her obvious warriorship (she is festooned in tattoos and is a strong powerful woman who fights for her beliefs – what else would I call her? Midwife seemed a little off the mark! 🙂 ). I asked her “Would you rather have this fantasy world of yours, or this real world right here, the one that includes war and racism and hate and fear?” She thought for a moment and smiled and replied “this one.” And that’s a good thing because it means she is living here with us and her energy can be put to use in this world, and more importantly, she can grow to accept the fact that war is a part of this world and it can also be a shameless part of her repertoire as well. How can you fight for a world of peace, unless you admit that such a world does indeed include warriors? (And what do most warriors fight for ultimately anyway?).
All of us have shadow sides, and those sides show up in the system, as the MLA in Kathy’s article points out. But because they are shadows, we don’t notice them…we can’t see that these are us. And if we hold dear this idea of inclusion, then we need to be able to include those parts of ourselves in the world in which we live, because without bringing them into play we can’t work with them. Ignorance of difference and hate is not inclusion. Inclusion makes things messy, which is just the world we process artists love to work within, eh?