Since 2004, the Art of Hosting has been offered every autumn on Bowen Island, British Columbia, where I live. I was a participant in the first one and since then have been on the hosting team every year. We love hosting people here, as the island itself is such an incredible place to be and to sink into relationship with one another as we learn and explore participatory leadership and facilitation. What I especially love about this offering is the people that we work withe on our teams and the questions we get to be in together.
In the past all of our retreats have been residential, and as we ease out of COVID restrictions we have decided that we want to offer an Art of Hosting in this region, but we’re not yet ready to make it residential. And so we are proud to announce that from September 26-28, 2022 to be held in Vancouver. You can register here.
Our team this year will consist of me, Caitlin Frost, Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier and Kris Archie. All four of us have stewarded the Art of Hosting in this region for many years working with Indigenous communities, non-profits, governments, philanthropy, and businesses in a huge variety of settings. We bring a deep set of experiences with the Art of Hosting,using the four fold practice in incredibly diverse contexts, working with participatory methods and leadership development with equity and decolonization lenses and putting the tools and practices to use in contexts ranging from personal work to system change around social services, mainstream philanthropy, and governance.
These three partners are some of my closest collaborators in this work and I think it is fair to say that we are all mutually inspired by each other. I am excited to see the growing list of people coming to join us for this event. The learning and creativity in the room will be amazing.
We would love to have you join us. Click the link to learn more about the program and please come and join us in Vancouver in the fall.
For about the past ten years or so I’ve been playing with various ways to teach Cynefin to groups. In every instance I start with some kind of experiential exercise to help people notice that there are different kinds of problems and situations that require us to act in different kinds of ways.
I have a couple of posts on different p[hysical exercises you can do with groups when you are face to face, and they are documented here and here. My little obsession with gamifying Cynefin led to being invited to contribute a chapter on this process in the Cynefin book as well.
Working on-line the past few years, I’ve tried a few exercises as well. The other day in teaching the framework I went through these instructions. (Number four I borrowed from Ciaran Camman.)
- Find something in your space that you can operate or solve so easily that a child could do it. When you find it think about how you might even automate it.
- Next, find something in your space that, if it failed, you would have to call in an expert to fix it for you. Notice how that is similar or different from the previous item.
- Now find something in your space that, if it failed, it would be a disaster and whatever you had planned for the day would go out the window, becasue you would have to deal with it. If it did fail, what’s the very first thing you would do?
- Finally, find something in your space that you are using for a different purpose other than the one it was intended for. If you were to give it a new name to reflect it’s new function, what would you call it?
Of course the first thing corresponds to the Clear domain in Cynefin where everything is simple and obvious and automation is possible. The second thing is complicated,and requires expertise and analysis to fix. The third thing is chaotic and requires the establishment of immediate action to get a handle on the situation. And the fourth thing is Complex and is an example of exaptive practice and how that changes the identity of a thing to the point where it’s possible that you won’t even recognize it anymore. When I taught this the other day, I referenced a 5 centimeter thick History of Ireland that I used for years as a monitor stand. When I went to lend that book to someone I couldn’t find it, despite that fact that I had been looking at it for YEARS.
i like teaching Cynfin as a framework that helps us to know how to make decisions and act. In the online world it’s often hard to study action in embodied ways, as we are so static and disconnected. But this seemed to do the trick and the participants in the course really got it.
Oh and just a note, I generally do the Complexity exercise last, because when I teach Cynefin, I am usually doing so as an introduction to complexity and so I leave us on the complex domain so we can talk about that more. This is also how I first had Cynefin presented to me – through Dave Snowden’s classing “How to Organize a Children’s Party” in which he actually starts with Chaos.
There is no really easy way to write this, so perhaps its just best to be polemical about it.
I am no longer going to be supporting cishet white men who are running for office. Basically guys that look like me. We’ve had our run, we have propagated genocide, mass destruction and murder, war, criminal economic inequality and the destruction of the life support systems of the planet we live on and now I think it is time to stop. Of course folks will “not all…” me on this, but just stop. Our role now is to support different people than us. Because what happens when we feel the MEREREST slipping away of power and influence is that we do ridiculous things like driving hundreds of trucks into the middle of Ottawa and demanding that the unelected Senate assist us in the overthrow of the government. Or worse. Much worse.
We do shit like this:
Just read the replies on that thread. I’m not going to tell you how bad it is.
Policy making matters. The people who make policy matter. Our job now is to use our power, money and influence to get behind different decision makers and support their election to office, or their appointment to the judiciary. because we need different decisions and we need to change the face and experience base of those making those decisions.
Three years ago the Canadian inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls concluded – quite rightly – that what has happened and continues to happen to Indigenous people in Canada constitutes genocide. And what continues to happen to women, non-binary, and trans folks is a good indicator of a country’s character and perspective. In Louisiana if this law goes through, any woman who terminates a pregnancy because it is ectopic and life threatening is a murderer. A women who has an unimplanted fertilized egg that flows out with her period is technically a murderer. And a judge that seeks to stay the charges is to be automatically impeached.
Let us stop being outraged and surprised at this continued pursuit of genocidal policies and fascist radical Christian extremism, for none of this is new. Let us instead change the game by changing the people with their hands of power. Make laws not blog posts.
The other day on the Art of Hosting facebook group, my friend Cedric Jamet asked folks for some materials about the four fold practice, which is the basic essence of the Art of Hosting. Toke Moeller weighed in with his latest posters from a session he was leading with graduate students in sustainability leadership.
Toke was, of course, one of the originals who put the four fold practice together and like all good generative frameworks, it has changed over time and it gets expressed in different ways depending on context. But the essence is that it balances self-awareness and focused practice on a life of participation in the world with the good leadership practices of hosting others and co-creating useful things. I’ve written about it alot. Upon this framework hangs a world of practices from meditation and reflection, to good dialogic practice, to facilitation and participatory leadership and decision making.
I have worked with Toke enough to know that what he probably did was to teach these four practices and then have people discuss where they show up in their own lives, and so I thought I would take his words, in bold, and reflect a little as if I was a student in the class. The prompt question Toke asked his class was “How may my personal practices enhance me and my leadership for a more peaceful and sustainable world?”
Host yourself to know yourself – be awake. These days I am finding myself on autopilot alot. Same rhythm, same kinds of activities, all done at the same desk, the same way. It has been a hard winter following on a hard year in terms of mental health, and a couple of holidays including one just ending now have served to create some breaks in my routine. I will see what i come back to, but one ritual I will be retaining is an early morning contemplative walk and 20 minute sit in a place near my house, next to the sea. To get out in the morning has been a godsend, and my physical and mental health needs this. All in service of jagging myself awake. I feel like I am in danger of a mental slumber. And so, break a pattern to awaken a pattern.
Be hosted to grow the listener and student in yourself – be a curious participant. The last two years have deprived me of one of my favourite activities, which is to sit and listen to others tell stories. I haven’t been travelling, I haven’t been sitting at the pub welcoming whoever walks in. There is no better way to develop your curiosity than to sit and listen to another person telling a story. Social media doesn’t cut it. I find myself too quick to respond, often unable to discern nuance. My curiosity gets pinched down to a small sliver and my judgement, fired by brain chemicals, gets all the fun. So practicing listening, to the forest and the sea, to the conversations of my neighbours in community, trying to figure out what to do as we come back together again, with a two year absence of joint history making. Listening to clients. I am looking forward to my first hands on facilitation gigs (not open space) where listening is a key part of what we will be doing. I’m all ears.
Step up to host others so they can grow their listener and the lifelong student in them. Years ago Toke and nI were sitting by my wood stove talking about teaching as we were preparing to deliver an Art of Hosting on Bowen Island. We were kind of humble-bragging – if I’m honest – about how we weren’t really teachers, but life long students. Caitlin, listening from the kitchen asked us a piercing question. She, who comes from a four generation line of teachers said “What is it about being teachers that makes you so afraid to be one?” I think we eventually answered that it was something to do with not wanting to lose our curiosity and learning in the role of the teacher-expert. She continued to point out that people were actually coming to the workshop to learn from us, and that we could also learn alongside them. She was being kind. There is a both-and about this. We decided to call ourselves teacher-learners and for me this practice captures that. Host other so that they become teacher-learners too.
Host together – co-create and co-lead: build capacity to build more capacity. It has been a long time since I saw Toke in person. It was, I think, many years ago during a gathering on harvesting practices in Halifax. We spent an hour together having lunch in a restaurant and talked about where our journeys were taking us. Toke was recovering from a small stroke and this was the first overseas trip he had taken. The stroke had imposed some constraints on what he could do and how his mind operated, and he and I talked about how, at a certain age, one moves into building capacity. You stop doing things for people and you build the capacity for them to do it too. And that way, you can continue being a part of the things you love doing while also being sure that those things could be sustained in a community of practitioners. That has been my life these days. “Support” is how I approach everything. I do it with money, time, opportunities, credibility, connections…whatever. I support causes and people that are important to me including lifting up Indigenous leaders and communities, younger dialogue and complexity practitioners, young and developing soccer players and many others. I have learned a lot from Toke and others and all of it was freely given, and for a gift to work it must be given away. So I give it away.
Now, if it interests you, have a go at answering Toke’s prompting question here in the comments or elsewhere on the open web, where we can share and compare.
Today Ontario goes back into lockdown, complete with curfews and the enforcement of the situation by police officers with the discretion to charge people with a violation of the public health orders. This is all being done without any significant new programs to support those who otherwise have to travel or move to non-essential jobs – including night shifts – because while the work may be non-essential, living without income is not. It is a situation that is going to impact marginalized people of all kinds.
This is an unprecedented public health crisis. We are battling an easily spread, lethal virus which causes incurable effects in many who catch it. It requires our health care systems to be overly careful when handling COVID-19 patients. The purpose of lockdowns has always been to manage the spread of the virus. Complexity geeks will know that connections are an important enabling constraint in self-organizing systems. Break connections, and you slow the ability of an overwhelming crisis to take shape. In theory, breaking connections should be the easiest thing to do but the combination of mixed messages and the unwillingness of governments to incentivize isolation over interaction has meant that places like Ontario need to take harsher measures: the imposition of boundaries on behaviour.
When the pandemic began I was impressed at the speed with which our government mobilized resources to ensure that people were able to choose isolation over interaction. In Canada, the Canada Emergency Response Benefit program was a stunning, accessible, guaranteed income program that provided $2000 a month of taxable income to anyone who wanted it. There was no means test, the application website was straight forward, and payments came fairly quickly. In addition, the federal and provincial governments launched a series of programs to protect tenants and businesses from being evicted, to extend credits and grants to businesses, to subsidize wages, to defer mortgages, and to relieve student debt payments.
These programs had the effect of initially “flattening the curve” the term used to describe the collective social effort to prevent spikes in hospitalizations which would allow for emergency services to properly treat COVID patients and not reach a situation like they did early on in Italy, where death rates spiked because doctors were forced to choose between who would live and who would die. For a couple of months, we all pulled together and with Herculean effort of citizens, businesses and government, we flattened the curve for the first wave
The implementation of these social programs had the effect of eliminating a whle lot of personal debt among many other positive effects. For people whose income is dependent on minimum wage jobs, the support of $2000 a month was, in many cases, all they needed to pay off bills that had been dogging them for years, make a rent payment that was overdue, get back on their feet. It hasn’t been perfect, and certainly folks on social assistance, folks with disabilities and students fell through the cracks. And the money that flowed to everyone who applied for the CERB went directly into the economy. It didn’t get tied up in equity, investments, or real estate. It went to the purchase of goods and services in unprecedented ways. This had the effect of enriching many billionaires and banks, but also of supporting local businesses and economies, and despite the potential for it, our economy has not entered a depression. Hard times for sure, but still afloat.
The CERB payment – and universal basic incomes in general – are the ideal form of stimulus for an economy. First, it is a policy of care, providing resources directly to people in need without strings attached, which allows people to quickly organize their own lives and allows the cash to immediately enter the economy. For conservatives who praise a market economy, trickle down economics is actually a terrible idea, because giving billions directly to the top of the economic food chain through subsides and tax breaks does not encourage a market at all. It encourages an oligarchy were very few people get unimaginably rich without any actual purchasing power being introduced into a market.
Markets self-organize around innovation and creativity, but only if there is spending money in the economy, for those who organize well will capture it. During the spring and summer, in my own community I witnessed the conversation and the call to action on local economy blossom like it never had before, during all the years I was on our Community Economic Development Community. There was money in our community, a need to stay home, and local businesses continually made their case for support. We had very few local businesses here shut down, despite these challenging times. That isn’t to say that things haven’t been challenging for my friends who own businesses, but a combination of government supports, mutual aid, and spending money circulating locally created the conditions for a healthy, local economy.
The CERB was designed for people to spend, and that is what happened. Many of the people who received the money had very little savings to begin with, and so when the money came in it went right back out the door into the economy, Banks got richer, Amazon got richer and the people that own these companies got richer too. Substantially richer at a rate that was faster than they had ever experienced.
Last month the federal government announced that it was now investigating something like 400,000 CERB applications that were apparently irregular. In its haste to set the program up, apparently the government failed to communicate a key aspect of the program criteria: that you needed to have made a net income of $5000 in the previous tax year as a self-emplyed person in order to be eligible for the benefit. Here is the crux of the problem:
In the first few weeks of the CERB rollout, CRA call-centre agents were given wrong instructions for how self-employed Canadians would be assessed for their eligibility. To be eligible, self-employed Canadians had to have received more than $5,000 in income in 2019 or in the previous 12 months before applying.
While eligibility was meant to be based off net income after expenses, CRA agents were provided written instructions that incorrectly stated that gross income, not net, was how someone’s eligibility for CERB would be determined. That information was then passed along to callers seeking clarity.
At the same time, the word “net” didn’t appear on CERB applications or the CRA’s “Who is eligible” page. It wasn’t until sometime after April 21 — more than two weeks after applications opened — that the CRA quietly update a Q&A page to include specific language on net income.
The problem now is that the government is now enforcing repayment orders for the money that was received. And of course people don’t have that money. They don’t have it because they did what they were told they should do with it, and used it to stay afloat during the early days of the pandemic while staying at home to flatten the curve.
But the money HASN’t disappeared. Not at all. the 400,000 people who took four months of CERB money have injected $32 billion dollars into the economy, much of it local, but a significant amount of it going to banks, utility companies and large consumer and service outlets like Costco and Amazon, and Netflix and Zoom. This video explains why.
I am at a loss to understand why the government – who has admitted to screwing up the CERB criteria communications – is punishing the people who have supported the survival of the economy during a once in a century economic event. During the spring we were all told that we needed to do our part to get this virus under control. We all did our part, we stayed home AND stimulated the economy. And now 400,000 people are being saddled with $8000 or more in debt.
Nationalizing debt is perhaps one of the best things we can do as a society. The CERB did that, providing for people to cover their debts and pay their bills. The government used the near zero interest rates to borrow to make that possible – thereby assuming consumer and business debt at far better rates than consumers and businesses were getting, and despite mortgage deferrals and lost revenues, the six Canadian chartered banks STILL made about $13 billion in net income in the fourth quarter of 2020 alone. The money hasn’t disappeared: it has moved. If governments need it back, they need only tax the richest businesses in the country with a one time pandemic tax totalling $32 billion and all is well.
But I suspect that this isn’t the issue, and I don’t expect this tax to be implemented. There is a stench of the age-old stigma associated with poor folks, that they are not deserving of government support, that “free money” is a risky thing to just give away without a means test, without accountability and without any sense of “deserving it.”
So Ontario is going into lockdown. Citizens once again are being asked to do their part to flatten the curve, and it is a challenge many folks will take up with relish IF they also feel a reciprocity from their governments to support and enable them to do that. But that isn’t happening. Not only are there no new supports for people but the federal government is chasing down repayments, with no forgiveness, and banks are stopping the mortgage deferral program. This is terrible public policy for a start, it is poor economics, even by conservative, market-based standards and most important, it is immoral.
There is a massive gulf between the top and the bottom in our society, a direct result of 40 years of the biggest wealth transfer in human history. This gap has created two different realities. The folks with the resources who are able to run for public office, garner the approval of their parties, and be given the reins of power are screened into this class of the wealthy. Their lives are very different from the lives of the majority of citizens who are living paycheck-to-paycheck or who are on social assistance or who have no means of support at all. The fact that several political leaders from all parties have been recently caught travelling abroad over Christmas, when governments were locking down everyone else, is a stark and ostentatious indicator of this difference.
Along with the wealth and income gap comes a sense that “rules don’t apply to me” because, actually, that seems to be the case. Despite bungled messaging and unclear criteria, the federal government is enforcing repayment orders against 400,000 Canadians, almost none of whom committed fraud in fact or intention with this benefits program. And yet, there are no new taxes, no special one time claw back for those that actually now have the money. Instead of THEM having to do paperwork and liquidating a few assets to repay the federal government and get that money back into the economy, they make plans for heading out of the country to their second properties.
Public policy that is made in the interests of the wealthy few at the expense of the many is immoral. For public leaders to appeal that “we are all in this together” when we are clearly not is an abdication of integrity. The federal government needs to immediately suspend the actions of the CRA in pursuing these repayments, and furthermore, as a country, we really need to push for a universal basic income, because we now have evidence, during that pandemic, that it works.
If you are in Canada, you can support this by lending your support to Leah Gazan who is sponsoring a House of Commons motion that reads:
That, in the opinion of the House, the government should introduce legislation and work with provincial and territorial governments and Indigenous peoples to ensure that a guaranteed livable basic income (i) accounting for regional differences in living costs, (ii) for all Canadians over the age of 18, including single persons, students, families, seniors, persons with disabilities, temporary foreign workers, permanent residents, and refugee claimants, (iii) paid on a regular basis, (iv) not requiring participation in the labour market, education or training in order to be eligible, (v) in addition to current and future government public services and income supports meant to meet special, exceptional and other distinct needs and goals rather than basic needs, including accessible affordable social housing and expanded health services, replace the Canada Emergency Response Benefit on an ongoing and permanent basis in a concerted effort to eradicate poverty and ensure the respect, dignity and security of all persons in respect of Canada’s domestic and international legal obligations.
House of Commons Motion M-46 Guaranteed Liveable Basic Income
This is not the final answer, but it is an important step to establishing the will of the House of Commons to undertake this project. It will be interesting to see who votes against it, and I suspect I will not be surprised. I think Leah Gazan is one of those rare people in Parliament that is able to understand how to use the tools of government to govern from the perspective of common citizens, those whose voices are meant to be primary in the House of Commons. She is doing so from an opposition bench, and while a house motion is a weak tool, she is relentless in pursuing this course of action and I believe she needs the support of many citizens from across the country to elevate and amplify her voice.
This is my contribution to that. It is time.