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?
Fascinating article in the New York Times about the norther area of Somalia where people have built peace in an incredibly turbulent region by mixing indigenous governance with democratic participation, using elders and tribal leaders to harness attachment to clans AND to transcendent principles such as independence and peace. Some quotes:
“You can’t be donated power,” said Dahir Rayale Kahin, the president of the Republic of Somaliland, which has long declared itself independent from the rest of Somalia. “We built this state because we saw the problems here as our problems. Our brothers in the south are still waiting – till now – for others.”
…
Its leaders, with no Western experts at their elbow, have devised a political system that minimizes clan rivalries while carving out a special role for clan elders, the traditional pillars of Somali society. They have demobilized thousands of the young gunmen who still plague Somalia and melded them into a national army. They have even held three rounds of multiparty elections, no small feat in a region, the Horn of Africa, where multiparty democracy is mostly a rumor. Somalia, for one, has not had free elections since the 1960s.
…
Somaliland, like Somalia, was awash with weapons and split by warring clans. Their first step was persuading the militiamen to give up their guns – a goal that still seems remote in the south. They moved slowly, first taking the armed pickups, then the heavy guns and ultimately leaving light weapons in the hands of the people. Again, this stood in contrast to the south, where in the early 1990s thousands of American marines and United Nations peacekeepers failed to put a dent in the clan violence.
“We had a higher purpose,” said Abdillahi M. Duale, Somaliland’s foreign minister. “Independence. And nobody in the outside world was going to help us get there.”
…
But the one issue that unites most Somalilanders is recognition. Somaliland has its own money, its own flag, its own national anthem and even its own passport.
“And we have peace, a peace owned by the community,” said Zamzam Adan, a women’s rights activist. “You’d think in this part of the world, that would count for something.”
[tags]somalia, somalialand[/tags]
Interesting report from a group I hadn’t heard of before, the Centre for Innovative and Entrepreneurial Leadership. THey have just released a publication called “Coping with Growth and Change: The state of leadership in rural BC.” I have an interest in this given that I teach and facilitate collaborative leadership and I live ina rural community in BC.
The report’s authors write:
“Many people see leadership development assisting with issues like change, economic diversification, youth attraction, innovation and collaboration, key ingredients to 21st Century success for rural communities.”
Many communities reported that youth are moving away and young families are not moving in. “Young people between the ages of 25 and 34 are the ones who typically start families and businesses, critical issues for communities,” says report co-author Mike Stolte, President-Elect of the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation (CRRF).
“The theme of youth leadership came up time and time again,” stated report co-author Stacy Barter, of CIEL. “Communities say they don’t know how to engage younger people. The established leaders are getting older and many of them are feeling burned out.”
One of the things that is exhausting community leaders, according to the study, is the increasing challenge of creating dialogue and communication between groups. “Many communities told us they want to work together, but they just don’t know how,” said Barter. “They want to learn how to practice collaborative leadership.”
The report shows that many communities are caught in a bind. “If special care is not taken to conserve the qualities fostering our community’s distinctive character, critical dimensions of its image and identity may be lost.” “These issues are dividing communities,” said Barter.
“The kind of leadership training they are asking for, collaborative leadership, involves the skills of leading a community through these differences. Without a new kind of leadership, they are telling us, the differences will continue to divide people, and the rate of growth will continue to overwhelm them.”
It seems there is an appetite everywhere for this kind of leadership. Yesterday talking with a friend involved in the biodeisal energy he was speculating that the shift in leadership models to something ore dialogic and less top down is a generational one. He was remarking that it seemed as if the current generation of 35-55 year olds were assuming th emantle of leadership and were altering by flattening structures that concentrate power. Of course my friend Jon Husband has been predicting this for a long time. He calls the idea wirearchy, informed as it is by the ways in which networked structures change power systems and leadership lenses. This report is encouraging to me, as it says that more and more people in governance systems (who tend to cling to the status quo) are finally loosening the kinds of leadership styles that characterize local government, and they are looking for some other way to deal with the stresses of the work they have to do.
[tags]local government, british columbia, rural communities, wirearchy[/tags]
Via Johnnie, comes a sweet elucidation from David Weinberger about the creeping relgion of “accountabalism:”
The Folly of Accountabalism
Accountability has gone horribly wrong. It has become “accountabalism,” the practice of eating sacrificial victims in an attempt to magically ward off evil.
The emphasis on accountability was an understandable response to some god-awful bookkeeping-based scandals. But the notion would never have evolved from a buzzword into the focus of voluminous legislation if we hadn’t also been lured by the myth of precision: Because accountability suggests that there is a right and a wrong answer to every question, it flourishes where we can measure results exactly. It spread to schools–where it is eating our young–as a result of our recent irrational exuberance about testing, which forces education to become something that can be measured precisely.
When such disincentives as the threat of having to wear an orange jumpsuit for eight to ten years didn’t stop the Enron nightmare and other bad things from happening, accountabalism whispered two seductive lies to us: Systems go wrong because of individuals; and the right set of controls will enable us to prevent individuals from creating disasters. Accountabalism is a type of superstitious thinking that allows us to live in a state of denial about just how little control we individuals have over our environment.
Accountabalism manifests itself in a set of related beliefs and practices:
It looks at complex systems that have gone wrong for complex reasons and decides the problem can be solved at the next level of detail. Another set of work procedures is written, and yet more forms are printed up. But businesses are not mechanical, so we can’t fine-tune them by making every process a well-regulated routine. Accountabalism turns these complex systems into merely complicated systems, sacrificing innovation and adaptability. How can a company be agile if every change or deviation requires a new set of forms?
Accountabalism assumes perfection–if anything goes wrong, it’s a sign that the system is broken. That’s not true even of mechanical systems: Entropy, friction, and manufacturing tolerances ensure that no machine works perfectly. Social systems are incapable of anything close to perfection, so if something goes wrong in one, that need not mean the system is broken. If an employee cheats on expenses by filling in taxi receipts for himself, the organization doesn’t have to “fix” the expense-reporting system by requiring that everyone travel with a notary public.
Accountabalism is blind to human nature. For example, it assumes that if we know we’re being watched, we won’t do wrong–which seriously underestimates the twistiness of human minds and motivations. We are capable of astounding degrees of self-delusion regarding the likelihood of our being caught. Further, by overly formalizing processes, accountabalism refuses to acknowledge that people work and think differently. It eliminates the human variations that move institutions forward and provide a check on the monoculture that accounts for most disastrous decisions. It also makes work no fun.
Accountabalism bureaucratizes and atomizes responsibility. While claiming to increase individual responsibility, it drives out human judgment. When a sign-off is required for every step in the work flow, those closest to a process lack the leeway to optimize or rectify it. Similarly, by assuming that an individual’s laxness caused a given problem–if so-and-so hadn’t been asleep at the switch or hadn’t gotten greedy or hadn’t assumed that somebody else would clean up the mess, none of this would have happened–accountabalism can miss systemic causes of failure, even, ironically, as it responds to the problem by increasing the system’s reach.
Accountabalism tries to squeeze centuries of thought about how to entice people toward good behavior and dissuade them from bad into simple rules by which individuals can be measured and disciplined. It would react to a car crash by putting stop signs at every corner. Bureaucratizing morality or mechanizing a complex organization gives us the sense that we can exert close control. But grown-ups prefer clarity and realism to happy superstition.
[tags]accountability, David Weinberger[/tags]