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.
Peter Levine shared a video today of a panel he was on back in June, discussing practical ways to have difficult conversations. We could all do with a little more practice in this these days. I know I certainly could.
I found the audio hard to hear, but Peter’s post helpfully summarizes what each presenter practices, and I have gathered these principles here in a list for future reference. Each person is working in a different context, but the gathering was about teaching civics in schools in the United States. I think there is some useful transferrance of these principles, so I’m going to slightly rephrase them to be more general.
- Ground discussions in shared principles, such as living well together or a desire to find common ground
- Explore tensions (such as between equality and liberty(
- Use historical rather than current examples.
- Let the other lead.
- Set norms for addressing identities
- Allow a person to opt-out of “representing” a group
- Take responsibility for imbalances in credibility
- Give full attention to the other
- Practice receptivity, curiosity and open-heartedness
- Allow long pauses to allow quieter voices to emerge
- Make the conversation multi-centred, in other words allow it to become a real conversation rather than a mediated exchange of ideas through one person with power in the situation.
- Ask “What are you concerned about?” to uncover core values
- Legitimate concerns without needing to agree with them.
- Ground the discussion in a shared moral foundation
- Understanding your own philosophical, moral or ethical principles can help you generate good questions.
- Listen for understanding, not debate or attack.
Peter Levine (my summary , because he doesn’t cover his own talk in his post!)
- Name your own biases and make them visible
- Find a share ground of values
- Ask questions that are neither too abstract but also not settled.
- Explore unresolvable tensions
I recently found myself in a difficult conversation and I handled it really badly. It stemmed from a poor comment I made on a social media post during an election campaign where I accused my interlocutor of posting a hoax becasue a meme he shared did not reflect the data that was contained in the report it referenced. I know this person in real life, and the conversation did not go well online. When I saw him in real life, I apologized. A few days later we found ourselves together in the community and we started discussing the point of the post he made. It became a dogfight. I was triggered and upset, feeling some shame and guilt that I had kicked this whole thing off with what he perceived as a personal attack online. For his part, he is a lawyer, so the conversation became a debate, both of us convinced we were right. I was without any kind of skillfulness in creating a good curiosity based conversation. It wasn’t a proud moment.
Practicing these kinds of conversations is incredibly hard. None of us are saints. Principles like the ones above are just basic good sense for anyone hosting or participating in a difficult conversation, but they are incredibly difficult to remember and practice when we are in an emotional state and when the conversations we are having may ultimately have existential implications for the folks in the discussion.
I think at the end of the day one of the key principles that is my own personal responsibility to take is “I want this to go well, for me and the person I’m talking too.” I don’t mean that we should avoid conflict and just be civil to each other, or that we should deny any part of our emotional response to a situation. What I mean is that we should embrace a relationship, even if only for a few minutes, that can hold different experiences, different points of view and different aspiration side by side. For that we need a practice ground and before we step out onto that mat, we need some principles to guide us.
Here are some. What are yours?
The golfer Scotty Scheffler, who just won The Open Championship, has made some waves recently with the interview he gave before that tournament where he talks about what is fulfilling in life. It’s not winning golf tournaments. In fact he expresses a little astonishment and confusion about why he does what he does, even though he is one of the best in the world at it. “You work all your life for two minutes of euphoria…” As a musician I can relate. We puts hundreds of hours of practice into learning a piece, only to perform it once, perhaps, for a couple of minutes of interesting music. And that’s not even counting the lifetime of work that goes into the training the voice, the fingers, the ear, and the heart to be able to perform competently enough to even be on a stage in the first place.
I was struck by the moment in his press conference where he says “am I making sense?” At that moment, I nodded, but clearly the golf and sports press gallery didn’t. And that is what separates artists from those who value the end line. As Alan Watts once said, if the result was everything people would only go to hear the final chord of a composition, or dancers would head to one spot on the stage and stay there. It’s a cultural error, which is what makes Scheffler’s comments seem so confusing, in a culture that worships the final result.
More patterns that are everywhere. Last week I shared a link about how the Golden Ration is over represented in our ideas about the universe. Today comes a beautiful article from Aeon which talks about the prevalence of the branching network (like a river valley or a bronchial passage) and the web (like neural networks or cosmic galactic clusters) and how they operate across scales. Interestingly in the article, the author Mark Neyrinck doesn’t seem to distinguish between networks with ends and those without. Networks where things arrive at certain places, and networks where they don’t.
I wonder if we are losing our ability to organize and work in networks at scale for social good. Here in North America we are very individual focused in terms of meeting needs and our current governments are most focused on creating the conditions for an efficient return on capital investments and concentration of wealth, following the long discredited trickle down theory of Neo-liberal economics. We are probably going to need networks of care, becasue the federal government is about to gut a number of public facing service personnel to pay for national defence spending and tax cuts. Most of these jobs are the liaison people that help folks with their federal pension plans, employment insurance, and federal taxation issues. The Department that serves First Nations communities and maintains Canada’s end of the bargain in terms of treaty benefits, stands to have substantial program cuts. This is one journey that is going to result in some dire destinations for vulnerable folks, newcomers, and Indigenous communities
Mindfulness, awareness and the move from confusion to aporia to resourcefulness in the Cynefin framework.