As the year comes to a close, I think I have struck a nice balance with Mastodon. It really is a platform much better suited to micro-blogging than twitter ever was. It provides enough characters to properly comment on one link, and invites conversation. And so I THINK I will be mostly posting links from my daily reading there and summing them up here. So enjoy these gems I have found over the past few weeks. You can follow me there at @chriscorrigan@mstdn.ca.
- A little summary of some teaching I did earlier this year with Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier
- The Yard Sale game and why extreme wealth inequality is inevitable without intervention: Why the Super Rich are Inevitable.
- An interesting read about possible futures of Northern Ireland: How realistic is the doomsday scenario?
- A deep dive into four seasons of photos of TSS Rovers FC courtesy of our supporters’ group, The Swanguardians.
- If you have never discovered The Marginalian (formerly “Brain Pickings”) then you are in for a treat. If you are home with your kids this week, you will need this particular entry: How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself: A Timely Vintage Field Guide to Self-Reliant Play and Joyful Solitude
- Rating the best Colorado beaver dams of 2022: The Best Dam Year End List
- The Sky Don’t Have No Roof: The last Ornette Coleman interview
- William Shatner on his experience of the overview effect and how it changes you. I can relate, not from travelling to space (I wish!) but from working across many different organizations and sectors. Life lives in relationships.
- A reflection on how co-operatives might be the way forward for Medicare, as they were at the outset.
- The first Romantics. An engaging long read about the cultural effect of an 18th century German university town and its creation of Romanticism.
That is plenty for now. And so I leave you with this blessing which I wrote and put into a rare Facebook post along with the above photo:
When the mist rises up off the sea After a day of rain and wind And you lift your eyes into the falling darkness With a sigh on your breath And weary in your heart May your eyes catch the sun That finds its way down the valley Creeps across the ridges Filters through the trees And lifts the fog from the bottomlands And fills it with diaphanous tendrils of beauty. May the light shine through for you in 2023.
A little joy for you this morning. I’ve been listening to Ibrahim Maalouf’s new album Capacity to Love which combines his unique middle eastern trumpet sounds with hip hop and pop musicians from across the spectrum.
This video was inspired by the third track on the album, El Mundo and is just a fun pop song that is embedded with an aspiration for a life of free joy and mutual support. Flavia Coelho sings. Enjoy.
Smelhmelhélch (Passage Island) at the mouth of Átl’ka7tsem (Howe Sound) before the snows came earlier this week.
Some notes on 2023 while I have a moment to review them.
The year began with the death of my father and is ending with worries about the serious and lingering health issues of other senior family members and so in a lot of ways this year has been split between personal grief during the first part of the year, and the waiting, supporting and attending in the second part of the year. Several times during the year, I haven’t found myself at my best. And that’s added on top of the persistent and low level background radiation that comes from the feeling that the world is slowly coming apart on this part of the planet and we are collectively ill-equipped to deal with it.
It hasn’t left me pessimistic, but I have noticed that I’m sad at what we have lost, which most of all appears to be the collective capacity to DO SOMETHING about the long term prospects for our planet and the community of living things that occupy it. as irrational as that thought is, because truthfully, it has been that way for my whole life, nevertheless, there is a feeling of loss. I’ve always described myself as an optimist because I believe that there is always something better we can do or embody, but the general prognosis needs power and wealth to radically change directions, and increasingly, I’m not confident that will happen. And so we push on.
Work
My work is changing, and has done throughout the pandemic. In the past I did much more face to face and one off facilitation work and delivered teaching through Art of Hosting workshops, for which I travelled the world. As I get older, I am more interested in teaching and supporting younger facilitators and so there is much more teaching now and one-to-one coaching and we are also taking work that is larger in scope than facilitating single meetings, in which we are focused on longer term support for leaders and organizations who want to be more participatory and more engaged with meaningful work. I like this as it means we develop longer term relationships with a few clients and are able to see the results of our work together over time. Additionally most of this work continues to be online, which suits me well as I have become more of a homebody and more introverted in the last three years. I do love face to face work, but as I get older I find it much more tiring, and I appreciate the ability to deliver quality content to folks and then turn off my computer and go to the garden or play guitar for an hour.
In 2023 I will turn 55 and I have a strong commitment that on my 55 birthday we will begin the process to scaling back and only working four days a week. We have been planning on this for a while, and I’m really looking forward to this shift. I feel like I need it for all kinds of reasons. In my calendar starting June 13, every Friday for the rest of my life has a recurring event that says “Fridays off for the rest of my life.”
This year Harvest Moon which consists of Caitlin Frost and myself along with our stellar assistant Laura O’Neil, had 27 clients. Many of these were larger projects working within large organizations and involving a lot of teaching and capacity building to support leadership and organizational change. We do this with a set of tools and practices that include participatory facilitation methods from Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development approaches, Participatory Narrative Inquiry, complexity work and personal practices for rigorous inquiry on limiting beliefs. This year we packaged these into bespoke programs in complexity focused participatory leadership for the Executive levels and senior leadership of a major university, a Crown corporation, an Indigenous government, a national labour union and one or two smaller organizations. We embedded several three day Art of Hosting/Art of Participatory Leadership workshops in these settings, and also used our course material we have been developing around complexity and personal leadership practices to complement the strategic conversations that we hosted. We have written four extensive workbooks for these programs and this might well turn into something more formal in the years ahead.
We amplified all of this work with story collections primarily using NarraFirma to gather stories and PNI to design sense-making and strategic interventions. This last capacity has become key to our work now and I have now run upwards of 30 story collection and sense-making projects through NarraFirma since the pandemic began. Although we have become really good at working with this material online, this work is most powerful in person, and it is one of the things I am looking forward to doing more face to face.
Partners
Over the past year we have worked with many partners and it is my usual practice to name them. They live in five different countries (Canada, USA, Netherlands, Moldova and Australia) and working with them makes it possible for all of us to do amazing work together. My gratitude to them all.
- Harvest Moon partners Caitlin Frost and Laura O’Neil
- Tatiana Glad
- Meribeth Deen
- Bhav Patel
- Kris Archie
- Kelly Foxcroft Poirier
- Tiaré Jung
- Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen at Beehive Productions
- Phill Cass
- Ciaran Camman
- Amanda Fenton
- Quin Buck
- Corrina Keeling
- Jodi Sanford
- Kinwa Bluesky
- Chad Foulks
- Geoff Brown
- Teresa Posakony.
Teaching
This year I offered several open enrolment courses with colleagues.
- Hosting Powerful Conversations: Introduction to World Cafe and Open Space Technology through teh Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University, a course I have offered annually since 2009.
- Complexity from the Inside Out. A course that Caitlin and I have put together and that combines our joint bodies of work assembled over the past 20 years of working with complex systems and challenges. We ran two cohorts in 2021.
- The Art of Hosting. Every year since 2004 we have offered this program on Bowen Island, and in 2020 we offered it online. After missing 2021, this past year we offered it in person in Vancouver with Kris Archie and Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier (who sadly couldn’t be with us for the actually program days). We’ll repeat that again in 2023.
- Kelly and I did do a course together though, which was really magic. Transforming Power, offered alongside our friends at Beehive Productions, used Nuu-Chah-Nulth lenses to look at the power we have and how we wield it. I loved this course.
- Also through Beehive I offer courses on Chaordic Design, Harvesting and Sense-making and Hosting in Complexity all of which are available to take on demand.
Learning
In addition to everything I learned from teaching these courses I also enrolled in two important programs myself to deepen my own practice.
- Weaving It In: Making evaluation part of your work. This was an inaugural offering from my close colleague Ciaran Camman and combined their decades of evaluation experience with solid complexity and participatory practice. A nice combination of theory and practice and experiential learning.
- Co-Resolve introduction to Deep Democracy with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson. After about 20 years of Sera challenging me to become friends with conflict, I finally came to study with her and this was a great course. The biggest shift in me is seeing how my conflict-averse tendencies have shifted from conflict resolution to what I’m calling “conflict preservation.”
- This next year I have signed up for Cynthia Kurtz’s deep dive into Participatory Narrative Inquiry which is a 20 week long practicum during which my colleague Augusto Cuginotti and I will be running a PNI project with a client. I haven’t done any learning like this at this sort of scale since University. I’m looking forward to it.
Living on the web
My first website was a collaborative writing project with my old friend Chris Heald called Stereotype back in 1995. It was a proto-blog in the style of suck.com, which even 25 years later is a remarkable documentation of the shift of life from physical to online. So I’ve lived through a lot of iterations of web life. This past year I started a long wean away from the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter and began writing again on my blog with more frequency. I started a Mastodon account and have used that as an opportunity to rethink how I have compartmentalized my life online to suit various audiences. For the most part I have maintained a professional kind of look here and on my @chriscorrigan twitter account and I have devoted hours and hours of time to soccer life through my @salishsea86 twitter account. That is all changing slowly. I maintain some twitter accounts for the supporters group of the soccer team I co-own, but otherwise, I think everything will eventually be centralized back here with micro-posts on Mastodon. I will republish links to these posts through Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter as usual.
I’m slightly looking at LinkedIn again as there is some interesting professional content there that used to be published on blogs, but as much as possible I am integrating interesting content into my feeds at NetNewsWire. That is where I will be doing most of my reading, as the endless scroll of twitter and facebook are no long giving much value and Instagram is useless for my life, other than keeping up with our footballers who are half my age who only post there!
Avocations
This year has had three big commitments outside of family and work. As a founding member of the TSS Rovers Supporters’ Trust, I have spent the year selling shares to 351 co-owners of Canada’s first community-owned semi-pro soccer team. We have done some remarkable things this year including winning a League Cup on the men’s side and qualifying us for Canada’s national championship, the Voyageurs Cup, which is, mindbogglingly, the pathway to the FIFA Club World Cup. We will play a meaningful match in the first round of that competition in April against a Canadian Premier League professional team and the only thing better than actually getting this far would be effecting a giant killing in April. It has bee a remarkable journey all it’s own.
Another responsibility that I have devoted myself too is chairing the Board of the Rivendell retreat centre, a contemplative centre on Bowen Island. We have come through a pandemic and stayed afloat and are now beginning to engage in active fundraising for our longer term sustainability. This role is part of the way I live out my contemplative spiritual practice alongside a commitment to leading worship once a month at our little United Church on Bowen Island. I love that job. It helps us to afford our part time Minister and I get to dive deep into topics and scripture readings that are close to my heart. Perhaps I’ll post my sermon notes here in the new year if that’s of interest to you.
Music is my love and my third commitment. I have been singing with a renaissance choir doing medieval liturgical music and madrigals and studying jazz guitar on my own. My guitar teacher sadly died in April, and I miss him dearly. We had only a few lessons this year as he grew sicker. Learning jazz alone with only you tube videos and fake books is incredibly hard but incredibly rewarding and I’m hoping this year I might be able to study with another teacher and finally get a chance to play with folks.
Life on an island
I have lived on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) now for 21 years and seen many changes over that time. I have blogged about living here for most of that time. These days we are facing a huge population turnover and some rapid growth which has introduced lots of new folks to the place and radically changed the culture. Community events are returning which is essential if we are to repair the cohesion as a community that has been lost through the pandemic. I feel that we are fragmented in many ways, and we are being confronted with some very challenging situations including a ferry system that is crumbling under global staffing shortages, strains on our little island infrastructure, economic pressures from living in one of the most expensive places on earth with no level of government committed to radical change, tourism pressures and mindset that sees the places increasingly as an under served and under resourced suburb rather than a rural community. These changes have been steadily occurring over the past number of decades but social media and a lack of face to face contact has made them more pressing.
In the natural world, the big news is the tremendous numbers of humpback whales and orcas that have returned to our seas, and there are almost daily sightings of these mega-fauna. Ten years ago that was unimaginable. While that is happening, we have also witnessed some extreme weather, including long hot droughts in the summer which are the biggest threats to the place. Things change here and being grounded in place means that one can be a long-eyed witness of it all.
So that is the state of play on Christmas Eve 2023. At the end of a year in which I was not at my best, after three years of living in a strange new world, entering the half way point of my 50s. Thank you for sharing this year with me. Say hi. I hope we can cross paths next year.
It’s been a fair few interesting weeks. A heavy work schedule with some important in person facilitations, combined with steady online work and teaching and an extended family health emergency is stretching our resources around here. So here’s a little news.
Social media rethink
On the social media front I’m still active on Twitter, and just waiting to see what happens there. But I have also opened a Mastodon account and I like it better. Twitter was created in an era where the speed and interaction and brevity of text messaging met blogging. Mastodon feels much more like blogging in that we all have accounts that hosted in different places and you can follow each other. it’s like Twitter meets blogging plus an RSS feed. Consider your friends’ Mastodon accounts as mini blogs rather than twitter accounts. At its best, Twitter is great for banter and conversation and has a feel of a transparent text conversation. But it’s under the control of a single unstable genius at the moment and demonstrating why we should not trust critical infrastructure to single individuals or companies. Musk is messing with Twitter as if someone got hold of the power grid and decided to create a whole new type of power generation by firing all the hydro dam technicians and trying to find nuclear scientists to keep the old system going and also get a new one up and running right away.
Twitter was robust. Robust things fail catastrophically. Musk is in danger of taking the compancecy dive into chaos from which return is neight guaranteed nor cheap.
So just stay here by subscribing to this blog’s RSS feed or subscribing by email over there on the right sidebar, or add me at Mastodon @chriscorrigan@mastdn.ca. I’m still on Facebook and LinkedIn but I don’t interact much in those places.
What I’m doing besides work
I might start sharing some different content here, and probably will do so as well at Mastodon too, so in addition to posts here on complexity and facilitation and working with groups, you might start seeing some stuff relating to other passions I am interested in. That includes building Canada’s first ever supporter owned semi-pro soccer team, TSS Rovers, who won a men’s championship in our fourth season and are on our way to play pro-teams in Canada’s national championship for the Voyageur’s Cup. If you are in Canada you can buy a share here and be a part of history. Our teams play in the third level of men’s soccer in Canada and the highest level of women’s soccer.
You may know I am a long time amateur musician and I sing and play liturgical music, folks songs, Irish music and popular music and I have started expanding my guitar chops by studying and learning jazz guitar over the past few years. That has married two passions – jazz and guitar – that I have kept separate for most of my life because the thought of getting them together was overwhelming. But I’m having the time of my life playing this music. Enjoy what I am enjoying. Here’s a Canadian guitarist I am studying, Reg Schwager and legendary bassist Don Thompson playing Everything Happens To Me.
So those are a couple of things that might seem to pop up here out of the blue.
Some cool stuff to share
Finally, I continue to read and earn about my professional craft and lately I have come across some hight quality recourses that I HAVE to share with you all:
- A snapshot of REOS’s scenario planning methodology recently used in Australia and Aotearoa to address future wildfire issues. With thanks to my mate Geoff Brown, a member of that team. It’s so good I’ve added it to the Facilitation Resources page.
- A toolkit for starting up communities of practice from my friend Nancy White, who is just the best there is at this stuff.
- A reader-focussed report assessment tool from Fresh Spectrum that will help you keep your audience in mind so that the reports you are writing get used. This is a great harvesting tool.
- A nice six step process for strategic planning from my Aussie Art of Hosting mates at the Jeder Institute.
- A for you theory-heads, a paper by Albert Linderman on Sense-making Methodologies and Ethnography published at the Spryng.io website. I’ve started in on some of Dervin’s work on this. It’s heavy going in a good way.
So there you go. What have you been up to?
This quote from Richard Rohr, is one of the core principles of the Center for Action and Contemplation.
Humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living.
It is also good complexity praxis, good leadership practice and good pedagogy.
I was on a coaching call this morning where this came up too, listening to a team I am working with describe the trap we often find ourselves in as consultants, tempted to provide the new things a group should be doing, often in the form of recommendations or lists of actions and projects to be managed. The idea is that we often try to get folks to learn and be different and then generate projects or plans that they can execute.
And that is not a good way to do it in emergent, complex and dynamic environments. If I want to learn to think differently I need to put myself in situations where the constraints afford me different possibilities to act differently. For example, I am currently learning to play jazz and I am currently without a teacher meaning that I am relying on lots of online resources to help guide me. The danger with this is that I can just learn how to play licks and lines and chord progressions or scale exercises based on what someone else is doing. This is not really making music, but rather making sounds. If I’m not careful all I will learn to do is ape teachers, master exercises or imitate recordings and that’s not why I want to learn jazz. I want to learn jazz to be able to express myself differently on guitar and for a myriad of other reasons that I play music.
Like any language, jazz has a grammar and a vocabulary. The grammar is the harmonic and melodic theory that underpins the style of music, some of which is shared with other musical forms and some of which is uniquely “jazz” in the same way that languages have different dialects which may even be mutually unintelligible amongst speakers of the same language. The vocabulary is made up of phrases and lines that one learns in context, much as you might hear a familiar word or phrase being spoken in a language you are learning. Using these phrases and lines, based in the common rules of grammar (or deliberately breaking them) requires, almost literally, speaking them out.
And the remarkable thing is that when I play this new material either against a backing track or, ideally, with another person, I learn to THINK differently about the music I am making. There is no amount of study of written notes and harmonic theory that will make me a jazz musician. Playing jazz is a way of thinking about music, expression, collaboration, culture, improvisation, order, tension, control and creativity. It must be lived into.
Or as I wrote down during my coaching call this morning, we grow through what we go through.
Teaching people to think differently is impossible without providing the affordances first for us to act differently.