It’s a grey muggy day here on the south coast of BC, and the photo above is from this morning’s ferry ride into Vancouver to begin a trip to Haida Gwaii this week.
Chris Mowles has a good post on the politics of uncertainty and writes about how that is unfolding in health care systems he is working with. I resonate with these words:
My colleagues’ dilemmas also made me think about the anxiety associated with uncertainty and how it is unevenly distributed. In times of crisis and hardship there is often a myth that ‘we are all in this together’, whereas in reality some are more in it than others. In his book The Politics of Uncertainty Peter Marris (1996) explains how group life, particularly in highly individualised and competitive societies, also comprises competition over who gets to sit with the most uncertainty. Your position in the hierarchy will determine how much you can pass on uncertainty to others. And Marris argues that the most marginalised are likely to bear the brunt.
This isn’t just true of inter organizational politics but of social politics as well. If you want to assert power, offload as much uncertainty as possible(and it’s accompanying anxiety) to others. That way you live with at least an illusion of comfort, shielded from the mental health challenges of being on constant stand-by for crisis or emergence.
It’s one of the reasons why I think it’s important to build capacity for working with complexity throughout organizations and societies, and especially deep in the lower middle management parts of these societies, where anxiety and uncertainty (and accountability) has been shifted. Of course, senior executives and government ministers have massive uncertainty to deal with, but typically they are resourced well to do it. Making complexity tools available to everyone helps everyone, becasue everyone is needed to deal with complexity.
If you want to to talk more about this and how we can provide accessible, lower cost training and capacity building to these levels of organizations and community, let me know. I’m constantly developing my practices and tools for doing this. We are doing this through story work and Participatory Narrative Inquiry, through sharing frameworks like Cynefin and the Two Loops, through our own bundle of complexity tools for facilitation and process design, and through facilitation and leadership practices that increase the relationships and participation that is needed to share the burden of living with uncertainty wherever you are at.
If nothing else, the deep divisions and culture wars in the US, and here in Canada too, are providing us with an opportunity to engage in deep practices of listening across difference. It’s harder now that it has ever been Dan Oestrich, who knows a thing or two about this, explains why.
Process artistry also has its place. Arts and well-hosted conversation are at work in Alberta where a group of researchers have initiated the Common Ground project to address stereotypes in the province. It is providing some useful lessons.
Depolarizing conversations is an initiative of my friends and colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum. It arose in 2021 during COVID when social media had divided families and small towns and disagreements had devolved into violence, assaults and the tearing of the social fabric. They have published some really helpful tools and resources on hosting these kinds of conversations. Get them while you can (and support them in continuing their work).
Irreconcilable difference is inevitable in a complex society but not every issue is an irreconcilable difference. Some are just conflicting perspectives. As long as we conflate conflict with war, we will maintain a tendency to want to avoid conflict instead of courting and supporting difference. Conflict transformation has long been the approach used to create a resilient container for what I call conflict preservation. We need this more than ever. And so do the orcas and the salmon.
One of the tools I use for working with polarities where there is a strong both/and situation is polarity mapping. I’ve written about it before but I love the way Kai Cheng Thom weaves it into her Loving Justice framework.
For more tools and training I can recommend Lewis Deep Democracy as one deeper approach to this work. It’s based in Arnold and Amy Mindel’s processwork. In Canada, I can recommend Camille Dumond and her colleagues at the Waterline Co-op. You’ll see my testimonial on their website. It’s accessible and practical training, even for experienced practitioners, and it will take your own practice deeper.
Yesterday I was working with a client who receives a federal government grant to do its work. The grant supports the coordination of a national network of organizations who are working with vulnerable people in communities across Canada, to support the work of a number of federal government policies. Over the past few years, these local organizations have been tasked with a an increasingly hard job, in a culture that is not providing them with much support. While I have been working with them, the support from the federal government has been declining, even as need is increasing.
We are planning a gathering of the network, one which many fewer people can attend than in previous years becasue of funding cutbacks. I’m working for a much reduced fee. The gathering we are planning is an important place for the network to connect and organize and the subject of our conversations together will be how to strengthen the connections between local initiatives in an era of coming austerity.
Yesterday, as we were planning, my client told me that the government funder expects that we provide them with evidence from this gathering that the conversations between people were “meaningful.” We are somehow being asked to collect data and write a report that shows this. This is not in our budget. The extraction of this harvest is not in the conference plan, and not what anyone desires to do with their precious time together.
A million thoughts swirled in my mind and a few came out of my mouth. Meaningful to whom? By whose standards? At what level? What does this sponsor aim to do with this “meaningfulness” metric and data? And what if the conversations we are having are meaningful because they are organizing the network IN SPITE of the funder? Because actually, that’s the reality. Everyone knows that this funder, despite their helpful contributions to the cause, are actually imperilling the work of the network with funding that isn’t even enough to get every member into the same room so we can talk about what happens next.
And then I got angry at the federal government’s audacity of austerity. How dare they ask us to do MORE while also cutting back core funding for this network that provides services to support federal government policies. Who is sitting in Ottawa saying “reduce their budgets by xx% and also ask them to do more things that are just for our own edification and confidence that they are spending the money well?”
Of course I am not going to release the identity of this group of people, but I can assure you that they do excellent work across Canada on issues that very few other people or organizations are able to handle. They provide safety, security and wellbeing for people that need it. And they are largely staffed by folks with lived experience of the issues that are at play. It’s a wonderful client.
We are heading into an era of austerity. If you are a government funder, I want you to know that the funding you are now providing to organizations needs to be used by them to organize for a future in which you are not a viable partner, and in some cases, you might even be the problem that needs to be organized around (“oh, you already get government funding? Our Foundation only grants to organization that have no other funding”). Years of funding cutbacks have ceded your authority to tell people what to do. And no amount of evidence based evaluation has stemmed the funding cuts, so you’ll forgive people who don’t believe that you need data to make decisions. It is clear that this is not how most program funding decisions are made, especially in an era where flat rate percentage cuts are being applied across the board. That is not to say that organizations that do essential work will not continue to advocate for themselves. But it does mean that, as a “partner” in the work, you won’t be at the head table any more. Folks will use what they have to try to survive you, not appease you. And when, in some bright future, funding is restored, it will be to a network that survived in spite of your “support” and not because of it.
It breaks my heart that folks who are just barely holding on to their jobs and doing essential work are being asked to spend time and money to provide funders with fawning thank you notes that their funding produced “meaningful” conversations. I can assure you that every conversation that folks in this network have is meaningful. Leave it at that.
I think it was 1986-87 academic year that I truly fell in love with the idea of culture. That was the year I began my BA in Indigenous Studies at Trent University and it was during a time when Indigenous cultures in Canada were going through a generational resurgence after recovering from 100 years of state-sponsored cultural, physical and intellectual extinction. I was able to be a witness to communities and organizations recovering by growing deep into traditional practices, and younger generations receiving the teaching of Elders and using them to create new political movements, organizations, economies, governments, and health and well being in their communities. I loved the idea of culture as the ground for this work and loved watching people work with it, and indeed being a part of cultural shifts and and catalysis. Culture was like magic. It appeared bigger than all of us, it shifted and changed and it enabled things to happen. Or not.
I so fell in love with culture that I did an honours thesis in my fifth year that compared two national Indigenous organizations in their attempts to root their operations and structures in traditional cultures. One did it by using artifacts and trappings and firm structures that ended in arguments about orthodoxies and heartbreak, and the other did it by creating a relational, caring, and connected context in which a unique but thoroughly Indigenous way of being emerged.
So early on I learned that culture is emergent, that it transcends individuals and specific artifacts and practices, that it is a context that shapes relationships and behaviours and that it is the product of relationships and interactions over time. Norms of behaviour can’t be dictated, they can only arise.
Since then I would say that the heart of my work with organizations and communities has been working with culture. The sources of joy and the sources of pain are the multiples contexts in which we live our lives. I’ve worked in one-off settings and multi-year large scale systemic settings. I’ve worked with large teams and with little groups of change-makers. And we’ve tried it all, from magic methods to the “this will finally solve it” conference, to multi-year narrative sense-making projects. I’ve spent decades surfing the rise and fall of supporter culture around the soccer teams I’ve been a part of. I’ve spent nearly 25 years living on an island with its own unique slant on the world, creating social enterprises, supporting community economic development and making community through music and play.
About a year ago on the Art of Hosting Facebook group someone asked about changing culture in a very large organization and which methods are best. For some reason that post appeared in the feed that I rarely check, and I responded to it. But because I’m never going to send you to Facebook, I thought I would catch this sketchy set of insights and share them here. This is a back of the napkin kind of list, but these are truths that I will no longer doubt in my work with organizations and communities. So here’s what I’ve learned about “culture change.”
- It takes years.
- Your work will be non-linear and unpredictable.
- All states are temporary.
- If it is necessary for senior leaders champion and support change work, it will only be sustained as long as they don’t succumb to their anxiety and fear of uncertainty and unpredictability.
- You cannot change culture directly, but you can work to change the way people interact with one another and see what kind of culture emerges as a result.
- Learning together is often a good way to approach many different strategic and cultural issues in an oblique and open way.
- If change of any kind in the organization or sector is predicated on the people needing to transform and be different then you are colonizing people. Don’t do that.
- Whatever you think is happening is only ever a part of the full picture.
- Whatever you think you have accomplished is only ever a piece of what you have actually done.
- It will never go according to plan.
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.
- What Could Citizens’ Assemblies Do for American Politics? | The New Yorker
Participation and democratic deliberation require time, attention, and intention. It doesn’t solve all problems, but this kind of work is essential. - Job One for 2025: Protecting Canada from US Oligarchs | The Tyee
A benchmark of the current state of US cultural and economic involvement in Canada, against which we can measure the increasingly imperialist tone of leadership in both our countries. - Danielle Smith is Undermining Canada: Former Chief Trade Negotiator | Rabble
Another piece of evidence to support my long-running contention that populists are dangerous in a crisis because they simply don’t know how to govern. - A Decent Dive into the United States’ Geopolitical Interest in Greenland and the Arctic | Channel News Asia
Trump signaling an intent to expand the US’ territory could set off a massive contest for Arctic resources. For the first time in my life, I’m worried that our neighbor to the south will actually invade this country. - Please Advise! How Dire and Disgusting Was Trump’s Day One? | The Tyee
Just bookmarking this one because it kind of captures the spirit of the day.
Climate & Environment
- We Saved the Planet Once. Can We Do It Again? | The Tyee
Charlie Angus and I are about the same age and we lived in Toronto at the same time (I remember that hot summer of 1988!). This memoir charts my own recollections too. It’s been a ride. - What Are the 2024 Salmon Returns Telling Us? | Alexandra Morton
Well, they appear to be telling us that closing salmon farms has a positive effect on returns and salmon health. Read the numbers for yourself.
Economics & Social Systems
- Milton Friedman Blaming Governments for Inflation is One of the Most Pernicious Lies of the Last Half-Century | Dougald Lamont
Lamont’s writing is new to me and absolutely compelling. A former provincial Liberal leader in Manitoba, he has a strong grasp of economics and governance. - How Communism Is Outcompeting Capitalism
It’s nice to have something to compare the grift of North Atlantic capitalism to. An article not without flaws and blind spots, but a really energetic critique.
Arts & Culture
- The Secret History of Risotto | The New Yorker
I love risotto. I love making it and eating it and learning about it, and I love a love letter written to it. - Folk Music Legend Got Short Shrift in ‘A Complete Unknown,’ But His Songs Will Live On | PennLive
A great piece that tries to rescue Pete Seeger’s legacy. Something about his portrayal in the movie didn’t sit well with me. Dylan was an artist who wrote anthems for activists. Pete was an activist who sang. Different. And we need both. - Close Reading Bad Poetry | 3 Quarks Daily
I really enjoyed this article. Learning from the worst possible outcome is a time-honored tradition.
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
- Bill Wilson Has Died | He was an incredible voice of leadership from the Central Coast of BC. A history maker, a guy who always spoke his mind with absolute certainty and wasn’t afraid to trigger reactions in the service of blowing a conversation about justice wide open.
- Listen to My Friend Kameron Perez-Verdia Tell the Story of His First Whale.
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.