Everyone wants action – that’s the current business buzzword. Dialogue and conversation seem fine “but they have to focus on action.” It’s almost growing tiresome to hear it.
The problem with the mantra is that people rarely have any idea of what action really looks like. Very few people think through to the personal responsibility THEY might take in animating action. Even less see conversation and dialogue AS action.
But today in my email box, comes confirmation that action is intimately connected to dialogue and when passion and reposnibility come together, real things happen.
Back in the fall, my business partner Lyla Brown and I conducted a series of Aboriginal engagement meetings for the Victoria Urban Development Agreement process (the report is here). As part of the work, we held an Open Space Technology meeting with more than 100 community members to discuss and implement ideas that had been raised in a series of focus groups. One of the conversations at the Open Space gathering was on food security, and the results of that work have now borne fruit. Today, I received a press release in my inbox from one of the community agencies that took up the implementation challenge and ran with it:
Aboriginal Group Promotes Food Security as humble start in reducing Aboriginal poverty as Big Business
VICTORIA – Inner City Aboriginal Society (ICAS), by promoting an aboriginal community dialogue on food security, is actively working towards reducing poverty as big business.
As a reaction to the fact that an estimated 50% of the street-homeless community in Victoria are aboriginal – and that current funded strategies are focused on charity based or service provision approaches – ICAS has organized itself to encourage a move towards a third option. ICAS is facilitating a series of Aboriginal Sharing Groups on Food Security at the end of March to provide information about food security issues, to explore cultural aspects of food security and to set some direction for further action. The discussions on food security represent – for those in the Inner City Aboriginal Society – the restoration of economic justice by transitioning the aboriginal community from victim to dignity status. Bruce Ferguson, one of the founding directors of ICAS expressed his opinion on the Aboriginal Sharing Groups on Food Security.
“Imagine if 50% of the budgets of all the downtown service providers and dedicated funds for the street community went to aboriginal people to empower ourselves….need I say more. Empowerment of the marginalized cant happen over night, but at least with taking back the dignity of feeding ourselves, we can one day reach equality with other Canadians…”
“The work of ICAS in food security dialogue will provide a challenge that moves the aboriginal community away from being objects of charity and-or clients of service providers towards strategies and languages that talk about empowerment and self-reliance” adds Rose Henry, long time aboriginal activist and recent candidate for City Council.
The Aboriginal Sharing Groups will be held between March 22nd and April 3rd.
Action is passion bounded by responsibility. Action becomes easier when there is a strategic architecture for acting. That architecture is forged in the fire of conversations about what matters, where people create relationships, connections and shared vision about what might be. When that action infrastructure is laid down, acting becomes fairly basic. When that architecture can be created from the bottom-up and then used by those who actually created it, then the action becomes both efficient and powerful.
The interesting thing about this series of community conversations on food security is that they have been taking place outside of the official program of the Victoria Agreement. The agreement itself is not yet signed, and there are many planning conversations going on behind the scenes to tranisition the structure of the inter-governmental relationships from working groups to action groups. While this has been happening, Inner City Aboriginal Society and its partners have been leveraging the strategic architecture that was formed in the community Open Space event to put this topic and approach in front of the community. They are seeking solutions to the problem that avoids a dependant relationship on governments and “charities” and in doing so, they are planning, organizing and meeting without government or charitable support.
Leadership, even in business, is about walking your talk and both creating and leveraging the strategic architecture to find a way to take responsibility for what one loves. ICAS is showing the way here.
My friend Toke Moeller and I are running an Art of Hosting training this week with 12 Aboriginal youth here in British Columbia. We are having a marvelous time so far with one day behind us and two ahead. There have been some good insights as we head deeper into the essences and practicesof hosting conversations that matter. Today we spent time in a natural circle of trees in Cathedral Grove near Port Alberni, which is a pokect of nearyl 1000 year old douglas-fir and cedar on the Cameron River. These old ones make good teachers, especially when we bring them questions about confronting our fears.
I had one or two insights myself today about the essence of effective conversation. Both arose in an appreciative conversation with Toke. For me, a powerful one was that effective conversation creates in the spaces in which true offerings of the heart can be made. The results of the best conversations include having the participants in that conversation able to give gifts of their time, attention and commitment to the result. All good action arises as a result of this kind of free, heart-based offering.
And we also noticed that good conversations contain the seeds of stories which are repeated for years afterwards. It is, in fact, nearly impossible to know these seeds untila later time, when we pull them out of a bag and tell them as stories. But for sure, an effective conversation is one that conceives these seeds that later brith in the momentof telling. Who is to know what any of these seeds will become?
What can you add to this list?
On Monday I was up in Kamloops taking part in an annual gathering called the “Stop Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth” Conference. That’s a mouthful but it’s a truly wonderful annual gathering hosted by The Justice Institute of British Columbia (itself a great thing we have here in BC).
I was asked to come and deliever a workshop on dialogue and deliberation methods with youth, and so I showed up to do that. In my design I though it would be cool to see if I could give people a tast of what it feels like to be engaged so deeply that we experience emergence. I wanted people to experience what it feels like to work from their strengths and have something appear about youth engagement that no one person brought into the room with them. And I had 2.5 hours.
I began where I always begin, telling the story of the quadrants, and mapping the four open space practices in some detail (link opens a .pdf). Instead of filling in my own practices, I asked people what their practices were and we filled in the map together. This is important, because people truly do know how to do opening, inviting, holding and grounding. It’s just a matter of turning their attention to how they do it.
After that, we moved into an opening practice, with a bit of an Appreciative Inquiry experience. I invited people to pair up and interview one another on the question of “Tell me a story or two of a time when you felt deeply engaged by others. What might we learn from that about engagement in general?” People spent a very short time interviewing – 10 minutes each – and then they returned to the circle.
Next I gave them a taste of The World Cafe and we moved into fours to process some of this learning. The question for the first 20 minute round was “What can we learn from these reflections about deeply engaging youth.” After the first round was over, the groups mixed up and continued exploring the question. At the end of the second 20 minutes, I asked them to remain in their spots and turn their collective minds to discerning “What ideas want to hatch now?” The third round was quieter and more deliberate.
Finally we reconvened in a circle and I invited reflections about where we were at after spending this time thinking through this work. We got a number of ideas, including thoughts about deep listening, about approaching youth where they are, both physically and emotionally and about showing up completely authentically in engagement and with curiosity about where the process might lead. There were also a number of “aha’s” about detaching from outcomes.
In just over an hour and a half, using nothing but the resources and stories of the people in the room we did experience a little bit of emergence and a I think everyone got some good ideas out of the session. If we had had more time, I would have then worked with the most interesting ideas (as determined by the group) and perhaps split people up into little design teams to figure out how these principles might work in a grounded engagement process. Then we could have melded these conversations together into some tools and approaches that might be useful.
I think the biggest learning for people was just how fast learning can take place when you are engaged in deep conversation about stuff that matters. And how the most important person in that kind of process is not the facilitator or the teacher, but the experts you are surrounded by, and the stories and experiences of your own life, seen in a new light.
A couple of stories about truth and stories. 
Yesterday on CBC Radio’s Sounds Like Canada, Shelagh Rogers interviewed Paul Rosen. Paul Rosen is the goaltender for Canada’s Sledge Hockey team, and is getting ready to head over to Turin to compete in the Paralympics.
Rosen is an amputee, having lost his leg to a persistent bacterial infection. Very early on in his new life as a one legged man he adopted a very positive outlook. His doctors were suspicious and sent him to a psychiatrist for an evaluation. At that consultation, Rosen took some water and poured it on his stump. He said to the doctor “I can water this stump five times a day for the rest of my life and the leg won’t grow back.
Faced with that reality, there were only two options: become depressed, or see the amputation as an opportunity to be a better person. Fully aware that neither option would bring back his leg, he opted for the second one.
You can hear the full interview with Paul Rosen here (opens a RealMedia file)
On the ferry coming home today I was talking with a friend who was trying to adopt a positive attitude but who thought that doing so was glossing over the reality of pain and suffering in the world. He said that he couldn’t see the glass as half-full, only half-empty. We talked for a while and I asked him what was actually true about the half full glass. We agreed that what was actually true was that an 8oz glass has 4oz of water in it. Whether you saw that as half full or half empty was entirely up to you. There was no more truth to one story than the other. Believing one over the other was not going to change the fact that there is only 4oz of water in that 8oz glass.
This is the difference between truth and stories. And so confronted with these two competing stories, why not choose the one that serves life?
[tags]paul-rosen, sledge-hockey, paralympics, stories[/tags]
Thanks to a link at plep, I stumbled today upon the journals of the Apollo 11 astronauts. There is a mass of material at this site, but what I have been finding most interesting is the transcriptions of the debriefing sessions that the astronauts went through when they returned to earth. A lot of the details are technical and full of acronyms and other jargon, but certain sections stand out. For example, here is a section from the debrief where Armstrong and Aldrin, the first two men on the moon, are talking about learning to walk:
Aldrin
I don’t think there is such a thing as running. It’s a lope and it’s very hard to just walk. You break into this lope very soon as you begin to speed up.Armstrong
I can best describe a lope as having both feet off the ground at the same time, as opposed to walking where you have one foot on the ground at all times. In loping, you leave the ground with both feet and come down with one foot in a normal running fashion. It’s not like an earth run here, because you are taking advantage of the low gravity.
I don’t think there is such a thing as running. It’s a lope and it’s very hard to just walk. You break into this lope very soon as you begin to speed up.Armstrong
I can best describe a lope as having both feet off the ground at the same time, as opposed to walking where you have one foot on the ground at all times. In loping, you leave the ground with both feet and come down with one foot in a normal running fashion. It’s not like an earth run here, because you are taking advantage of the low gravity.
Aldrin
The difference there is that in a run, you think in terms of moving your feet rapidly to move fast, and you can’t move your feet any more rapidly than the next time you come in contact with the surface. In general, you have to wait for that to occur.
Armstrong
And you are waiting to come down. So the foot motion is actually fairly slow, but both feet are off the ground simultaneously. You can cover ground pretty well that way. It was fairly comfortable, but at the end of this trip, going out there and back, I was already feeling like I wanted to stop and rest a little. After about 500 feet of this loping with a 1-minute stop out there in the middle to take pictures, I was ready to slow down and rest.
The transcript is full of these kinds of reflective learnings. Reading through, one comes away with the sense of how important story is in reinforcing learnings. There was much that the astronauts had to do for the first time during their mission, things that they couldn’t practice on Earth or things that were different under the conditions of being in space. It’s these things that make the best storytelling, and you can see them trying to make meaning of their experiences.
Here’s another section. This time Aldrin and Armstrong are talking about the colour of the moon’s surface:
Armstrong
Probably the most surprising thing to me, even though I guess we suspected a certain amount of this, was the light and color observations of the surface. The down-Sun area was extremely bright. It appeared to be a light tan in color, and you could see into the washout region reasonably well. Detail was obscured somewhat by the washout, but not badly. As you proceeded back toward cross-Sun, brightness diminished, and the color started to fade, and it began to be more gray. As we looked back as far as we could from the LM windows, the color on the surface was actually a darker gray. I’d say not completely without color, but most of the tan had disappeared as we got back into that area, and we were looking at relatively dark gray. In the shadow, it was very dark. We could see into the shadows, but it was difficult.Aldrin
We could see very small gradations in color that were the result of very small topographical changes.
Probably the most surprising thing to me, even though I guess we suspected a certain amount of this, was the light and color observations of the surface. The down-Sun area was extremely bright. It appeared to be a light tan in color, and you could see into the washout region reasonably well. Detail was obscured somewhat by the washout, but not badly. As you proceeded back toward cross-Sun, brightness diminished, and the color started to fade, and it began to be more gray. As we looked back as far as we could from the LM windows, the color on the surface was actually a darker gray. I’d say not completely without color, but most of the tan had disappeared as we got back into that area, and we were looking at relatively dark gray. In the shadow, it was very dark. We could see into the shadows, but it was difficult.Aldrin
We could see very small gradations in color that were the result of very small topographical changes.
Armstrong
Of course, when we actually looked at the material, particularly the silt, up close it did, in fact, turn out to be sort of charcoal gray or the color of a graded lead pencil. When you’re actually faced with trying to interpret this kind of color and that light reflectivity, it is amazing.
Aldrin
When illuminated, it did have a gray appearance, very light gray.
Armstrong
Wouldn’t you say it is something like the color of that wall? It isn’t very far away from what it looked like. Yet when you look at it close, it’s a very peculiar phenomenon.
It actually feels like a privilege to be sitting in on this conversation. It inspires me into a similar practice with facilitation events, debriefing with clients and partners as well in a way that is story-based learning.
Categories: learning, storytelling, astronauts