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Category Archives "Uncategorized"

Going deeper into understanding this territory

September 26, 2024 By Chris Corrigan Bowen, First Nations, Uncategorized 2 Comments

Because I lead a lot meetings, I often get asked to do territorial acknowledgements before the work begins. And because I’ve been a supporter of Squamish language education and fluency through the Sníchim Foundation I’ve been trying to learn how to do that in the Squamish language. The text above is a very basic acknowledgement of territory, that was shared with me by Khelsílem a while ago and I’ve been using it for gatherings held here on Nexwlélexwm (Bowen Island)*

* my current blog fonts settings can’t cope with some of the characters in Squamish orthography. I recognize that’s a problem. Any suggestions for addressing that are welcome!

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Founder’s syndrome

August 7, 2024 By Chris Corrigan Featured, Leadership, Organization, Philanthropy, Uncategorized 2 Comments

I was in a call with a colleague yesterday and we were discussing Founder’s Syndrome. Over the years, it’s one of the more persistent patterns I have seen in non-profits and social enterprises. There are a lot of similar aspects to this pattern, and it generally unfolds like this:

A person or small group of people start something. Usually, they come from the front line and have experience working directly with people, delivering services, restoring landscapes, organizing campaigns, etc. With a little bit of success, these folks start thinking about growing their operations and stabilizing them over time. This means bringing in staff, board members, and funders who believe in them and want to support the vision. Some staff may be the same kind of front-line folks that the founder was. Still, many will be experts in another aspect of growing and operating an organization: managers, board members, marketers, finance people and so on. While these folks are all crucial to running an organization well, they don’t always share the founder’s experience with grassroots or front-line work.

Often, as the organization grows, the founder realizes that their role can no longer be directly involved in the front-line operations of the organization. They retreat to a more visionary role, and, as the holder of the core story and vision of the organization, they become an ambassador for the work, obtaining funding and support and good board members who can oversee the organization. This sounds good, but it can often generate many issues, especially as the founder begins to sense the end of their involvement with their organization.

At this stage a number of inevitable patterns begin to emerge. They don’t always work like this, but these are common enough that I see them over and over in organizations that have been around for a couple of decades, sometimes less.

The founder begins to feel irrelevant and starts getting nosy. If your whole life has been spent creating programs for vulnerable youth, you might not find yourself relishing leading an organization set up to do this. Founders often have a hard time removing themselves from the day-to-day operations because their heart lies with the activism and the work of change-making, not organizational sustaining. Sometimes founders will involve themselves too much in the front-line work, micro-managing and being unaware of their power and influence. This can lead to trust issues, where newer hires don’t feel like they can learn and grow in their jobs. The antidote to this is to establish good governance structures and good roles and for the founder to transition into a new role through learning and cultivating leadership.

Hardly anyone thinks of succession until it’s too late. This controlling dynamic affects the ability of a founder to plan well for succession. Very few founders give much thought to their own disappearance from their life’s work, especially when building and growing an organization which relies so heavily on them. If an organization successfully survives over the long term, there will always come a time when the founder will step back. I have talked with founders who occupy all points of the spectrum that range from “I can’t leave because the organization will collapse without me” to “if the organization dies when I’m gone, I’m okay with that.” Once you’ve created a structure and moved into a leadership role, it is time to think ahead about how you will get out of it. Even if that is 20 years ahead, it shapes your approach to mentorship and shared leadership. Building shared leadership early will help folks move into roles and create mutual support relationships that allow people in the organization to grow into these roles, increasing organizational resiliency over time.

Resisting change. Organizations that grow their stability also become less able to change. Board members appointed to support the founder’s vision often govern to a rigid version of what that looks like, and Boards like this are always more risk-averse than a swashbuckling social entrepreneur. Funders can enforce a kind of rigidity of approach too as funding grants can bend an organization’s operations to the funder’s theory of change rather than create the ongoing ability of social enterprises to grow and adapt. Stability is a polarity, and from the beginning, organizations need to develop resiliency rather than robustness. They must survive by being changed rather than stand as a bulwark against change. This is hard when you deliver services because clients require a continuity of care, and there are no easy answers to these questions. Managing this polarity is crucial for overcoming a founder’s syndrome, where the governance and funding are tied to an original vision and are not allowed to grow beyond the founder.

Splits between board and staff. In the early days of an organization, everyone is moving in the same direction, doing the same things and pitching in wherever they need to. However, as organizations become larger and more stable, roles become highly differentiated. Board members are often chosen more because of their connections to funding and power than to the front-line work. Staff are learning and adapting at the coal face of the work. The two groups often develop a distance between them, making it hard for them to be mutually supportive. When organizations ask me to help them with strategic planning, I always ask them to do it jointly with the board and staff and even clients and other stakeholders. Organizations that set their mandates and future plans through closed board sessions tend to suffer from a deep lack of situational awareness about the organization’s context. This can exacerbate founder’s syndrome even after the founder has left, as they will often invoke the founder’s intentions in their role as stewards and guardians of that vision. Ignoring the needs, concerns, creativity and awareness of staff and partners is a good way to dig a hole of irrelevancy for an organization.

This is just a bit of the ground I covered with my colleague yesterday. What patterns and responses do you notice?

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Not exactly night

June 25, 2024 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized

Today’s sun graph for Vancouver, BC

Here in the mid latitudes of the norther hemisphere, there are a few days around the solstice when there is technically no night time. This image, from TimeAndDate.com shows that the sky remains in twilight at midnight for another few days. Further north of course it’s light and in the Arctic, the sun doesn’t set at all.

Here on Bowen Island, it’s still a dark night, and the moon has just risen around 12:30am or so, but we are treated to a very special time when there is no actually, technical night.

I’m not sure so many folks in this area realize this, but it’s a cool fact.

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Blogging with AI

May 14, 2024 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized 7 Comments

Peter Rawsthorne is back to blogging and today he published a post that discusses his process for writing in a time in which AI can be a useful writing companion. Here’s his process.

Step by Step my blogging will now follow this basic approach;

  1. Mind dump, capture ideas for new posts, be verbose, be imaginative, think about context
  2. Put these ideas to incomplete blog posts, work ideas for days, for weeks…
  3. Read extensively, add to the understanding of any specific idea
  4. Keep references, cut and paste to the bottom of the related incomplete posts
  5. Prompt AI with phrases from the idea generation
  6. Take blocks of text from written ideas and push them into generative AI, be critical, harvest what you can.
  7. Take the written blog post and ask AI for a rewrite. Change your audience. be critical, harvest what you can.
  8. Try and see, try and write, what AI cannot… add to the body of human knowledge.
  9. Find pictures to support the writing, format for engagement. Use AI to generate images from passages of text taken from the blog post.
  10. Format, edit, improve, repeat. Be bold… Publish.
  11. Rest, reflect, improve… Publish again.

Interesting. I’m curious how others are using AI in their writing. What’s your process?

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Deep time and ancient landscapes

April 20, 2024 By Chris Corrigan Being, Complexity, Containers, Culture, Featured, First Nations, Uncategorized One Comment

I’m back in Tlaoquiaht territory on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This is a place I once described as The Land of Tsawalk as it is the cradle of a philosophy and cosmology of interconnection and interdependence that has been refined by centuries of Nuu-chah-nulth philosophers, leaders and families. We’re here to do an Art of Hosting with the Clayoquot Biosphere Trust and 40 or so local leaders and organizers. This will be the fourth Art of Hosting I’ve done here and they are always different, responsive to the land and the ocean and the people and the way time works here. We will plan tomorrow and then we will allow things to happen, and it will be, as it always is, a rich and abundant experience.

On the way here, Caitlin and I listened to some podcasts. Two of these had moments that spoke to the place and the quality of time and landscape, and this is the real purpose of this post.

The first is. A Radiolab episode called “Small Potatoes” is about how observation and reflection can transform the most mundane of things in our daily experience. One segment of this episode featured a clip from Ian Chillag’s podcast Everything is Alive in which the philosopher Chioke l’Anson plays “a grain of sand” in conversation with Chillag. l’Anson brings an incredible perspective to this interview, including these gems:

CHIOKE:
Yeah, I mean, I think that if there’s one difference between them and I… Sorry, I’m just having
trouble with the pronouns, you know, we’re doing this interview and I’m a grain of sand.
IAN:
Yeah.
CHIOKE:
But that’s not really the way I would think of myself. I think normally I would just say, “We are sand.”
IAN:
OK.

CHIOKE:
So, you see that there’s the mass noun thing happening and it’s weird to talk to you because you
don’t have a mass noun thing. Or you don’t seem to have a mass noun arrangement. So, you say
yourself that you’re a person, right?
IAN:
Yeah, I would say I’m a person.
CHIOKE:
So, like why aren’t you a grain of person?
IAN:
Like why do I not consider myself as like a fraction of all of humanity?
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like that makes more sense. It just seems to me like if you recognise the degree to which you
owed your existence to other people you might also be nicer to other people.

Or then there is this meditation on time and change:

IAN:
Right. Do you know how old you are?
CHIOKE:
Not exactly, no. I think, it probably would amount to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of
years. Like, I mean, I wasn’t always sand, right? Like there was a time when I was a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, yeah.
CHIOKE:
Yeah. So, you know, like do you know about the myth of Sisyphus?
IAN:
Yeah

CHIOKE:
Yeah, that’s a funny one to me because Sisyphus is cursed to roll this boulder up the hill for eternity,
but really the boulder would eventually erode. I mean, a hundred thousand years or so. It would be
like a little pebble. Like, just stick it out, Sisyphus. You’ll be done in no time, you know?
IAN:
Eventually it’s just going to be sand.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, exactly. And in addition, the hill will also erode. And so, you know, Sisyphus after some time
would have a flat plain instead of a hill and maybe like a marble instead of a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, so, yeah. So, he’s cursed for eternity, but really, he just needs to get through I don’t know
50,000 years or something.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like he should really stick to it. And then that’ll show the Gods.

Amazing.

In another podcast we listened to, a To The Best Of Our Knowledge episode on deep time, Ann Strainchamps interviews geologist Marcia Bjorneru about changes to our earth and climate:

AS: Do you think the perspective of deep time can help with any of the existential fear and dread that comes with an awareness of climate change and global warming? Does being aware of the many long ages of the planet put climate change in perspective? Or make it more frightening?

MB: From a scientific point of view, I can say that Earth will be fine. The Earth will deal with the changes in climate that we’re causing and eventually, new ecosystems will emerge.

But the human part of me mourns what we’ve done and the rapidity with which old, well-established ecosystems and landscapes have been changed. And I worry for humanity, for what the next decades or century will bring as we cope with a new set of rules. That’s the scary thing to me. We’ve been able to understand the way the planet has worked through the Holocene, but now we’re changing the boundary conditions and parameters, and so many of the models we’ve developed aren’t going to be very relevant as we go further into the Anthropocene.

The past won’t necessarily be a key to the future. And there’s real sadness there. Our cultures have grown up with a certain version of Earth, and it’ll be radically different.

These insights seem to hit so much deeper out here in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth territories, where a deep sense of time and a deep connection with the ancient marine and forest ecosystems are responsible for thousands of years of occupation and well-being. Indeed, Bjorneru’s observation about the new boundary conditions of life on earth brings added importance to preserving intact large amounts of wild and ancient ecosystems. In 300,000 years as a species, humans have never lived in an environment that is as heavily degraded as it is now. We were nurtured in the complex life-giving cradles of the very ecosystems out of which we arose. We have changed those conditions of life, and who knows what effect it will have on our survival, the survival of millions of other species and the evolution of new forms of life on Earth.

Out here, on the edge of the world, the principles of tsawalk compel us to engage these questions. The perspective of deep time and deep interconnection lies all around us.

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