For those of you that read in newsfeeders you won’t have noticed that I changed the template of the blog again. I think it’s now a little easier to read, but let me know.
At any rate, light blogging this month. I have been involved in some incredibly draining work of late, the most recent of which required me to be substantially bigger than I normally have been. I was holding space for a day long circle dialogue on Aboriginal child welfare in British Columbia. It was a full day with many important people from throughout the system who came together to look at how we might work at changing the deepest assumptions about the child welfare system to focus on interdependence. A very rewarding day, and a few reports are forthcoming, but I found myself deeply tired after this event. On reflection, I think it was largely a result of holding myself in solid purpose, and deeply committed to facilitating a process that took a conversation to a place none of us could have guessed. It was, in the words of Donald Rothberg, committed action with nonnattachment to outcome. And it’s a very draining thing to do.
When I say that the day required me to “be bigger” I mean, metaphorically speaking, that process work like this requires us to be both big enough to contain the energy and the edges of the circle, and small enough that we don’t get in the way of what is emerging. It is to be both committed to the action and invisible enough that the outcome arises collectively, without personal baggage attached. And there was another level at work here too, in which I needed to embody the values that were being articulated by the group. They were saying for example, that the Aboriginal child welfare system needs to be based on the assumption that no one person can make a decision for a child. For a facilitator hearing that who is willing to embody this deep change in real time, I was required to be in a present moment of reflective practice: “How can I embody this emerging value and validate the group’s sense that we need to base process on this value? Right now, even?” Very tiring to do that and still hold the container open.
I mention Buddhist teacher Donald Rothberg because today I was listening to this podcast where he speaks of this kind of work. Towards the end of this talk, he mentions characteristics of committed action with nonattachment to outcomes:
- Appreciating the journey. If results are not everything, then we can have a greater appreciation for the journey we are on, and we are better able to live in the present moment and be of best use there.
- Recognizing that there is no failure. This is not to absolve oneself of responsibility. It is rather to adopt the mindset that every experience contains the seeds of great teaching. We can learn from everything that happens if we view “results” as simply another point in time at which we reflect, and that we undertake that reflection with no judgement. Rather we seek to evaluate based on what we can learn in the present in order to adjust our future actions. Developing these reflective capacities is a central practice of good facilitation, good leadership and good action.
- Long term view. Accepting the fact that failure is really just an approach to results means that we are freer to see the impact of our work over the long term. Rothberg mentions the founder of Sarvodaya, Dr. AT Ariyaratne who says that the peace plan for the civil war in Sri Lanka must be a 500 year plan because the roots of the conflict extend back that far. There is no way we can measure results if there is a 500 year view, but if there is to be true, deep and sustainable peace in Sri Lanka, the solution must come from the true, deep and sustainable foundation. Nonattachment to outcomes allows us to see deeper causes and longer term sustainable solutions. We work then on a vector, in a direction and not towards an end in itself.
- Resting in the mystery of how things happen. I can think of dozens of small decisions in my life that have resulted in huge life changes. Deciding one afternoon to visit a friend who offered me a job which set my career in motion. Waking up one morning and deciding it was worth it to brave a autumn sleet storm to see a live CBC radio broadcast, and meeting my life partner that morning as a result. Everyone has these experiences. The fact is that nonattachment to outcomes admits the possibilities that the smallest things might actually have the biggect impact. You may spend the next year at work toughing it out to bring a project to life, working late hours and always being the last one to leave the office. The project may be a success or not, but what if the relationship you develop with the evening security guard, the simple greetings and the occaisional short chat were enough to bring him from a state of despondant isolation to appreciating life again? Sometimes people can be brought back from the brink of isolation and suicide by people reaching out to them. That may be the most important result of your year long project.
It’s a serious practice, this idea of being fully committed and nonattached to outcomes, but recently it has helped me get through some heavy work. I wonder where it shows up in your life and practice?
As Michael and I make some progress on our writing, I find that I have been assembling together bits and pieces of writing I have done over the years and putting some papers up at my site.
Today I want to invite you to have a look at a new paper called “Six observations about seeing” which is composed from some blog posts I made 18 months ago or so.
As always, comments are welcome.
Inspired by a project I have been involved in with the Anecdote boys and Viv McWaters, I have written a paper on language and leadership practices in convening a dialogue. Here’s the introduction…
William Isaacs book Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together is continually inspiring reading. It equates very well with the practices that we are teaching fo Open Space facilitation and it is a useful guide for other forms of process facilitation. In the book, Isaacs describes four fields of conversation, essentially politeness, breakdown, inquiry and flow. Within each of these four fields of dialogue, there are a number of practices to cultivate and things to do as the nature of the dialogue keeps changing. In a short chapter but important on convening dialogue, Isaacs outlines a guide for leadership in each of these four areas. I have been using this guide more and more frequently and, in addition to Isaacs’ work, I have been collecting questions and language approaches to help move deeper into these dialogic spaces. What follows is a brief overview of the four fields, Isaacs guide to navigating the fields and the questions with which I have been working.
The whole paper is yours to read. I’d appreciate any comments.
I have been listening this evening to a podcast (.mp3) by Buddhist teacher James Foster on the single most important question in any spiritual path: so what?
That’s it. That is the question. It is neither a trivial question nor one that is completley cavalier. In fact it is a profoundly important question in very many realms and it is the utter foundation of the grounding practices that take facilitation, leadership and work from the esoteric to the real.
So heading into a week of teaching, I think I will anchor a lot of what I am doing around this question and play with the way in which the energy of this simple inquiry grounds everything.
[tags]James+Foster, Buddhism[/tags]
Everyone wants action – that’s the current business buzzword. Dialogue and conversation seem fine “but they have to focus on action.” It’s almost growing tiresome to hear it.
The problem with the mantra is that people rarely have any idea of what action really looks like. Very few people think through to the personal responsibility THEY might take in animating action. Even less see conversation and dialogue AS action.
But today in my email box, comes confirmation that action is intimately connected to dialogue and when passion and reposnibility come together, real things happen.
Back in the fall, my business partner Lyla Brown and I conducted a series of Aboriginal engagement meetings for the Victoria Urban Development Agreement process (the report is here). As part of the work, we held an Open Space Technology meeting with more than 100 community members to discuss and implement ideas that had been raised in a series of focus groups. One of the conversations at the Open Space gathering was on food security, and the results of that work have now borne fruit. Today, I received a press release in my inbox from one of the community agencies that took up the implementation challenge and ran with it:
Aboriginal Group Promotes Food Security as humble start in reducing Aboriginal poverty as Big Business
VICTORIA – Inner City Aboriginal Society (ICAS), by promoting an aboriginal community dialogue on food security, is actively working towards reducing poverty as big business.
As a reaction to the fact that an estimated 50% of the street-homeless community in Victoria are aboriginal – and that current funded strategies are focused on charity based or service provision approaches – ICAS has organized itself to encourage a move towards a third option. ICAS is facilitating a series of Aboriginal Sharing Groups on Food Security at the end of March to provide information about food security issues, to explore cultural aspects of food security and to set some direction for further action. The discussions on food security represent – for those in the Inner City Aboriginal Society – the restoration of economic justice by transitioning the aboriginal community from victim to dignity status. Bruce Ferguson, one of the founding directors of ICAS expressed his opinion on the Aboriginal Sharing Groups on Food Security.
“Imagine if 50% of the budgets of all the downtown service providers and dedicated funds for the street community went to aboriginal people to empower ourselves….need I say more. Empowerment of the marginalized cant happen over night, but at least with taking back the dignity of feeding ourselves, we can one day reach equality with other Canadians…”
“The work of ICAS in food security dialogue will provide a challenge that moves the aboriginal community away from being objects of charity and-or clients of service providers towards strategies and languages that talk about empowerment and self-reliance” adds Rose Henry, long time aboriginal activist and recent candidate for City Council.
The Aboriginal Sharing Groups will be held between March 22nd and April 3rd.
Action is passion bounded by responsibility. Action becomes easier when there is a strategic architecture for acting. That architecture is forged in the fire of conversations about what matters, where people create relationships, connections and shared vision about what might be. When that action infrastructure is laid down, acting becomes fairly basic. When that architecture can be created from the bottom-up and then used by those who actually created it, then the action becomes both efficient and powerful.
The interesting thing about this series of community conversations on food security is that they have been taking place outside of the official program of the Victoria Agreement. The agreement itself is not yet signed, and there are many planning conversations going on behind the scenes to tranisition the structure of the inter-governmental relationships from working groups to action groups. While this has been happening, Inner City Aboriginal Society and its partners have been leveraging the strategic architecture that was formed in the community Open Space event to put this topic and approach in front of the community. They are seeking solutions to the problem that avoids a dependant relationship on governments and “charities” and in doing so, they are planning, organizing and meeting without government or charitable support.
Leadership, even in business, is about walking your talk and both creating and leveraging the strategic architecture to find a way to take responsibility for what one loves. ICAS is showing the way here.