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Category Archives "Learning"

From the Parking Lot

February 3, 2025 By Culture, Democracy, Featured, First Nations, Learning, Links, Music, Poetry, Power

The light is returning to the northern hemisphere and we’ve had clear skies for the last 10 days. This is a photo of the twilight with Venus seen from my house looking southwest over Apodaca Ridge. Cloud has since rolled in and a little blast of coastal winter is coming.

Republished. The post I sent out last week had broken links.

My monthly round up of interesting links. These are posted nearly daily at my Mastodon feed.

Democracy & Politics

It has been a full month of politics here in Canada and in the US that has shaken a lot of things up.

Climate & Environment

Economics & Social Systems

Arts & Culture

Technology & Innovation

  • I Love a Bushfix. But What’s the Future of ‘Right to Repair’?
    I don’t know much about farming, so this was an interesting article that also made me realize that some of the reasons why food is expensive might have to do with farmers being bilked by their equipment manufacturers.
  • How to Remember Everything You Read | Justin Sung
    As a person with ADHD, these kinds of videos are interesting. I’m currently actively learning two languages (Italian and jazz guitar), continuing to develop my understanding of complexity, and learning how to best teach and share it.

Indigenous Leadership & Legacy

Books and music

Links are to publisher or artist sites where you can buy this art directly.

  • The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. A beautiful novel set in 2019-2020 about a haunted book store in Minneapolis during the first year of COVID and the events following George Floyd’s murder. The book is a deep story of identity, history, language and relationship.
  • The Keeper by Kelly Ervick. A graphic memoir about women’s soccer told through the eyes of a woman who comes of age in the 1980s, just as American women’s soccer bursts on to the scene.
  • Benjamin Britten’s Choral Works. Nearly all of Britten’s non-carol choral music collected and performed beautifully. The choir I sing in, Carmena Bowena, is currently adding Hymn to The Virgin to our repertoire.
  • Cassandra Wilson – New Moon Daughter. Her 1995 release explores multiple genres with cover songs and originals and is backed by musicians who have a wide range of fluency across multiple styles. Her voice sounds so much like Joni Mitchell’s voice from the same time. Deep and smokey and full in timbre.
  • Herbie Hancock – The Piano. An album of solo piano music from 1979 recorded direct-to-disc. Showcases Hancock’s improvisational chops and his curiosity about harmony.
  • Peter Hertmens Trio – Akasha. Every month I like to look for a new-to-me jazz guitarist and explore their material. This month I stumbled on the work of Belgian Peter Hertmens. Akasha is a 2018 release with organ and bass that is just a lovely collection of Hertmens’ original compositions.

The economic productivity conversation

January 31, 2025 By Democracy, Featured, Learning, Youth 3 Comments

The photo shows my neighbour Shane at the top his game, and the top of a tree, skillfully falling a 50 meter Douglas-fir.

So today is another Friday, which is the day I set aside to do some reading and reflecting, and follow my interests down various rabbit holes. And today the rabbit hole is the crisis of “productivity“ in Canada.

The term productivity crops up a lot when policy makers, and those with an interest in how economic policy affects corporate activity begin talking about their worries and fears. Productivity is simply an economic measurement that divides the gross domestic product – the value of all goods and services produced by a country – by the number of hours worked. Now right off the bat you can see that there are enormous problems with using such a simple metric as such a fundamental pillar of economic policy. For example, unpaid labour can’t be measured either in terms of output or hours worked. That was famously one of the reasons why back in the 1980s, Marilyn Waring launched her critique of GDP as an effective measurement of well-being in a society.

Over the past several years people like the deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and other economic think tanks have described Canada‘s productivity levels as a crisis. Their analyses all seem to sing from the same song book. The Canadian Dimension shows that there is a lot hidden in the measurement of productivity, including who benefits from it.

But let’s look at the stuff that’s in our current public conversation. When you look at this table, you can see that in 2023 we “produced“ only 78% of what Americans do.

Remember this is a completely arbitrary measurement. But let’s take it on it’s own terms and unpack a bit what it might mean

Here is a pretty mainstream definition and discussion about, what the term “productivity” actually means?

So in general when people talk about productivity levers, they mean things such as skilled labor, good machinery, and technology that helps workers work more efficiently. People in the private sector, often call for more investment in skilled labor (usually by calling on governments to do so they don’t have to). People who support free market economics, call for reducing regulation and taxation to enable businesses to invest more, even though very large businesses don’t tend to invest their profits in productive ways, but often engage in acquisition of smaller firms, buying back their own shares, or paying out executive bonuses. For many large companies, the production of material goods is simply the channel to sustained investor returns. I do think in an era where we have financialized everything, the discussions about productivity related to industrial equipment and skilled trades labourers seem almost archaic , if not disingenuous. But here’s a thing. When I looked at the above table, I noticed that there were several countries who outpaced the United States in productivity. You will notice that three of these countries are Nordic countries who have similarities and differences with Canada.

We are similar in that our economies are quite resource dependent, but we are very different in terms of our population density and our cultural attachment to a social safety net. While solutions that work in the Nordic countries are not directly applicable to Canada, it strikes me that we might still learn from what they do.

And glaringly and obviously, that is the role of public services and a robust social safety net, even though nobody in this country seems to talk about that in relation to the “productivity crisis.”.

If one of the easiest ways to increase productivity is to introduce more skilled labour into the workforce then it strikes me that an over abundance of investment in our education system would have both an immediate and long-term impact. Imagine what would happen if we lowered or eliminated tuition and forgave student debt. What if we supported continuing education, professional development, and skills upgrading as an ordinary part of a person‘s work life? Imagine creating employment standards that require businesses and organizations to provide two weeks a year of paid leave for learning for every employee. Imagine all the social and public enterprise that would spring up around that need to provide workers in every industry with ongoing learning and development, materials and experiences.

Imagine if these resources were also available to small businesses and entrepreneurs. People could truly choose their own adventure in life. Learning and creating as much or as little as they wanted to. Fostering creativity and inspiration and motivation and possibility to live your life how you want to.

It is also clear to me, that a robust social safety net provides peace of mind and both tangible and intangible security for citizens who can then feel more free to put their talents to best use in a society. One of the big differences between Canada and the United States is how restricted my American friends are to quitting their jobs, starting businesses, or looking for other work, if what keeps them in a dead end situation is a decent healthcare plan. In 1999 when I started my business consulting I had one client, a toddler at home, and another child shortly on the way, I didn’t think twice about quitting my government job. I wasn’t losing fundamental healthcare benefits. I lived in a housing co-op with a rent geared to my income, which had been capitalized by a federal government housing program in the 1970s. My ability to start a business was enabled by our collective social safety net. I was able to quickly save money as a result and when we had enough to move out of the co-op another family could take our place. At the time, many of my American friends who wanted to do the same, were unable to do so. They stayed in unsatisfying jobs, doing the bare minimum to get by because quitting was too financially precarious. And this was in a good economic period.

Scratch the surface and I think you find that all stories of bootstrapping are based on that fact that someone made the shoes for you in the first place.

We are in a period in this country where social services are being eroded and eliminated, where provincial governments are critically underfunding, health and education and other essential services and where the rhetoric is that the market can provide better public services than governments. But we are also in an era where our economic system has financialized everything from intellectual property to housing to water. This means that any public benefits provided by the market are only incidental results of providing a return to shareholders.

Of all the times in history, this is not the moment to erode public services that support citizens in pursuing their highest and best purposes. Nor is at the time to look to the free market to provide investments in public and social infrastructure when they have an actual fiduciary duty not to do so.

Today’s rabbit hole has convinced me more than ever that our continued hand wringing about Canada‘s productivity crisis is simply empty bluster if it isn’t also accompanied by a demonstrably robust investment in our social safety net. We are on the verge of losing so much.

During a teachers’ strike a number of years ago I asked my MLA what the core issue was, and he boiled it down to teachers demanding more money than we had in the provincial treasury. We did a little thought experiment together, and I dared him to think about what would happen if we accidentally overfunded education. Imagine the terrible fallout of small class sizes, individual learners getting attention to foster their passions, special needs professionals supporting unique learners, abundant resources and tools, and beautiful state of the art classrooms and environments for kids to learn in. Sounds bad, eh?

I still await that day with bated breath.

Thanks for reading this far. I’m really curious about this topic and I’m just learning about it, so if you have anything to add or correct me on, let’s talk about it in the comments.

Practice notes: teaching the art of participatory leadership

October 10, 2024 By Chaordic design, Complexity, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Invitation, Leadership, Learning, Open Space, Power, World Cafe 2 Comments

Some notes from three days of teaching a small cohort of leaders in the art of participatory leadership.

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When we teach the four fold practice of the art of hosting (also the art of participatory leadership) I’ve taken to doing it in a World Cafe. We use Cafe to essentially recreate the conditions that created the insights of the four fold practice 25 or so years ago. We invite people to tell stories of engaging and meaningful conversations they have experienced, look at these stories together for insights about what made them engaging and meaningful and provide and three pieces of advice to aspiring hosts and leaders about how to create engaging and meaningful conversations.

This not only helps a group discover the practice – which we teach only AFTER the World Cafe – but it also shows that the World Cafe is itself a powerful process for sharing stories, collective sensemaking and knowledge creation. In the context of our work this week, with academic researchers , leaders and administrators at a university, this can be a powerful experience as they experience first hand what it feels like to be hosted in what is essentially participatory research.

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Tennesson’s check in questions this morning featured a question that I love. “Who is a person for whom you are here this week?” I love a question like that. It focuses a learner for a moment on the fact that leadership development is not just personal development. It is learning you do to make the world a better place for others.

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Chaos and order and the Chaordic path is an important and basic introduction to complexity. It is the basic teaching that helps folks to see the polarity between ordered and unordered systems and how our work as hosts is essentially determining what move is required to bring a process into more or less order so that good work can be done. Complex facilitation, a term from the Cynefin world, is all about working with constraints, to loosen or tighten, to expand or contract, in order to create the conditions to catalyse actions or behaviours that take us in a preferred direction of travel. Its is about working with constraints to fashion a container that can become a place for emergence and then managing that emergence by harvesting, shaping, grounding or eliminating it.

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Personal work is critical for people working in complexity, or walking the Chaordic path. When confronting uncertainty and emergence, we run into reactions and emotions. Understanding the reactivity cycle and having a tool to create a subject-object shift that can first recognize the connection between the emotion and the situation and then examine that reaction helps to interrupt the cycle of rumination or fixation that can reinforce unhelpful patterns of behaviour which can make a person less resourceful in a space of uncertainty, leading to reactions like controlling, fleeing or tearing it all down.

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Adrenaline does not just create a flight/fight response. It can also induce freeze, appease, control, and comply response. None of these are helpful in leadership situations especially where there are triggering events like conflict, chaos, tough decisions, accountability and other issues on the line. Understanding the reactivity loop is the first step in shifting our responses. Working consciously with our patterns of reaction is how to disrupt those patterns and discover better ones. And it helps us stay more present and aware when we are in situations in which we are more likely to become reactive.

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My father in law Peter Frost, in his book Toxic Emotions at Work, worked from the premise that leadership creates pain. Decisions create lines and boundaries and good leaders make good decisions with an awareness of some of what will NOT happen while being committed to what will happen. This commitment to a core, once a decision is made, can free a leader up to handle the turbulence at the edge of the chosen path. There will always be those who disagree or dissent from a decision. There will sometimes be winners and losers, at subtle political levels as well as more obvious material levels. Taking the time to hear voices and build as much collaboration as possible before hand, and then working at managing the pain afterwards while committing to the decision is a really key skill. It’s never either or. It’s a dance. And the moment of a decision is a kind of madness, but some of the best leaders I have seen in action are able to do it this way.

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A half day spent on Chaordic design. There is nothing more indicative of the intention to create truly participatory meetings than the willingness to make design them collaboratively. As one young person once said to me about Open Space “I love this process because I know that whoever controls the agenda controls the meeting.” Collaborative design is fractal and can happen at all levels of an initiative. It can also be initiated at all levels of an initiative. My hypothesis is that the extent to which people will participate in a meeting is directly related to the extent to which they are connected to the necessity for and purpose of a meeting. Taking time to name these helps ensure high degrees of engagement. Literally, nothing about us without us.

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A good question that came after I taught the Chaordic stepping stones: “This seems like it would work in an egalitarian environment but what about when there are real issues of power?” Mapping the urgent necessity of the moment should surface that reality. Naming the people who need to be involved is an important moment to name who has the power to say “no” and shut this down. In my experience every new initiative has a window of opportunity and a sponsor who will keep it open for a while. Until they don’t. Knowing you have limited time is helpful to focus on what’s really important and WHO is really important to include and HOW.

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How is Open Space a leadership practice? The moment of posting and the hosting a conversation that matters is what does it. A person responds to a call and takes responsibility for something important. For calling a conversation that needs to be called. They write it up and stick it on the wall and then show up to host. In these simple acts are the hallmarks of participatory practice. Post and host. Take responsibility for what’s important.

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One of the features of things like Pro Action Cafe is the way the constraints some times force naive expertise to be present. Having four at every table means sometimes people don’t get their first choice of projects to work on. They might end up a table where they have no idea what’s happening. We always encourage them to participate anyway because these are where the oddball questions, the “dumb questions” and the new ideas come from. Never underestimate naive expertise. If you want some try to explain what you are doing at work to our 16 year old niece. You will instantly learn some new things.

Ticking away…

September 25, 2024 By Being, Culture, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Invitation, Learning, Organization 7 Comments

A detail from the monastary at Mont St Michel in Normandy showing a person overwhelmed with ripening fruit. He’s probably rushing off to his next zoom meeting.

So much has changed since the pandemic began, and it is hard to notice what is happening now. I feel like my ability to perceive the major changes that have happened to us since March 2020 is diminished by the fact that there is very little art that has been made about our experience and very few public conversation about the bigger changes that have affected organizational and community life in places like North America and Europe. All I seem able to grasp are fragments of patterns. Because I work with all kinds of clients in all sorts of different sectors and locations and situations, I do find myself getting struck with similar patterns that seem to transcend these differences, and it makes me wonder a bit about what is creating these patterns.

One of those repeated patterns is “we don’t have time” or “I’m too busy.” The effect of this is that convening people together is becoming increasingly difficult. I used to do lots of three-day planning sessions or organizational retreats where folks would come together and relax in each other’s company and open up a space for dreaming and visioning and building relationships. It was not uncommon for three or four-day courses to take place. Between 2011 and 2019, When we ran the nine-month Leadership 2020 program for the BC Federation of Community Social Services, we began and ended with five-day residential retreats on Bowen Island. We had two-hour webinars every fortnight. While some organizations found it hard to give up that amount of time (10 days away from the office on professional development training in a year!), we nevertheless put nearly 400 people through that program. Nowadays, when we do similar programs, the most we can get are three-day in-person retreats, and usually only one throughout the time together.

This is costing us big time. I am working with organizations where folks are meeting constantly but only spending time together a couple of times a year. The pandemic threw us into an emergency stop-gap approach to remote work that served the purpose of the times: to keep things going while we remained isolated. However, much of what happened throughout 2020 and 2021 was just stabilizing and concretizing these emergency measures. There wasn’t much thoughtfulness to how to make remote work and schooling work well. As a result, I think that many organizations made an over-compensation to being back together in person, and we are seeing some of that backlash now. Some people are six and seven years into their working careers who have only ever really known remote work. Their engagement patterns are radically different from those of us who came up in the days of long off-sites, of days spent in offices and work sites developing relationships and figuring things out together. And that isn’t even to mention schooling. Before the pandemic, there were some excellent programs in BC to support distance education for elementary and high school students, thoughtfully prepared and designed. When the pandemic began, teachers and professors were thrown into a completely new pedagogical context, and very, very few had any practiced ability to work in these contexts.

Of course, what makes this even worse is that we did a terrible job of managing the pandemic. Had we been able to return to office in the summer of 2020, with the virus squashed by a good public health response, it would have been an interesting time. We would have been equipped with experiences of different ways of being, what it felt like to work from home or support communities with a universal basic income. We would have run an experiment without entrenching structural constraints that made it hard to un-run the experiment. Instead, as the pandemic dragged on, temporary structural changes took hold. People moved away from their homes near their offices into cheaper and more distant communities. Public transportation funding shifted as ridership disappeared, and office leases were let go as companies and organizations realized that they could save on overhead and facilities costs. It is now far too late to be thoughtful about integrating the lessons of a global three or four month experiement into an existing society.

It feels to me that the urgency hasn’t gone away. Every day is a slew of online meetings, stacked back to back and on top of each other without any rest between sessions. Work hours are extended beyond a reasonable day, and those of us who are neuro-divergent are tipped into a world of near-constant distraction and dysregulation from the various and persistent demands on our time and attention. My first wide open day on my calendar for which I have no work committments at all is November 27, two months away. Since I turned 55 I have started taking Fridays off which means that I occasionally book full day sessions for that day. And I can move calls around and make time and space when I need to, but in general, I think my calendar probably reflects yours.

Our time and attention has been divided into hour long units, largely dictated by the default setting on our videoconferencing software. A half hour meeting feels like a blessing, as does a three hour session when we can take breaks and slow down.

My relationship to time is changing. Our relationship is changing.

I’m lamenting the loss of deep long engagement. Pre-pandemic we used to even have great online meetings that were rich and deep. People saw them as special and treated them like face to face meetings, giving the work it’s full attention. Cameras were always on.

Nowadays I bet there are heardly any meetings where everyone is focused on the task at hand. There are browser tabs open, phones to play with, tasks to accomplish while the meeting is going on. In some cases when we are doing workshops in organizations, and people have simply accepted the calendar invitation without giving any thought to how participatory it is, folks will just ghost the whole meeting. We have presented to zoom rooms full of black boxes with names in them, every camera off, every mic muted. One meeting I was involved – with elected officials no less, on the subject of engagement – I simply cut it short. No one was paying attention, no one was participating. There was nothing to do. Clearly the work wasn’t important enough, and so I just said something like “Instead of pulling teeth, I’m just going to suggest we finish this session.” A couple of people took a moment to say goodbye, and most just blinked off. I billed them my full rate.

I reallize that my life history as a facilitator has left me ill equipped for these kinds of meetings where attention is splintered into shards and no one seems to have the time to prepare or follow up becasue the next task is coming right up. Instead what I end up doing is focusing deeply on the invitation to the gathering so that everyone who comes has placed the time we have together at the top of their list. Sometimes this means shortening the meeting from two days to one day, or a half day to an hour and a half. I always warn clients that we can’t do the same quality work in half the time, so we make do. If we need a large amount of time together, we will plan something for a few months out so folks can clear their schedules. It’s now all about invitation and preparation, even more so than it ever was.

So…how are you with time and attention? What adjustments are you making to deliver quality in the meetings in which you are participating?

PS. If you want to read a good literature review on this stuff, check out “Remote work burnout, professional job stress, and employee emotional exhaustion during the COVID-19 pandemic.” i need not remind you that we are still in the pandemic; we are just pretending we aren’t.

Dark Skies and blurred edges.

September 19, 2024 By Being, Collaboration, Community, Culture, Featured, First Nations, Learning

HFN guide Qiic Qiica, wearing his Three Stars vest, leads us across the beach at Kiixin, the ancient capital of the Huu-ay-aht Nation, and a site that has been occupied for more than 5000 years.

Two hours to kill in the Departure Bay ferry terminal because I forgot to reserve a ferry. Missed the 4pm sailing by three cars. But it was worth it to stop in and have lunch with my dear friend and colleague Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier in Port Alberni. I’m grateful for my friends. And for the time to reflect on my week.

I drove through Port Alberni on the way back from Bamfield, or more accurately, the Huu-ay-aht territories, where I was invited to lead a little debrief session at the end of a two-day Dark Skies Festival. The festival was inspired by and connected to the Jasper Dark Sky Festival. It was hosted and organized by the Huu-ay-aht First Nation and Foundry Events from Calgary. I was invited by my new friend Niki Wilson who is one of the organizers of the Jasper Festival and a science communicator with a growing interest in how dialogue can help us get past polarization. We both have an interest in that, so I would say we are co-learners because these days, polarization ain’t what it used to be.

There were 30 or so of us at this event, a pilot project designed to explore the feasibility and challenges of doing dark sky events at Huu-ay-aht. Present was a mix of folks, including amateur and professional astronomers, Indigenous cultural workers, leaders and territorial guardians, folks working in Indigenous and local community economic development and Indigenous tourism. The mix and diversity meant that we could absorb presentations and conversations on topics as diverse as exoplanets, Huu-ay-aht history, marine stewardship, economic development, astrophotography, Indigenous sovereignty, and economic development. Hosting becomes very basic when a diverse group of people is collected with a shared curiosity for both offering their expertise and learning from each other. Create containers in which people are connecting and, as councillor n?aasiismis?aksup, Stella Peters remarked to me on our first afternoon, the principle of Hišuk ma c?awak comes into play, and we begin exploring connections and relationships. Everything is connected.

Huu-ay-aht history begins with the descent of the original ancestors from the sky and so the skies are important, just as the land the sea and the mountains are, to the core identity and principles of Huu-ay-aht life. I quickly got enamoured with the idea of ensuring that the sky had a matriarch to govern and guardian that part of creation. With Elon Musk polluting the very skies over our heads with an infrastructure of connectivity and delirium, the sky needs a protector.

Over the days and evenings we spent together we were absorbed by story, guided through ancient Huu-ay-aht history and culture by Qiic Qiica, through the deep passion of Emma Louden for her research on exoplanets, to the astrophotography of Jeanine Holowatuik and her despair at the sky pollution of satellites and ground light. We toured the territory by foot and by boat, and spent the night around the fire talking and drinking tea and hoping for the fog to life so we could catch a glimpse of the starry sky, the partial lunar eclipse or the auroras.

Alas, the starry night evaded us as we were blessed with two foggy days, but for me the Dark Sky experience was only enhanced by being socked in. I am lucky enough to live in a relatively dark place, but darkness is a luxury for many who live in towns and cities. I have seen folks equally awed by the thick, inky darkness of the forest under cloud and fog as they are under a sky full of stars on a clear, dark night. Darkness is another of our diminishing commons in this world, and in this respect, the fog and cloud are a blessing, restoring a healthy circadian rhythm and deepening the rest we need. There is perhaps nothing better for understanding how arbitrary the boundaries between living things, landscapes and the universe are than a dark, foggy night where every edge is slightly ambiguous, and you are unsure if the sounds and sensations you feel are coming from inside or out.

I have long felt that on the west coast of Vancouver Island, in all the Nuu-Cha-Nulth communities in which I have been fortunate enough to travel and work. The west coast is one of those places where experiments like the Three Stars Dark Sky Festival seem more possible. First Nations have important and intact jurisdictions in these territories and are actively engaged in massive cultural resurgence. This means that relationships are constantly being reimagined between colonial governments, settler communities, foundations like the Clayoqout Biosphere Trust and Indigenous governments and communities and people who are governing, directing and stewarding their lands and resources with more and more of the recovered authority that was wrested from them over the past 200 years.

The first place I ever visited in BC was Hot Springs Cove in Hesquiaht territory back in 1989. We flew, drove and boated from Toronto to Hot Springs without stopping in Vancouver or anywhere else along the way. I think from that moment, my view of possibility for what could happen in this part of the world has always been informed by the week I spent, staying with my friend Sennan Charleson’s family, fishing herring, listening every night to Simon and Julia Lucas tell stories of all kinds. Coming out here wakes up those experiences in me, and I always return from the Nuu-Cha-Nulth worlds, which are a little different and a lot better for being there.

I hope this Dark Sky Festival thrives. There were so many ideas generated and so much goodwill created between folks this week. So much good can come from that.