Victoria BC
I love a space with a brick wall in a space. Tonight at Ferris’ Oyster Bar with a couple of friends for dinner, I kept noticing how that wall lended its presence to the space, as I enjoyed a beautiful and tasty rice bowl of vegetarian potstickers and deep friend tofu. I was noticing all day how details do more than they seem capacble of doing. The stillness permeating the inner harbour as the water stayed flat for a second day in a row, the signs on the busses that say “Sorry…I’m out of service.” Something about that “Sorry…I’m” part that makes the whole downtown core a little more friendly as the post-rush hour busses deadhead back to the bus garage.
We were locked deeply in design conversations today, and we went through six design tools from the Art of Hosting, all of which I taught and we discussed as I harvested them all on this diagram.
The tools that are elucidated here include the following:
Attention to the details of design led us into an incredibly deep conversation about the work we were doing, working at a whole different level. The quality of attention flowing from the presence lingering from good design…
[tags]ferris’ oyster bar, victoria, design[/tags]
My friend Alex Kjerulf has just released his new book about happiness at work.
Alex is a true clown in many senses of the word bringing joy and humour to everything he does. How do I know? Well, in November 2003 he suggested that we swap blogs for a week. It was a crazy experiement and it drove some of our readers nuts. I wasn’t too high on it either, but I was game for a go.
When I switched to wordpress the author marking fuction didn’t come over in the import, but Alexe’s post are still in my archives. You can read what he had to say about the experiment as we finished. It was an interesting experiement in mixing up online identities, and it was fun to hack Alex’s blog for a while and have hime hang around in mine.
At any rate, I am a happy worker and I deeply appreciate Alex’s life mission. And I hope his book becomes a classic. He already is.
Monica Nissen, George Por, Ria Baeck and I have been in some conversations about harvesting lately. When Monica and I were together at the Art of Hosting in Colorado last month we had three incredible conversations about harvest. Naturally we harvested from them and I have just spent some time making some deeper meaning of these notes.
I have made all of these notes at my flickr site. When you visit these links, view them in order and be sure to read the notes and annotations on the photo page. Most of the photos are pictures of my journal, where I was recording my thoughts as we went along. Click on the photos to view the notes.
Conversation 1
We began with our first conversation about harvesting, by seeing harvest as a cycle:
Conversation 2
In the second conversation, I started explaining to Monica the difference between folksonomy and taxonomy and how the two might work together to create meaning. This was based on a conversation I had with George:
From there, Monica and I wondered about the simple hobbit tools of harvesting including the most basic kind of cycling and iteration:
That prompted a powerful learning about what happens when we see harvest in an evolutionary context, when well designed feedback loops create great depth and meaning and transcendance:
Conversation 3
Seeking to understand more about the patterns we were seeing, we co-convened a session on harvesting during the Open Space and we collaborated on the recording. Monica focused on deep questions and I focused on further articulating the cyclical nature of deep harvest:
I have walked away from these conversation with a deep and lively question: What if the Art of Hosting was actually the Art of Harvesting?
Why is this important? I think it matters that harvest, good harvest, moves organizations and communities forward, links leadership and action to conversation and makes the best use of the wisdom that is gathered from meetings. If you have ever wondered about meetings that seem not to go anywhere, this inquiry into harvesting, sensemaking and iterative action holds the key to avoiding those kinds of situations. It’s not enough just to have good process and a good facilitator – the results of the work must also be alive in the organization. That’s where we are going with this.
In the last couple of weeks I have been in deep and important conversations about the work of facilitating change in the world. I am just back from another Art of Hosting gathering, this time in Boulder, Colorado and, among the many many things that were on my mind there, the subject of talk and action came up.
This was especially a good time to have this conversation as this particular Art of Hosting brought together many deep practitioners of both the Art of Hosting approach to facilitating change and the U-process approach to action and systemic change. One of the conversations I had related to solving really tough problems and I had a deep insight in that discussion.
I think first of all that there is a false dichotomy between talk and action. To be more precise I should say that there is a symbiotic relationship between talk and action. We can act any way we choose, and that is just fine, but when we want to take action that is wise, we need to be in conversation with others. We may also be in conversation with context as well, which looks like a literature review, a market study, an environmental scan and so on. Regardless, wisdom follows from being with the insights of others. Wise action is what we do after we have talked well together.
The question now is, what role does wise action have in solving tough problems? It seems to me that every system that responds to something has an action system within it. The action system is what the system or community uses to move on any particular need. And so, in Canada we have a legal system that creates action to resolve disputes between parties. We have a food system that delivers food to our stores. We have a health care system to care for us when we are sick. Within these three systems, there is a discrete action system and there is a lot of conversation. In the legal system conversation and action are raised to high and almost ritualistic arts. The formal conversation of a courtroom is so far beyond regular conversation that one actually has to hire a specialist to engage in it. And judgements, court orders and sentences are the mechanisms by which change takes place. Various bodies enforce these judgements so that there is accountability in the system.
Similarly, the food system and the health care system have conversational forums, meetings and so on in which wisdom and strategy is discerned, and there are trucks and doctors to do the work.
The problem is that neither of these three systems contains an action system that can reduce crime, prevent malnutrition or lower patient wait times. In other words thare are problems that are too big for the curent action system of any given community, society, or world. These problems become known as “wicked problems” or intractable problems, and they are often met with much despair.
When we are faced with these problems, we need to ask ourselves what to do. Do we use the existing systems, even in novel recombination, to try to tackle the biggest problems? Or perhaps is the biggest problem the capacity of the action system itself?
This is an intriguing idea to me. This is what I jotted down this morning in an email to some of my mates about this:
If we take the biggest, toughest and most intractable problem of any community we see immediately that the reason it is so is clearly that the community does not have the ability to deal with it. Water quality is an issue only in places where the community action system has been unable to deal with it. That might be because the community action system is not big enough to address it from a systemic basis, or that the leadership capacity is not strong enough or the collective container is not robust enough, or any combination. Ultimately the biggest problem for any community is: what do we need to do to get our collective power and action working on our toughest problems so that they are no longer our toughest problems?
I wrote a short note on the plane coming home from Denver, and it relates to how absolutely critical harvest is, in terms of focusing our eyes on the ways in which any conversation or meeting might affect a community’s action system. This is an attempt to caputre a simple form of the pitfalls of a false action/talk dichotomy and the necessity for learning, reflection and inquiry in a system.
“If we are wanting stuff to get done by any system, the first question is an appreciative inquiry into how things usually get done in the system so that we know what we are harvesting intoand we understand what forms of harvest will best serve the actions we want to take as a result of any conversation.
But what do we do when the system itself is not up to the task of taking action on a large problem? In that case, the inquiry has to find a way to get the system to act on itself to create the conditions and change necessary for it to become powerful enough to move into action on the intractable problem. This is difficult because it requires “bootstrapping” the system to see itself and then teach itself to be bigger and more powerful.”
I don’t know how to do this. But I feel deeply that THIS is the challenge. We can solve global warming IF we figure out how the world community action system can develop the capacity to address the problem. If we don’t develop that capacity, we won’t solve the problem. We can break it into more manageable bits and pieces that fit what we can already do, but global warming is an emergent phenomenon and it needs an emergent response. So what is the biggest problem? Not global warming…it is us…the biggest problem is the inability of our existing systems to address it. And to me, daunting as it is, that seems like work we can actually do togather.
So that is where I am currently, as a facilitator of deep conversation, interested in how we can connect inquiry, talk, harvest and action to find and use the power we need to make to big changes our world needs.
Your thoughts? What seems especially interesting about this take on wicked problems?
[tags]wicked problems[/tags]
One of the key skills in deliberative dialogue is figuring out what we are, together. This is often called “co-sensing” or “feeling into the collective field.” There are many ways to talk about but the practice is on the one hand tricky and subtle, and on the other, blazingly obvious.
In general, in North America and especially among groups of people that are actively engaged in questions about co-sening the collective field, a speech pattern I have notcied goes something like this:
- I feel that we need to…
- My thoughts are that we should…
- I just throw this out there for consideration…
- I’m not sure but I think we…
In other words, oin our efforts to discern the collective, we very often start with a non-definitive statement about our personal relation to what might be held collectively. Very often these kinds of statements serve to keep us stuck in individual perspectives. What we end up talking about is our own perspectives on things. Instead of sensing into the whole, we are negotiating with the parts. There is no emergent sense of what we have between us.
Last week, I was working with some ha’wilh (chiefs) from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth nations of the west coast of Vancouver Island. (We were in this building). Although this was a somewhat standard government consultation meeting, these ha-wiilh are quite practiced in traditional arts of deliberation. Much of the conversation during the day conformed to the above pattern, but at one point, for about a half an hour, there was a deep deliberative tone that came over the meeting. We were talking about a government policy that is aimed at protecting wild salmon, an absolutely essential animal to Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities.
When talk about the policy, the pace of the conversation slowed down and the ha’wilh entered this pattern:
- We need to support this policy. I support it.
- We have to find a way to involve the province in this. Here’s who I know on this.
- Logging in our watersheds affects these fish and our communities are affected as well. What can we do about that?
The essence of this pattern is that one waits for something to be so obvious that a dclarative statement about “we,” “us” or “our” begs to be stated. And once it is stated, it is supported with a statement about how “I” relate to that whole.
This produces a number of profound shifts in a field, and very quickly. First, it slows everything down. It is not possible to rush to conclusions about what is in the collective field. Second, it builds conidence and accountability into the speech acts. It is very, very difficult to say “we need to support this” if you are uncertain of whether we do or not. This shift takes us from random individual thoughts and speculations into a space where we need to think carefully, sense outside of our own inner voice and speak clearly what is in the middle.
This is a very abstract notion, but anyone who has driven a car or ridden a bike in traffic knows what I am talking about. When we are driving our cars together, we are actually creating traffic. Traffic is the emergent phenomenon, the thing that we can only do together. In order to create traffic that serves us, we need to be constantly sensing the field of the road. This involves figuring out what other drivers are doing, noticing the flow and engaging safely but confidently. You need to both claim space and leave space to drive safely. Anyone who offers something into the field that is too focused on the individual disturbs the field significantly. They drive like road hogs, dangerous, not fully connected to the field around them.
So the teaching of the ha’wilh is very straightforward for any form of deliberation and co-sening: quickly go to the “we.”
[tags]co-sensing, deliberation[/tags]
Photo by Wam Mosely