Coming home across Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound last night, with a working tug boat carrying a log boom to the mills on the Fraser River.
Parking Lot is actually the name of this blog, a partial reference to the facilitation tactic of listing issues not germane to the current conversation thread. These lists are stored in a “parking lot” for later, although often these become “wrecking yards” when the issues never resurface again.
At any rate, here is a summary of the links and notes I’ve posted in the past week. Dive in and explore some of the interesting stuff.
We’re not too nuanced at appreciating sentience. Matt Webb traces our history of appreciating other-than-human sentience, with respect to aliens, AI and animism, and concludes with this thought: “Even if we don’t agree on chicken sentience, what about people who work in sweatshops, and they are definitely sentient, and they don’t get access to the same “robot rights” currently being debated for future sentient AIs.” Matt’s blog is a must read.
Perhaps I’m a process animist, but I do strongly feel the presence of a “life unto itself” when a good dialogic container emerges and relationally crackles within. Adrian Sager, who writes more than anyone on bring life to traditional conferences, has a post today which begins with a quote that is attributed to Eduardo Galeano, but cannot be confirmed to be his: ““We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content.” I think it is a journey in the art and practice of facilitation that facilitators do fall deeply in love with their structures and processes at first. The tool is the thing, or as Franz Kafka once wrote (No. 16 in The Zurau Aphorisms) “A cage went in search of a bird.” There is a fetishization of structure, as Sager points out, and a belief that just the right structure will create the conditions for life. I’ll write more about this in an expanded post, but suffice to say, that ain’t quite it.
When we take this relationship between life and structures (yang and yin) into the spiritual world, we can see that the struggle for spiritual liberation is to tussle between the structure that has emerged to hold spirit, and the spirit’s desire to be free, but also held. A dynamic interdependence exists. This is a central tenet of Taoism of course, and also shows up in the liberation theology of Judaism and Christianity. It’s chaordic turtles all the way down.
This is one in s series of near daily notes and links I post on this blog. if you would like all of these delivered to your inbox, subscribe below and click the tag “notes.”
Cynthia Kurtz has been working hard at distilling and releasing her body of work in Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) for the past few years. Her collection of four books on working with stories is the complete offering for practitioners, a highly detailed set of discussions, exercises and inspiration for putting this approach to work.
She describes the books this way:
Working with Stories is a textbook on Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI). It explains the fundamentals of story work and explains how to plan and carry out projects that help groups, communities, and organizations work with their stories to discover useful insights, find new solutions to problems and conflicts, and make decisions and plans.
Working with Stories Simplified is a quick guide to Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI). It briefly explains the fundamentals of story work and explains how to plan and carry out projects that help groups, communities, and organizations work with their stories to discover useful insights, find new solutions to problems and conflicts, and make decisions and plans.
The Working with Stories Sourcebook contains 50 question sets for use in Participatory Narrative Inquiry projects plus 50 descriptions of real-life PNI projects.
The Working with Stories Miscellany is a collection of 40 essays and other writings about stories, story work, and Participatory Narrative Inquiry.
Cynthia’s approach has been central to my work alongside the participatory practice frameworks I use from the Art of Hosting, the complexity theory and practice of Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang and dialogic practice as well. I deeply appreciate Cynthia’s gifts of this wisdom and knowledge into the world and especially appreciate NarraFirma, which is the software we use for larger scale narrative work. It is open source and easy to install, but invites a lifetime of practice to use well. I appreciate that platform because it is geared towards enabling stories to be used by groups for collective sensemaking, decision making and acting. We’ve done dozens of projects with this software and approach focusing on organizational culture, public health, branding, supporting learning communities, leadership development and community development.
Cynthia has been a generous mentor to my own work, challenging me and guiding me and encouraging me, and she has been invaluable to the work of many of my clients. I encourage you to support her through purchasing these books, whether by donation or when they are released on commercial platforms.
People are enjoying longer experiences, according to Ted Gioia, who has a keen eye for the trends in culture that are shaping our world and experiences. And while this is true for the individual consumption of cultural products.
BUT. As a person who spends time creating collaborative environments where people engage and co-create within organizations and communities I can attest that experiences of creating community together are becoming harder and harder, because people want to spend less and less time together. Clients who regularly asked for three-day -ong retreats now wonder if we can do the same amount of work in only one and a half. “Everyone is so busy” goes the line. But everyone is not busy. Everyone is retreating into individual immersive experiences. Even Taylor Swift shows, despite the fact that a fantastic community vibe emerges from her art and her fandom, is still a consumption experience. I worry that co-creative community activities are fading away, and have been for a long time. . The trends in consuming arts may be changing, but the trend in collaborative community is still fading away.
Spending time in deep community building activities matters. My friend Bob Stilger is championing Regenerative Responders, which is an initiative to build resilience in community from the ground up before crisis and emergency hits, so community can be ready to respond, not simply wait to receive help. The impetus for his work is in the stories he heard and witnessed from Japan after the March 11, 2011 Triple Disaster. Longform community practice develops the resilience needed for the times when it’s too late to do so. Movements like this exist all over the world, and I’ve written about Sarvodaya before, who came to my attention when they were first on the scene in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, long before the Red Cross arrived.
It shows up in sports too. My buddy Will Cromack posts today about how footballers are being deprived the immersive experience of just playing the game, long days spent kicking a ball around, training sessions that are just play, honing your craft becasue you have an endless horizon of the joy of co-creation stretching out before you. As he puts it:
Forgo the showcase tournament.
Go hit the ball against a wall.
Better yet, play 2v2 with friends.
More joy. More touches. More learning.The player’s work is to learn where to place their time and attention, and to seek challenges that invite growth. They must learn to welcome difficulty as a necessary step on the journey toward mastery, whatever mastery means to them.
There is no meaningful progress on the gentle slope with soft ground. The journey demands friction. And through that friction, players fall in love with the process.
I can get behind that: More joy. More touches. More learning. Consume good art. But create something too.
Are we living in a black hole? A delightful watch from Neil deGrasse Tyson, exploring the evidence that we might be living inside a black hole. Can we even know that? At some level, it perhaps doesn’t matter, although it makes my head spin and creates that little feeling of amazement that we are here at all. I like that.
Of much more practical concern are the cognitive black holes that we are drifting into. Three readings from this morning that have me reflecting on those. First, from the June issue of Harper’s Karl Ove Knuagsgaard writes about our relationship to technology. Us Generation X folks have our lives split into thirds. The first third, including our formative years, was pretty much digital technology free and the probably our last third will be spent being talked to by inanimate matter: “if I were forced to mention the most distinctive feature of our time, it would be precisely that: everything addresses us.”
These cognitive blackholes created by the digital world that manages us are even countered by the digital world that manages us. Having my heap of papers, notes, links, stories and ideas SEARCHABLE is a major feature of the technology in my life. I have never been able to hold a thought for long, and I’m always chasing that little stimulation brought about by novelty. Adrian Sager writes today about why people of our age and generation appreciate this feature of technology, even as some are finding liberation in deleting their digital memory.
The issue of course is whether it deadens us to the world by stealing our ability to navigate and create. Brian Klaas has written a lovely piece about this and shared the term “an illiterate in the Library of Alexandria” lamenting that “we’re engaged in a rather large, depressingly inept social experiment of downloading endless knowledge while offloading intelligence to machines.”
I don’t want to go down that black hole. But like the one that deGrasse Tyson describes in his video, though, I may already be deep in it and not able to know how deep. There are event horizons like the ones that Knaugsgaard writes about. Remember the first video game you ever played? (yup. Pong, on a Sinclair ZX-80 in 1979 in John Harris’ living room on Muskalls Close, in Chestnut, Herts.) I was 11.