Confirmed yet again that the way to build community, and indeed strengthen participatory and democratic societies is to do work together.
Peter Levine, who I feel like everyone should read, has a nice little blog post today that serves as a bit of a gateway to his own research and thoughts on this topic. Here’s his basic thesis:
People are more likely to trust institutions if they are involved in diverse, participatory groups, because such participation gives them a feeling of agency, teaches them that compromise is necessary (it’s not a sign that leaders are corrupt), and encourages them to share and critically assess information.
A few times this past year I have been in situations that have borne out this reality, for better or worse. For example working with folks in different places on the opioid crisis, for example, it is clear to me that folks can come together across all kinds of ideological differences if there is actual work in the centre to do. Grappling with the realities of governance, community building, the provision of services and policy making is edifying work. It’s hard, and requires relationship and commitment. Everyone has opinions about things, but rolling your sleeves up and getting to work is where relationships and therefore community is built.
It has been true for a while, but community engagement – the traditional “ask the people what they think” kind – is now clearly a dead end way to make things happen. Polling drives policy and as a result you get truly stupid decisions that don’t at all improve life for people but rather just keep the voters electing populists to power. Simplify problems, seed the population with simple platitudes and memes, convince them that “your guy” has the answers and then poll them on the results.
Trust in democratic institutions, a key theme of Peter’s work, is undermined by this approach to community. People don’t believe polls (except the analytics folks working for parties that shape narrative as keenly as marketers working with personalized market segmentations – see what I mean?) and people don;t believe in surveys either. A recent survey in my home community of 5000 people had 250 returns, to which a suspicious refrain of Facebook amongst folks with zero statsitics backgrounds was “That’s all? How can they make decisions based on such a paltry sample.”
The exercise of engagement is often window dressing. It can result in hundreds and hundreds of text answers on qualitative surveys that have no rhyme nor reason to them. Comments like “fix the potholes on Elm Street” don’t mean anything without context, even if a bunch of people say them. And worse still when you ask people how to make the neighbourhood safer, you will be stuck with all manner of opinion and regurgitated talking points fed to folks who know nothing about sociology, criminology, policing or urban design. The value of the content is nil. The value of the exercise is “we consulted with the community and decided to fix the pot holes on Elm Street as a way of solving the problem of community safety.” And so leaders do what they want.
Election success now is about saying you will do a thing, then doing something and successfully externalizing all the bits that didn’t work so you can take credit for the small thing you did. If people buy what you are selling, you will get re-elected. It’s easier just to say vacuous things like “Axe the Tax, Build the Homes and Bring it on Home” over and over and over and over again until people get so sick of you that they elect you to office just to shut you up. From there, you meet the realities of governing, and memes and slogans won;t get you through.
But there are ways out of this state of affairs. On the decision-making side I think we should be investing heavily in citizen assemblies, such as the one currently underway in Saanich and Victoria which is exploring how to merge two cities. These bodies, in which citizens are chosen at random and enter into a learning journey together to understand the issues at play and recommend courses of action. My friend and colleague Aftab Erfan has recently written about the results and potential of citizen assemblies to do proper engagement which honours democratic and participatory principles and generates meaningful accountability for elected leaders in using their power.
And, back to Peter Levine’s work, I believe there is a tremendous potential in the approach of shared work that he advocates above. Some of the most engaging work I have done has included Participatory Narrative Inquiry approaches, which help people gather, listen to and make sense of each other’s stories as they seek openings and affordances for taking action on complex topics. The process itself builds the social connectivity that builds the basis for collaboration and community. It complexities the work of building things like justice (which Peter has a lot to say on) and helps us to understand that there is no single authority that can deliver the perfect outcome in a society.
Democratic societies thrive where there are democratic institutions that help stabilize the conditions that create freedom and diversity of association, participation and contribution. We are entering a period of dire outlook for this kind of rich ecosystem of collaboration. Get out there and make things together with others.
If you email me in the next couple of weeks you will get this reply:
Hi there.
You have caught me in a really busy travel time. It might take me a
while to get back to you, but I’ll do my best to do so within a couple
of days. Please forgive me if it takes longer!In the meantime, here’s my homemade no-knead bread recipe if you want
to give it a try.5 cups of white flour
1 cup of whole wheat flour
1 Tbs of instant yeast
2 Tbs salt
3 cups of water.Mix everything together in a large bowl until all the dry flour has
been incorporated.Let it rest for an hour, loosely covered, until it has doubled in size.
Take out a half to a third of the dough and shape it into a ball, and
place it onto a baking stone or a baking sheet and into an 450 degree F oven.Bake for 45 minutes or until the centre is at least 180 degrees F.
Put the rest of the dough in a sealed container in the fridge and
repeat when you run out of bread.Chris
I’m getting tired of algorithms and machines doing all the relational work. This is a way for me to share something beyond my travel logistics with you.
This is a speculative post, with a bit of a hypothesis.
Where I live in British Columbia there is a provincial election campaign on. It is happening in the midst of a kind of permanent federal campaign that, although not officially begun, has been manufactured by the Conservative Party of Canada as they try to topple the Liberal Party minority government.
Political branding is all the rage at the moment, and I’ve been reflecting on an interesting pattern: parties on the right are largely unstable alliances that unite under a common banner for a while and then engage in cycles of ascendancy and self-destruction. Parties on the centre and left exhibit outward stability even as they drift to the right or left, depending on internal politics. I think this says something about how they choose to act when in government. Here’s some interesting history.
In BC, the right has just rebranded itself again. When I first moved here in 1994, the “party of free enterprise” as it was known was the BC Social Credit Party. It held power from 1952 to 1991 except for three years in the early 1970s when the Dave Barrett-led New Democratic Party formed government. The party folded after Bill Vander Zalm lost power and fell into a corruption scandal. The NDP held power under Mike Harcourt and then Glen Clark for two terms. When the party folded, many of the former Socred members invaded the BC Liberal Party which was, at the time a classical centre-left Liberal party, similar to the federal Liberals. They ousted the leader, Gordon Wilson, and became a broader party of the right, uniting conservatives, the centrists that had been scared away from Clark’s leftward tilt of the NDP, and a few right-wing populists. Under Gordon Campbell, they won the 2001 election and held power until 2017. During that time, they drifted further and further right under Christie Clark. In 2017 John Horgan, a relatively centrist premier, won the election for the NDP with the support of the Green Party. The centre mainly had abandoned the BC Liberals, and the party name became too associated with the federal Liberal Party. And so, they changed their name and became BC United.
That new name only lasted 16 months before the party’s financial backers decided they wanted to align with the BC Conservative Party probably mostly for the better branding. There had always been a BC Conservative Party, but it was always weak, mostly acting as the home to former political leaders who had just a bit too much right wing grievance for their own good. In 2020, seizing the upswing in popularity of the federal Conservatives, they changed their name to the Conservative Party of BC, which mirrored the Conservative Party of Canada, even though it is technically an independent party. In 2023 John Rustad became the latest of the high profile political exiles to find a home in the CPBC after he was kicked out of the BC Liberal Party for having ridiculous views on climate change among other weird ideas currently trendy on the populist right.
With BC United flailing in the polls and the federal Conservatives flourishing, the financial backers of the BC LIberals/United threw their support to the CPBC and the United leader Kevin Falcon, on the verge of a provincial election took the unprecedented action of essentially folding his party without talking to anyone. Although this seemed suicidal, it seems to have eliminated the possibility that the right will be split in this election, and suddenly, the NDP have a powerful – if weird – political opponent. The election will be close and God forbid we get another strange populist government here like Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario have experienced.
Populists make terrible governors, but they are really good at getting power. So, typically, the strategy of right-wing populism is to grab power using emotional appeals and scapegoats and then cede it to private interests or the market, selling off public assets, cutting the funding for public services until they no longer work, and then handing them to their backers for pennies on the dollar. Their governments, like their parties, tend to be short-lived and short-sighted. They hold power through appeals to emotions like fear and insecurity. When they collapse, they often regroup with a a trendy set of populist principles and a little dose of outrage so that they can get power again solely to keep it away from policy based parties. Robust government policy tends to restrict and regulate what the “free market” can do, so that’s the flash point. Elections are contested on that space.
The right wing, and especially the populist right wing, seems to live in this cycle of uniting a coalition under a new name, operating for a while and then flaming out because while outrage is helpful for winning elections, it is a corrosive force once in power. It always splinters and divides and the splitters often run off to other parties or form new ones. Alberta and Saskatchewan have both seen this (Conservative, Wild Rose, United Conservative Party in Alberta; Conservative to Saskatchewan Party to their east). In contrast on the left, parties tend to split when a leadership regime has been in power for a while. Folks may flee the party to alternatives on the left or the right, but the remarkable stability of parties like the Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party are a testament to the fact that in general party members see value in long term stability, even as they contest stark differences within the tent.
These new right-wing parties and brands were formed in the years after the old school federal Progressive Conservative Party split and the Reform Party became the powerful conservative voice of the West, before reuniting into the short lived and infamously named Conservative Reform Alliance Party (CRAP) and then becoming the Conservative Party of Canada. Stephen Harper, who was at one point the head of the right wing Canadian Taxpayers Federation and then a prominent voice in the Reform Party came to power as Canada’s first elected Conservative Prime Minister since Brian Mulroney. That party has drifted a long way right of the old Progressive Conservative Party and that enabled the federal LIberal Party of Canada (who bill themselves as the natural party of government) to come to power in 2015. Since Harper retired, a few leaders have come and gone but a relentless campaign against Justin Trudeau personally, aided by screech owls from the far right People’s Party of Canada, angry westerners, and folks driven out of their minds by the public health response to COVID has resulted in the federal Conservative Party riding high in the polls but sitting atop an incredibly volatile mix of competing and populist self-interests with very few policy oriented folks wielding much power. Anyone who values the role of government on the right is currently sitting with the federal LIberals. The current Conservative leader Pierre Pollievre is a long time conservative politician and strategist and he’s parlaying populism into a force to be reckoned with in Canada. He’s weird, as are many members of his party, but weird is doing well these days.
This is really what it comes down to, in my eyes. The new political spectrum is not right-left, but populism-policy. This polarity tends to mirror right-left, but not exclusively. In Canada there are folks on the right who think deeply about policy and wrestle with how conservative principles can address issues like climate change and the social good. However, their voices tend to be drowned out by the feverish outrage against immigrants, First Nations, and LGBTQ+ folks. Climate science deniers, COVID skeptics, isolationists and anti-woke culture warriors make up the loudest wings of the party now. The result is that we have political parties who have a real chance of forming power and will achieve that goal by punching down on people and promising that if elected, they will essentially cede the field of governance to the market or other players through tax cuts, austerity, and the elimination of regulations against harm and programs that provide robust public support for education, health and opportunity.
When a person running for the leader of a government tells you that they think that government is not a good thing, it’s useful to believe them. They will not treat it well, and in fact, the instability they create through incompetence or negligence often results in huge opportunities for private operators who are poised to bring the profit motive to public services, at the expense of the public good. If you want to see how a party will govern, look at it’s own history of dealing with dissent and unification. Canada’s right-wing is mercenary and opportunistic and, in the century anyway, has rarely governed with any immutable principle beyond the fact that chaos is good for bank accounts. The left tends to value stability and a long term role for government and seeks to hold folks together in difference even as they dissent. They usually lose power when they drift too far from the centre to bring the policy minded into the fold.
If we elect populists, we will enter a period of instability and, worse, vulnerability for those who are already being deeply scapegoated by messages designed to score wins. I’m not optimistic about what will happen in the next few years in Canada as my heart lies with people and parties that are committed to thoughtful policy responses to complex challenges. We shall see.
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!
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?