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Category Archives "Stories"

Story work is hard

February 23, 2023 By Evaluation, Featured, Stories 5 Comments

This is a picture of me, puzzling something out.

I’m about a third of the way through a 20-week Participatory Narrative Inquiry practicum with Cynthia Kurtz. We’ve been spending a lot of time talking about story, and story collection, because that is a really important aspect of generating the magic. As Cynthia said today “magic is amazing but all the folktales will tell you that it is always supposed to be hard.”

Today she shared an old blog post on the work being “too hard” and it’s worth quoting in depth:

Story work is hard. It is not clean or clear or simple. It is high input, high risk and high output. I find there is a tendency, probably common to all human beings, to jump past the first two parts of that sentence and pay attention only to the last part: high output. But all three parts are equally important. If input is not high enough — yours and every participant’s — or if things go wrong, the potentially high output of story work could be low or nonexistent, or even negative. Nobody should work with stories in organizations or communities without a full awareness of this fact. The reason story work digs deeper than other methods of inquiry is the same reason it is more likely to fail than other methods of inquiry. It is hard because it is good, and it is good because it is hard.

All of this makes working with stories hard to popularize. It’s not an approach that spreads like wildfire. I’d rather it be slow than wrong, and I’m not in any hurry to change the world, so I don’t mind if the majority of people stand off and view story listening from a distance…

…soak yourself in stories. Why? First, because before you have a good long soak in stories you can’t see the values they bring to inquiry, so you can’t sustain the high input required. Second, because until you understand the life of stories you won’t know where to place your high input, and you won’t know where the risks lie. Like a gardener who tries to grow food without learning to love the soil, you will bring failure upon your own efforts. Most of the people I’ve seen come to story work from other fields have not been willing to be with thousands of stories and learn how they live. They just want results, and that’s part of why they get frustrated. They aren’t in the world of stories to settle down, just to visit. But the world of stories doesn’t open itself to casual visitors. Only the locals know the soil, and only the locals grow the best tomatoes.

This has been my experience too. The amazing insights that come from working with stories together are like magic, but it is a lot of work to get it going and make it sing.

End of year reflections

December 24, 2022 By Art of Hosting, Being, Bowen, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Football, Leadership, Learning, Music, Practice, Stories, Travel 10 Comments

Smelhmelhélch (Passage Island) at the mouth of Átl’ka7tsem (Howe Sound) before the snows came earlier this week.

Some notes on 2023 while I have a moment to review them.

The year began with the death of my father and is ending with worries about the serious and lingering health issues of other senior family members and so in a lot of ways this year has been split between personal grief during the first part of the year, and the waiting, supporting and attending in the second part of the year. Several times during the year, I haven’t found myself at my best. And that’s added on top of the persistent and low level background radiation that comes from the feeling that the world is slowly coming apart on this part of the planet and we are collectively ill-equipped to deal with it.

It hasn’t left me pessimistic, but I have noticed that I’m sad at what we have lost, which most of all appears to be the collective capacity to DO SOMETHING about the long term prospects for our planet and the community of living things that occupy it. as irrational as that thought is, because truthfully, it has been that way for my whole life, nevertheless, there is a feeling of loss. I’ve always described myself as an optimist because I believe that there is always something better we can do or embody, but the general prognosis needs power and wealth to radically change directions, and increasingly, I’m not confident that will happen. And so we push on.

Work

My work is changing, and has done throughout the pandemic. In the past I did much more face to face and one off facilitation work and delivered teaching through Art of Hosting workshops, for which I travelled the world. As I get older, I am more interested in teaching and supporting younger facilitators and so there is much more teaching now and one-to-one coaching and we are also taking work that is larger in scope than facilitating single meetings, in which we are focused on longer term support for leaders and organizations who want to be more participatory and more engaged with meaningful work. I like this as it means we develop longer term relationships with a few clients and are able to see the results of our work together over time. Additionally most of this work continues to be online, which suits me well as I have become more of a homebody and more introverted in the last three years. I do love face to face work, but as I get older I find it much more tiring, and I appreciate the ability to deliver quality content to folks and then turn off my computer and go to the garden or play guitar for an hour.

In 2023 I will turn 55 and I have a strong commitment that on my 55 birthday we will begin the process to scaling back and only working four days a week. We have been planning on this for a while, and I’m really looking forward to this shift. I feel like I need it for all kinds of reasons. In my calendar starting June 13, every Friday for the rest of my life has a recurring event that says “Fridays off for the rest of my life.”

This year Harvest Moon which consists of Caitlin Frost and myself along with our stellar assistant Laura O’Neil, had 27 clients. Many of these were larger projects working within large organizations and involving a lot of teaching and capacity building to support leadership and organizational change. We do this with a set of tools and practices that include participatory facilitation methods from Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development approaches, Participatory Narrative Inquiry, complexity work and personal practices for rigorous inquiry on limiting beliefs. This year we packaged these into bespoke programs in complexity focused participatory leadership for the Executive levels and senior leadership of a major university, a Crown corporation, an Indigenous government, a national labour union and one or two smaller organizations. We embedded several three day Art of Hosting/Art of Participatory Leadership workshops in these settings, and also used our course material we have been developing around complexity and personal leadership practices to complement the strategic conversations that we hosted. We have written four extensive workbooks for these programs and this might well turn into something more formal in the years ahead.

We amplified all of this work with story collections primarily using NarraFirma to gather stories and PNI to design sense-making and strategic interventions. This last capacity has become key to our work now and I have now run upwards of 30 story collection and sense-making projects through NarraFirma since the pandemic began. Although we have become really good at working with this material online, this work is most powerful in person, and it is one of the things I am looking forward to doing more face to face.

Partners

Over the past year we have worked with many partners and it is my usual practice to name them. They live in five different countries (Canada, USA, Netherlands, Moldova and Australia) and working with them makes it possible for all of us to do amazing work together. My gratitude to them all.

  • Harvest Moon partners Caitlin Frost and Laura O’Neil
  • Tatiana Glad
  • Meribeth Deen
  • Bhav Patel
  • Kris Archie
  • Kelly Foxcroft Poirier
  • Tiaré Jung
  • Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen at Beehive Productions
  • Phill Cass
  • Ciaran Camman
  • Amanda Fenton
  • Quin Buck
  • Corrina Keeling
  • Jodi Sanford
  • Kinwa Bluesky
  • Chad Foulks
  • Geoff Brown
  • Teresa Posakony.

Teaching

This year I offered several open enrolment courses with colleagues.

Learning

In addition to everything I learned from teaching these courses I also enrolled in two important programs myself to deepen my own practice.

  • Weaving It In: Making evaluation part of your work. This was an inaugural offering from my close colleague Ciaran Camman and combined their decades of evaluation experience with solid complexity and participatory practice. A nice combination of theory and practice and experiential learning.
  • Co-Resolve introduction to Deep Democracy with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson. After about 20 years of Sera challenging me to become friends with conflict, I finally came to study with her and this was a great course. The biggest shift in me is seeing how my conflict-averse tendencies have shifted from conflict resolution to what I’m calling “conflict preservation.”
  • This next year I have signed up for Cynthia Kurtz’s deep dive into Participatory Narrative Inquiry which is a 20 week long practicum during which my colleague Augusto Cuginotti and I will be running a PNI project with a client. I haven’t done any learning like this at this sort of scale since University. I’m looking forward to it.

Living on the web

My first website was a collaborative writing project with my old friend Chris Heald called Stereotype back in 1995. It was a proto-blog in the style of suck.com, which even 25 years later is a remarkable documentation of the shift of life from physical to online. So I’ve lived through a lot of iterations of web life. This past year I started a long wean away from the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter and began writing again on my blog with more frequency. I started a Mastodon account and have used that as an opportunity to rethink how I have compartmentalized my life online to suit various audiences. For the most part I have maintained a professional kind of look here and on my @chriscorrigan twitter account and I have devoted hours and hours of time to soccer life through my @salishsea86 twitter account. That is all changing slowly. I maintain some twitter accounts for the supporters group of the soccer team I co-own, but otherwise, I think everything will eventually be centralized back here with micro-posts on Mastodon. I will republish links to these posts through Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter as usual.

I’m slightly looking at LinkedIn again as there is some interesting professional content there that used to be published on blogs, but as much as possible I am integrating interesting content into my feeds at NetNewsWire. That is where I will be doing most of my reading, as the endless scroll of twitter and facebook are no long giving much value and Instagram is useless for my life, other than keeping up with our footballers who are half my age who only post there!

Avocations

This year has had three big commitments outside of family and work. As a founding member of the TSS Rovers Supporters’ Trust, I have spent the year selling shares to 351 co-owners of Canada’s first community-owned semi-pro soccer team. We have done some remarkable things this year including winning a League Cup on the men’s side and qualifying us for Canada’s national championship, the Voyageurs Cup, which is, mindbogglingly, the pathway to the FIFA Club World Cup. We will play a meaningful match in the first round of that competition in April against a Canadian Premier League professional team and the only thing better than actually getting this far would be effecting a giant killing in April. It has bee a remarkable journey all it’s own.

Another responsibility that I have devoted myself too is chairing the Board of the Rivendell retreat centre, a contemplative centre on Bowen Island. We have come through a pandemic and stayed afloat and are now beginning to engage in active fundraising for our longer term sustainability. This role is part of the way I live out my contemplative spiritual practice alongside a commitment to leading worship once a month at our little United Church on Bowen Island. I love that job. It helps us to afford our part time Minister and I get to dive deep into topics and scripture readings that are close to my heart. Perhaps I’ll post my sermon notes here in the new year if that’s of interest to you.

Music is my love and my third commitment. I have been singing with a renaissance choir doing medieval liturgical music and madrigals and studying jazz guitar on my own. My guitar teacher sadly died in April, and I miss him dearly. We had only a few lessons this year as he grew sicker. Learning jazz alone with only you tube videos and fake books is incredibly hard but incredibly rewarding and I’m hoping this year I might be able to study with another teacher and finally get a chance to play with folks.

Life on an island

I have lived on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) now for 21 years and seen many changes over that time. I have blogged about living here for most of that time. These days we are facing a huge population turnover and some rapid growth which has introduced lots of new folks to the place and radically changed the culture. Community events are returning which is essential if we are to repair the cohesion as a community that has been lost through the pandemic. I feel that we are fragmented in many ways, and we are being confronted with some very challenging situations including a ferry system that is crumbling under global staffing shortages, strains on our little island infrastructure, economic pressures from living in one of the most expensive places on earth with no level of government committed to radical change, tourism pressures and mindset that sees the places increasingly as an under served and under resourced suburb rather than a rural community. These changes have been steadily occurring over the past number of decades but social media and a lack of face to face contact has made them more pressing.

In the natural world, the big news is the tremendous numbers of humpback whales and orcas that have returned to our seas, and there are almost daily sightings of these mega-fauna. Ten years ago that was unimaginable. While that is happening, we have also witnessed some extreme weather, including long hot droughts in the summer which are the biggest threats to the place. Things change here and being grounded in place means that one can be a long-eyed witness of it all.

So that is the state of play on Christmas Eve 2023. At the end of a year in which I was not at my best, after three years of living in a strange new world, entering the half way point of my 50s. Thank you for sharing this year with me. Say hi. I hope we can cross paths next year.

Lessons from facilitating babies

May 29, 2022 By Art of Hosting, Community, Facilitation, Featured, First Nations, Flow, Stories, Youth 8 Comments

Im just coming back from a meeting this weekend on Vancouver Island where Kelly Poirier and I were working with some specialized health care workers who were meeting with Indigenous families around creating a care model for their children. We had three families with us including six children, two of which were babies, a five month old and a seven month old.

It has been a long time since I facilitated meetings with babies taking an active role in the proceedings. The children were included in this meeting as participants and they had as much to offer both the content and the process while also demonstrating what it looks like when we build a system with children at the centre.

With the world increasingly full of people that are acting like babies, it’s a good time to pause and reflect on the lessons that actual babies bring to the game. Babies get a bad rap.

The clock doesn’t matter. Rhythm matters. When there are babies in the room, we learn to pay attention to natural rhythms. Babies that are constantly held and cared for are very quiet and happy. The two babies we had in the room with us loved being held by others and they were looked after by their older siblings and other participants in the meeting. This of course is common in Indigenous families and large families. The babies had a blanket in the middle of the room they could roll around on and their every need was looked after. If they needed holding, they were picked up. If they needed as nap they could cuddle up with someone. If they needed feeding, they were fed, if they started getting tired at the end of the day, we closed the meeting down. If they were late in the morning, then we started once everyone was present and settled. Babies do not obey a clock, but they do very well at reminding us of healthy rhythms. Watching Kelly facilitate an hour of reflective practice with a five month old baby curled up in her arms sound asleep was beautiful.

Put the children in the centre not around the edges. We had babies in the middle and we had smaller children who were offered many options for being present including going in and out of the room, being accompanied by different adults and contributing. But there was no child care offered for our meeting. The meeting was child care and the children had a place in it. We all took turns being with the children, and they were never out of sight or out of earshot.

Babies change the conversation. The meeting we were running was not full of conflict or high emotions but it was about tricky issues like cultural safety and non-Indigenous professionals meeting with Indigenous families and so there was some nervousness in the room as we were building the container and the relationships. But babies make excellent talking pieces and excellent centres for a dialogue circle and having them constantly in our space made the conversation about them all the time. Their presence helped ground and simplify the conversation and it ensured that we spent our time well so as not to tire them out.

Babies have something to offer. Find a way to include them. Babies offer lots of things to a meeting, including feedback and insight and a kind of checking of the ego. All of the children in te meeting were included in every conversation sometimes in small groups, sometimes in the larger group. They offered their own answers to the questions we were asking because the questions were simple enough that a five year old could contribute “What do you like about your worker?” is a question everyone can answer and the children will often find ways to add to an adult’s story or tell it in their own voice. Additionally the two smaller children we had in our meeting were both excellent singers and when offered the chance to do so, they shared songs with us to end our meetings or bless the food, which is a common practice in Indigenous meetings on the west coast with adults usually offering songs before eating. There is nothing better than a child who loves singing being invited to share their gift with others in services of a genuine need rather than a cute performance.

Babies will tell you what’s happening in the room. Babies are very sensitive to the energy of a group. I learned this years ago, that they will sometimes express the emotions that are in a room in more subtle ways before the audults become aware. If things get tense they will get squirmy or begin crying from worry. It’s a signal to take it easy and take a little break. The baby is the first one to become unregulated in a setting and usually the first one to become regulated again. Babies don’t carry a lot of stories about what is happening in the room, so I pay close attention to their sounds and movements and it gives me information especially in setting like this one where the primary purpose was building a relational field and sharing and making sense of stories.

The baby reveals the truth of the system. If you are developing a model of care centered on children, watch what is actually happening with the children in the room. They way they are included and respected and lifted up so they contribute tells you a lot about how ready the people are to bring a truly child centered approach to their work. I have seen systems where the babies and the children gave us warning signs in the room that much more work had to be done. This weekend though was very special.

Very basic story gathering

February 16, 2021 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Complexity, Evaluation, Facilitation, Featured, Stories 5 Comments

For much of the past few years my facilitation and evaluation practice has been steadily merging together. When I FINALLY came across Cynthia’ Kurtz’s body of work, Participatory Narrative Inquiry a few years ago, I felt simultaneously validated and challenged. Validated in that the participatory facilitation work I have been doing since I stumbled on Open Space Technology in 1995 met the complexity work I have been in since 2005 and the developmental evaluation work I’ve been doing for the past ten years. Challenged in that it opened up new streams for my practice, and that has been gratifying.

Nowadays I regularly do story gathering as a part of all my projects. I use online tools like NarraFirma, Spryng or Sensemaker and sometimes pen and paper approaches. In a future blog post perhaps I’ll name some of the projects we’ve been doing with these tools and how they have contributed to our work.

Today in a conversation about getting started with stories, someone asked about how to get a bunch of perspectives from throughout to company on a new phase in a company’s evolution. I responded with a simple approach to PNI. You can use this to get started with a group.

  1. You want to begin by collecting stories, not running a workshop where everyone tells you what they think are the issues. That approach tends to get everyone prepared to advocate for their own position. So try this simple approach. Do a little questionnaire, using Google Forms for example. Ask participants to “share a story of something that happened lately that made you think: ‘we need to address this issue…'” Get everyone in the organization to enter one story, a few sentences. On the form then ask them a) how common do you think this is in our organization and b) what is one thing we could do to address that issue?
  2. Now you have a collection of grounded stories and a bunch of material you can use to host some more interesting strategic sessions. Convene some meetings and give people the stories to look at, maybe separated into common and rare, and have them look at the material and work together to create ways of addressing the issues.
  3. There are many things you can do with these stories, but the principle is “Use the harvest to convene the conversation.” From that the conversation can produce a harvest of things to try to address the issues you discover.

The advantage of this is that everyone’s voice gets in the mix, and everyone has a chance to interpret their own stories and then interpret what other people’s stories might mean. This generates massive engagement.

I really appreciate Cynthia’s clear writing on this and offer you this quote from work as a heuristic in your own planning and design:

In my experience, the greater the degree of participation the stronger the positive impact of any project that involves people and aims to improve some situation faced by those people. I have also noticed that some forms of participation are easier to manage than others. So I generally encourage people planning projects to think about taking one more step up the staircase of participation, wherever they find themselves now; but I order the steps so as to make the transition more feasible in practice.

If you are asking people to tell you stories, why not ask them what their stories mean?
If you already do that, why not ask people what the stories other people told mean?
If you already do that, why not ask people to build something with their stories? Why not ask them what that means?
If you already do that, why not ask people if they can see any trends in the stories that have been told?
If you already do that, why not ask people to design interventions based on the stories they have told and heard?
Then, why not ask people to help you plan new projects?

And so on. As you step up, keep watching your project to see if increasing participation is making it better. If it stops making the project better (for the people you are doing the project to help), stop increasing the participation. Wherever you find yourself is participatory enough. For now.

Xwexwesélken: ways of doing

October 30, 2020 By Facilitation, Featured, First Nations, Leadership, Stories 2 Comments

Xwexwesélken is the Squamish name for the mountain goat, a creature that lives on the high rocky cliffs of the coast mountains, picking its way across perilous and sheer vertical surfaces in search of food and protection. Mountain goat wool is a prized material in Squamish culture, used to weave blankets with immense spiritual and social significance.

In the last session of the Mi Tel’nexw leadership course, Chepxímiya Siyám (Chief Janice George) used the mountain goat as her metaphor for teaching about Squamish ways of doing. As a master weaver who has brought the weaving practice back to life in many Coast Salish communities, she wove her personal story with the deeper cultural story of Squamish ways of life, as goat wool is woven through weft and warp into a beautiful, powerful blanket. I heard two critical teachings in her presentation: doing things well comes down to being anchored in story and treating all work as ceremony.

Chepxímiya started her teaching with her own personal history of how she grew in the cultural knowledge, raised by her grandmother after her family died in a car accident, and working as an archeology researcher. Several times she talked about how “the culture saved my life.”

Chepxímiya was raised in the Squamish tradition of women’s leadership, leadership that is characterized by gentleness and deep knowledge of the rhythms and seasons of land, family, medicines, and food, so that the people may be cared for. In a culture where men were often sent to war, the women are knowledge keepers. A man might be killed in battle and all his knowledge dies with him. Women hold the deep knowledge of ceremony while men lead the work.

“To lead,” she said, “we have to believe in our ancestors, their teachings, and ourselves.” Who I am and what I am doing is deeply connected to my family, to our stories, and to my aspirations for my children and their children. This is the bigger context for any action, but it is so easy to make things short-term and succumb to immediate needs that don’t take the bigger picture into account. If one is disconnected from family, community, land, and history, then one is lacking the perspective needed to lead well.

One of Chepxímiya’s profound early learnings about this came in her research work when she discovered that the National Museum in Ottawa had two skeletons in its possession that were taken from Xway Xway, the village site in Stanley Park in Vancouver that is located near to where the totem poles stand today. In the early part of the 20th century, it was cleared and the residents relocated across the water to Xwmeltch’stn. In 1879 and again in 1928, two skeletons were disinterred and taken to the museum. Chepxímiya was a key part of the effort to bring these ancestors home in 2006. When the skeletons arrived in Vancouver, they were driven to the Park and brought to Xway Xway for one more visit before being taken away and buried in the cemetery. It was a profound moment, connecting ancestors, land, history, and ceremony.

This moment led Chepxímiya to learn more about her leadership and to accept her responsibility as a Siyám. She was invited to take a name and refused to do so until everyone in her family agreed that it was a good action, and there was no jealousy or conflict. The name she was given is from Senákw, the village on the south shore of False Creek that was the subject of nearly a century of litigation with the federal government and decades of discussions between Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh. Chepxím was one of the last people to live at Senákw before the villagers were moved against their will. In taking her name, Chepxímiya consulted Elders and leaders from Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh, and all were invited to witness in her naming ceremony. As Cheif Leonard George told her at the time “that’s a gutsy move you’re making” but when the final litigation was all settled and the Squamish regained the village site, the final court decision was released on her birthday.

As Chepxímiya says, when you walk softly and receive signs, you become susceptible to spirit. This is why ceremony as a model of “doing” is so profound.

Lessons from Squamish ceremony

The way in which Squamish ceremonies are conducted contains many lessons for leadership. Chepxímiya shared these lessons generously, and these are my reflections on her teachings.

Family, land, and teachings are all connected to action. Squamish ceremonies are conducted under strict protocols. These protocols include an intense period of preparation where one personally invites people to come, prepares to seat, feed, and gift every person who comes. There are people in the community who manage the feasts and conduct the ceremony with detailed knowledge of every person’s name, who their family is, which community they come from, how they are related to the family hosting the feast and where they are in their spiritual development. For a feast with hundreds of attendees, this is an immense amount of knowledge to carry, and making a mistake – such as pronouncing a name wrong, running out of food or seating a person in the wrong place – can be costly to the standing and status of the host family. Knowing the context is critical, to the finest detail, and finding the people who can lead in a respectful and generous way is essential to keeping the work relational.

(It is one of my great failings that I have a hard time remembering people’s names and faces, and I personally understand how hurtful it is to get this wrong. I spend a lot of time trying to remember and also humbly apologizing for my inability to connect faces and names.)

“The more you give away the richer you are.” Squamish culture is a reciprocal gift giving culture, and in giving away possessions, names, and power, one humbles oneself and open oneself to be able to receive from others. Those who hold on to their possessions and hoard them are unable to receive gifts from others. In my own spiritual practice, emptying is a key practice, to become open to receiving. To receive, first, you must give and that is a powerful leadership lesson.

Prepare seriously for important work. When leaders are appointed to lead in ceremony, they are blanketed with a mountain goat wool blanket to protect their heart and given a headband made of cedar to focus their mind so they can act purely, kindly, and with the purpose of the work in mind. Witnesses are appointed for any kind of important work and are given the job of reporting the story of what happened in as much detail as possible. In my own facilitation practice, these are the practices of hosting and harvesting. Preparation for hard work is essential, and perhaps this is an obvious teaching, but in a rushed world, when we can zoom from one meeting to another, it is critical to create time to prepare ourselves well to host and harvest important moments.

“The weaver’s job is to create a pure space for your people to stand on.” I have left the most profound teaching for last, as this speaks so powerfully to the work I have done for years trying to understand the role of space and containers in my facilitation and strategic leadership practice. The blankets that Chepxímiya weaves are both for the protection of the heart, but also to lay down on the floor of the longhouse so that people may stand on them as they are appointed to their witnessing roles or given their new names. The blanket creates a pure space, a container that is open to potential and clear of anything that holds back the person in fulfilling their duties, It is both a physical purity and a spiritual purity that is represented. The image of the leader as a facilitator and as a weaver is powerful; creating a lifegiving context for action; providing the conditions of material and relational capacity for a person to live out their purpose for their family and community and territory; to trust a person to act while keeping them connected to all that is important. This is really the gift of these teachings.

Mi tel’nexw is a powerful leadership journey. As a person who lives within Skwxwu7mesh Temix, this journey has given me some deep insight into what is HERE, into the traditions that are soaked into the land in which I live. It helps me better understand Squamish practice and tradition and gives me lenses for reflection on my own leadership the concepts that I teach others. You too can go on this journey, and the next course starts on November 3.

I lift my hands up to Skwetsímeltxw, Lloyd, Ta7táliya, Chepxímiya and Ta7táliya-men for this offering, for their generosity and their beautiful work. Chen kw’enmantumi!