The other day I wrote a post looking at religion as an emergent container of meaning making that is both difficult to define and important in civic life. I’m writing this as a person who is religious to the extent that I practice within and belong to a 100 year old mainline Christian tradition with a mixed history in civic affairs, the United Church of Canada. It was involved in the establishment of both residential schools and public health care. It has championed and supported global solidarity and peace work and no doubt has left people feeling hurt by actions of its leadership. It was the first church in Canada to ordain gay and lesbian ministers and an early adopter of same-sex marriage. In many ways my life has been shaped by this tradition, even the two decades or when I wasn’t an active practitioner in a congregation.
As I have worked with many churches and faith communities of all kinds, I am acutely aware of the influence that religion can have on civic life. I am acutely aware that that is often “not a good thing” especially in this day and age. In the post I wrote the other day I was trying to explore how religion functions as an emergent product of a set of constraints. My basic idea is that religion itself is difficult to define and therefore difficult to either adopt or throw out in terms of its influence on civic affairs. Those of us that belong to religions have very different conversations about the role of religion in civic life than those who do not. Very few of my friends are religious, but with those that are, critical conversations about the role of religion in society are very different with them than with those who simply reject religion at all or say it should be a private matter.
Today I awoke to a beautiful Christmas present (yes this is the liturgical season of Christmas). My friend AKMA, an Anglican priest, Biblical scholar, and critical thinker, read and reflected on my post and offered some beautiful responses offered with grounded and gentle assertions from the perspective of one who inhabits a religion. He shared some sources which inform his thinking (knowing that I will chase these down for further reading!). Most importantly, he shared from a place of deep lived truth, with his characteristic humility and respect:
” I should own up that I take my faith and the sorts of congruent Christian discourse as true and real in a more than merely notional way. That applies even in a way that excludes other ‘religious’ claims. That’s just part of what I take believing to mean, and I’m keenly aware of the risks and presumption baked into that. At the same time, I know and recognise that other profound, admirable, illuminating people do nothold to what I believe, and some believe things that my faith contradicts. Since I have no specific reason to think I’m cleverer or more pious or more receptive to divine revelation than these among my neighbours, I must hold to my faith with a humility that obliges me to treat people’s divergent faiths with the respect that I’d wish them to show mine. I have more to learn than one lifetime…so I can’t by any means rule out the possibility that my Muslim neighbour has arrived at the true, real way of faith and I am wrong about many particulars.
All of which is to say that where Christian nationalists take their faith as a warrant to oppress others because they can’t imagine that they’re wrong, I take my faith as an obligation to honour others’ faith up to the point where our claims conflict, and there to handle that conflict as gently and respectfully as circumstances permit.”
His whole post is worth multiple reads, because what I think he is saying in response to what I am writing is that he isn’t necessarily interested in my framing and exploration of religion-as-container, but instead in sharing the way in which his participation in his religion guides his participation in civic life. And he does so in such a nuanced and expansive manner that it validates the point I was trying to clumsily make in my original post.
Viz:
The tricky task set before us entails finding a modus vivendi by which we who hold to particular exclusive claims about human flourishing can honour and respect people who take a different view, but who still want to live in a civic community with us, and how we can work together to minimise the damage done by fascist-nihilists who will contentedly imprison, torture, kill anybody who gets in the way of their implementing their will.
This is what I mean by religion as a powerful dialogic container. It is a bounded space of shared identity and meaning-making. Inside it, you see these conversations with contemporaries and with ancestors who have carried a deep questions about how we live together. AKMA’s distillation of such is an example for me about the role that religion plays in both personal and civic life. It feels brave to say it aloud. Thanks AKMA.
Light up the Cove celebrations earlier this month here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island.
It has been dark and rainy on Nexlelexwm/Bowen Island these past few weeks. The Pacific storms have rolled through with rain and wind from the southeasterlies which we call the Pineapple Express, an atmospheric river that brings warm temperatures and heavy rain. We’ve had the westerlies blow in their usually unpredictable ways, sometimes bringing rain and sometimes clearing, but this time toppling trees and kicking the power out for my neighbours on the west side of the island. And we have the frontal systems of low pressure travelling down from Alaska and sending cold fronts and waves of rain through our region. It has been dark and stormy and blustery. And I love it.
The darkness here around the winter solstice is the combination of low northern sunlight and thick cloud. When the day is over, it descends inky and thick over the island. If it isn’t storming, it gets deeply silent, with only the sounds of the sea lions in the bay reverberating along the shoreline. The darkness has an expectancy to it. The expectation of longer days, of warmth and dry spring days, and the knowledge that those days lie only a few weeks away around the beginning of February, spurs the expectation to life.
Here on Bowen there are many traditions that mark this time of year. Light up the Cove, on the first Saturday in December is celebration of the Christmas season. Thousands of lights doll up Snug Cove in almost random and beautifully gaudy ways. There is a parade of lanterns and lights and elves and Santa makes a visit, arriving at the Union Steam ship company to the delight of hundreds, this year in a golf cart. I sang Christmas carols along with a small diorama of wise men this year. Down in the Cove, local businesses set up little Christmas trees.
Following that there are craft fairs and book sales during the month, at Collins Hall, at the School, and al around the island. Artists open their studios, the Galleries all turn their walls over to local artists and artisans. This year Kingbaby Theatre mounted Mad Mabel’s Christmas for only the fourth time since 1999. It is a local story of a homeless woman who witnesses and enables the magic of the season through the transformation of the people around her. It’s a beautiful story about love and friendship and the beauty and awe of light in the darkness, made by our neighbours, featuring our neighbours.
Today, on the solstice itself, my friends Aubin and David van Berkel hosted a pagan solstice party during which participants dipped bread in apple wassail and threw it at the apple trees in their orchard to inspire the trees to return to life and produce their fruit again this year. Tonight I played with a little ensemble of Celtic musicians accompanying Tina Overbury in her production of Dagda’s Harp, her retelling of the story of the Tuatha De Danaan, the mythical Irish warriors. It is about how they recovered the stolen harp of their Dagda and in so doing restored the world to light and rhythm and music. It is a story delivered in a near sacred manner at sunset on the solstice.
Last night the Jewish community on Bowen celebrated the sixth night of Hanukkah with a lighting of the menorah candle in the Cove. 60 or 70 people took part. In the United Church today, on the last Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Love, we felt the beginning of the release of darkness and the anticipation of the return of the sun and the birthing of the light into the world as Emmanuel, the God who takes form as a human. On Christmas Eve we will gather in the Little Red Church again to sing carols and hear the story of the birth of Jesus, an outsider and refugee, whose rumoured birth sent the dictator of his day into a paranoid frenzy that saw thousands rounded up and hundreds of children killed. We celebrated the thin thread of love that conquers all, that weaves itself through the very fabric of the universe. Unconquerable, unrestrained, unconditional. Soon it will be Christmas. Not yet, not for another four days, not until we can be sure the light is really coming back. These are the days of faith.
The time is pregnant with intense feelings and sentiments. The land and sea and atmosphere brings us to quiet and anticipation and reflection. We are invited indoors and encouraged to join together with others, friends new and old, sharing music and poetry and food and drink. Sharing stories about how this year seems darker than previous ones. We remember those we have lost, those who are struggling. Those who have fallen ill or who are recovering. We hold them in our hearts, bring them round our hearths.
And we wait. We wait in trust and faith and hope and love, prepared for the moments of joy that are coming, that are long anticipated, that are desperately needed. The solstice is a turning of time and attention.
From here, the light.
No, not a a post about facilitation tactics, just some notes on questions in different contexts: business, football and life hacks. Like these job interview questions from readers of The Economist. Some of these are truly anodyne, but some are interesting. And it gives you some insight into what an elite level job interview looks like (washing dishes at the CEO’s cabin?). I’m slightly disappointed there weren’t 42 questions. I’ve gifted you the link. Read it to find out why.
World Cup qualification all but wrapped up yesterday for most of the remaining spots in the 2026 Men’s World Cup. There was drama all around but perhaps the most incredible match of the night happened in Edinburgh where Scotland qualified for the first time since 1974 in a match for the ages. In our region, North and Central America and the Caribbean, there was late drama as Curaçao qualified for their first World Cup after Jamaica hit the woodwork 3 times and was denied a 95th minute from a VAR review. With 155,000 people, If Curacao was a city in Metropolitan Vancouver, it would be the fifth or sixth biggest municipality in our region. They are the smallest country ever to qualify for a World Cup, in a year in which 47 other countries will also take part. I hope they get to play Cabo Verde for some kind of small island trophy.
Canada, for the record, played their last game of 2025 and broke a three game goalless streak with a sometimes-feisty, sometimes-anemic performance agains Venezuela. Becasue we qualify by being co-hosts, we have had a dearth of competitive fixtures since a disappointing quarter final loss in the Gold Cup in the summer, where we also drew with Curaçao. Impressive friendlies against Wales and Romania in September failed to build momentum. Last night’s win was good, but with only two windows in March and June, we have only 4 warm up matches to prepare for the World Cup.
I like soulcruzer. I found him on Mastodon, and his approach to life is to use his brain and his sense of ritual and magic to hack reality. Here are a few of his Chaos Magik practices. Have a read. Some of these are really fun little games and rituals you can play using the tools of obliquity and complex cognition.
Yesterday Rowen Simonsen and I filmed a little conversation about AI in facilitation practice and perhaps inspired a bit by soulcruzer’s reality hacking, I suggested that AI, specifically LLMs can be a fabulous obliquity engine to help individuals and groups crack their pattern entrainment, much the way we can use art, poetry and music to create surprising associations in our mind. Use LLMs to stimulate your brain’s own meaning-making capabilities. Perhaps we can use LLMs as a way to introduce obliquity into deliberations (give me ten questions about this subject that might be asked by a river watching us work). This is the kind of thing that LLM AI might be best for in the world of sense-making and dialogue: generating nonsense that stimulates human brains to make unlikely connections. We could also use card decks, I Ching divination, coin flips and the like to introduce randomness that forces brains to get to work. Like all “oracles” though, if you believe that the tool has an answer informed by some kind of intelligence, you are more culpable for hallucinations that your LLM partner. Oracles are best used to force your own eyes to see what is really going on with you. The interview is part of a series that are being used for Beehive Productions’ current course on Hosting at the Edge of our Humanity.
The above is a photo of a great campfire that happened on Saturday night in the forest by a lake in Eastern Ontario. You had to be there. But if you want to do an interesting exercise, take a moment before reading on and make a list of things that you should do to create a great campfire experience.
I’m working away writing a book on dialogic containers and reflecting on the remarkable phenomenon of stability in the midst of change. I remember years ago Dave Snowden sharing a pithy description of the the difference between robust and resilient structures. Using the examples of a sea wall and a salt marsh, he says, essentially, that a robust system is one that survives by not being changed and a resilient system is one that survives by being changed. That description has always stuck with me and as I look at the nature of dialogic containers, ephemeral spaces which produce meaning between people, it’s interesting to me to think about what contributes to their relative stability in the face of change.
This was brought home to me again today while listening to a talk by Gil Fronsdel on the Buddhist practice of “Right View,” (he calls is “Wholesome View”) the first discipline of the Noble Eightfold Path. Fronsdel uses the example of standing in a rive to discuss what mental and spiritual stability looks like, even as a current flow all around you, carry the river over a waterfall. The way to address your fear of floating over a waterfall is to stand up and take a stable stance:
I’ve been in somewhat shallow rivers, maybe that the river was up to my mid?thigh, and I could lay down flat on the surface of the river, and it had a nice current that carried me beautifully down the river.And it was kind of fun and nice to be floating along. It feels really nice until you realize that the river is going right over a waterfall, a big waterfall. So then it’s not so nice anymore.
And so… you turn around, try to swim upstream, but…the river is pulling you down the stream faster than you can swim up. The waterfall is coming, you can hear the roar. And so all you have to do, though, is stand up in the river. Because it’s shallow… it’s just courage, it’s only up to your mid?thigh. And if you stand there, then the current of the river continues. It flows right by you. But you’re still.
You’re not separated from the current, but now you’re free of the current because you have the stability, the strength of standing there, and you’re far from any danger of going over the waterfall. It’s relatively easy now to walk to the shore or walk up river. And so we get swept away sometimes by our thoughts, swept away by our emotions, swept away by the world and concerns that are going on. And we don’t realize how much we’re being carried along, swept away by the current of this momentum of thoughts, momentum of desires, momentum of aversion. We don’t even see the waterfalls that’s going to take us over sometimes. But what mindfulness teaches us is that we could always have the ability to stand up in the current and kind of wake up and kind of be stable and strong.
In dialogue, containers offer a kind of stability to hold emotions and thoughts. Human beings thrive when there is a container in which we can fully participate, be fully human, and be. And they require us to have that overview of process and context, to see that we are in something that is meaningful, or not, and to notice what is contributing to that state of affairs. From there, we might even be able to catch ourselves and offering a slight shift, a slight move, a slight contribution that might catalyze more or less stability. It is a subtle art.
The way a conversation unfolds around a table and deepens and becomes sticky – you don;t want to leave it – is a kind of stability. When it breaks it’s hard to get it back again, and nif you weren’t a part of it “you had to be there” to understand what it is like. Other forms of stability for dialogue are held through rigid physical or protocol constraints so that deliberative chambers like court rooms and legislatures are designed for rational, non-emotional discourse. When feelings erupt in those chambers, the integrity of container fails, and chaos ensues, because those who are responsible for this spaces have no way to cope with the events of the moment but to shut it all down (don’t perform a haka in the New Zealand Parliament!). That can be a form of liberation, but in the end some form of stable container needs to arise in order for human relationships and conversations to unfold. Places like Parliaments and court rooms are structured to assert a particular kind of power relationship, so the physical and procedural stability of those containers is designed to re-establish that state of affairs “once every one has calmed down” and the dour business at hand can be considered again in the desired modality of the system, in these cases, predicated on notions of reason and civility.
But even in highly structured and constrained places, dialogic containers are emergent. You cannot force meaningful dialogue. You can only set some initial conditions and monitor what unfolds. Even though a room may have robust physical restrictions, adjustments to the constraints of the container can still offer a chance at something meaningful happening. I bristle from the idea that a dialogue facilitator’s role is “to create and hold the container.” I prefer instead to think of that role as one of using constraints to increase the probability that a a dialogic container will emerge. The way I have learned to practice facilitation is to be a witness to the capacity of a group to self-organize and manage itself with minimal intervention from a “facilitator.” Instead we work hard to design initial conditions, and pay attention to threshold practices like beginnings and endings to invite human beings into a place in which meaningful work gets done.
For my whole career I’ve been consumed with the mystery of the emergence and stability of dialogic containers, how something so ephemeral can create deeply meaningful experiences, and how we might find the ways to work with containers – through constraints of connection, exchange, attractors and boundaries – to increase the chances for powerful dialogue and meaning making. Everywhere I look, there are examples and lessons to be learned about this.
So, back to that campfire that is pictured above. If you took the time to make the list, think about whether that list will guarantee a great campfire every single time, from the get go. If not, what do you think you will have to do to make that more likely to happen? The answer to that question might be a good way to think about your approach to facilitation.
For as long as I have been working in the non-profit and government worlds, since 1991, I have been confronted with the idea that somehow we always must do more with less. When I began work at the National Association of Friendship Centres in 1992, my first real job after leaving university, the organization was coming to the end of a five-year cycle of funding for urban Indigenous programs and core capacity that had grown steadily since 1972. Over twenty years, the federal government had increased funding in the Friendship Centres in Canada’s towns and cities, and the movement had grown to over 100 communities with between three and five core funded positions in each centre, offering a myriad of services to urban Indigenous populations from Halifax to Port Alberni and Red Lake to Inuvik.
In 1993, the Liberals were elected to power after ten years of Progressive Conservative government, and they committed to tackling the federal deficit. The did this by actually continuing a series of budget reductions that the last Tory finance Minister Ray Hnatyshyn had proposed in his election budget. Paul Martin got credit for it, but it was a PC plan.
The upshot of these across-the-board spending reductions was that we “had to do more with less,” or “become more efficient” or “get creative” or “innovate” or “tighten belts and find redundancies.” With very, very, few exceptions almost every organization I have worked with since then has had to face the same problem. The neo-liberal economic revolution of Regan and Thatcher and Mulroney delivered massive amounts of money to the richest people in the world and starved government of revenues and marginalized communities of funding and material support, even as they picked up the work of addressing the increasing social problems externalized by the private sector.
We went through periods of funding freezes, cuts, occasional bumps (“investment” it is sometimes called) but there has in general been a growing trend of increasing social problems and complexity, decreasing government support and increasing wealth inequality in Canada leading to massively underfunded non-profits. We are now seeing core government services shredded too. When the word “austerity” is used it seems to signal that direct government services such as health and education and income security are in for a tough time.
Ideology drives all of this. For most of the past 45 years that ideology has been the market-based economic liberalism that has privatized and financialized everything. In the past 20 years it has included ideologies of the culture war that has tied government funding to strange ideas that are put out there to stoke outrage, fuel algorithms, divide citizens and achieve razor thin electoral margins. In places like Alberta a bewildering set of strange ideas about public health, energy independence and education has meant that the public purse is weaponized against people who are trying to provide vaccines against fatal and preventable illnesses, or create sustainable and low-cost energy technologies, or build education systems that create welcoming and inclusive learning environments. These were things we used to fund, plan for and organize around.
In talking with a colleague today we were noticing how this moment of austerity is showing up in the work we do to support organizations and facilitate dialogue, and engagement, especially in this moment when we are confronted by nearly overwhelming confusion and complexity. It used to be that the conversations we were hosting suffered at times from a scarcity mindset, meaning that we weren’t aware of the actual richness that was around us. Participatory leadership and process opens up access to that richness.
Today we are suffering from an austerity mindset, which can be thought of as a realization that the richness we need has been taken away from us. It is harder and harder to find diverse groups of people and voices to work on issues of staggering complexity. People have had their time and material resources privatized, colonized, and taken from them.
We were noticing that coming out of the pandemic, people have welcomed the chance to be together in person again, but how we show up has changed. Every face-to-face meeting is high stakes and there is decreasing trust in opening up and letting go into a participatory process. While in the past it seemed easier to coach leaders and organizations to find solutions at the margins of their work with authentic and creative engagement with their people and communities, these days it seems like our work is to keep leaders from becoming autocratic. With so few hands willing and able to do the work of addressing huge systemic issues, most organizations and networks seem to have only a few key people who are close to the work. This creates a fear that if the leader doesn’t directly influence and shift everyone to their way of thinking, we won’t get the chance to do the work properly.
To be honest some of this worry is warranted. We know from the ways in which Cynefin advises us to act in crisis, that applying tight constraints is the best way to establish safety. But what you do with that safety once you have it is what’s at stake. These days it seems that many leaders are drifting towards consolidating that power by offering to sustain the work of maintaining safety at the expense of other ideas, diverse thinking, or even a challenge to their plans. We see this in national leadership. Trump is the obvious example, but it has been interesting to see Prime Minister Carney stumbling in the House of Commons as Pierre Poilievre looks his seat and provided the first testing challenges of Carney’s leadership. Carney has had it easy since he was elected.
There are lots of implications here for facilitating participatory work and supporting leaders in this time, and to me they come from our lessons in complexity and dialogic practice. Here’s a few, and maybe you can add to them:
The work of the world is teetering on the edge of chaos AND is deeply complex. So that means that yes, leaders and facilitators and Board chairs need to consolidate decision making and create safety. But it also means that this is EXACT time to open up leadership to people who have differing view points and perspectives and experiences. That diversity is what provides the sophisticated situational awareness needed to address the challenges we are in. Polarity management is coming back into my practice in a big way as we help groups to see the tensions they are working with and engage with them productively.
Avoid premature convergence. One of my favourite Dave Snowden slogans implores us to not choose the first good idea and go with it. Even if thing seems to be moving fast, committing too early to a course of action can send you on a path from which return is very tricky. Use scenario planning to keep a view on possibilities, and adjust plans as you go. COVID killed the five-year plan, but you can still set longer-view directions of travel and think about the different landscapes you will confront to get there.
Leave more community than you found. In times of crisis it is impossible to build the social connectivity and relational fields that help sustain us. We need to be doing that in the moments when we can take a breath and think. And meetings are what those moments look like in organizational life. If you are using meetings to preach to the masses, you are missing this chance. Every conversation in the organization right now has the chance to build community while also doing good work, including conversations about how to be together. And if you are a leader with a good idea that you want others to take up, you need to build trust and relational capacity if that idea is to be supported and improved upon. Participatory work does this. It also does this much better if we are physically n the same room.
Big messy conversations are a feature, not a bug. Since the pandemic, I have been doing A LOT of Open Space meetings. Open Space just creates the kind of agenda that is impossible if only one person is in charge. When participants begin posting sessions in Open Space everyone gets to see the real texture of need and capacity in the organization, and we are given the chance to dive in and work on them. Same with Pro Action Cafe, which helps individuals in large gatherings get the help they need with the many different projects and programs they are running. We don’t need alignment on everything right now. We do need much more activity happening in plain view, co-created and co-supported. Like Harrison Owne used to say “Trust the people.”
We need to look after ourselves. This time is taking a real toll on many people. Caring for oneself is not greedy. It is essential. If we are all to stay resourceful in the messy chaos of the present moment we need to be taking our time to be grounded, become familiar with our own patterns of reactivity and do the world a favour and work on them. Yesterday, in talking with a colleague who works right at the coalface of social change and community organizing, I asked her how she was keeping it together. Her morning practice of prayer and meditation has never been more essential, and in fact she had to remind herself to get back to it. I can relate.
I’m sure this list could go on, and I invite you to add to it. Leave a comment about what you are noticing and how you are working with others to cope with the realities of this moment. We are living in a thin time when the macro currents of war and conflict and austerity and hatred are seeping into each of our special places. We need to work within these contexts and find islands of meaning and respite so good work can continue and people can be looked after.