SItting here with Geoff Brown and Steven Wright at the World Indigenous Housing Conference here in Vancouver. We are on the back end of what has been a terrific gig.
We were hired by the Aboriginal Housing Management Association of BC to facilitate dialogue at this 800 person international gathering. The sponsor made dialogue a clear priority and after talking about intentions, we arrived on the design of three World Cafes: one in the plenary with everyone present and two in more focused breakout sessions. The first cafe would look at stories of success, the second would think about how to build capacity to support success and the third was focused on institutional development. each one built on the last.
The theme of the conference was “Sharing our Stories, Sharing our Successes.” With that theme to play with, we knew the cafes needed to be about connecting people and ensuring that stories were central to the work. Our first challenge was to think about how to harvest stories and connections quickly from 800 people. We looked at several tech solutions and realized that we needed something simple, unobtrusive and accessible. The ubiquitous tool at hand was the text equipped smart phone. Almost everyone has one, and almost everyone can text. Our basic problem was first how to gather text messages and second how to make meaning from them quickly. Geoff, Steven and I were familiar with Wordle.net which makes a word cloud out of blocks of text, and which I have used in the past to get a visual and intuitive sense of what concepts and words are weighted highly.
So our question became, how can we combine smart phones, text messages and wordle?
Through our networks we found Luke Closs, a local developer/hackerwho put together a simple solution that he called “Text to Cloud.” At the back end he connected Twillio to world using an interface that we could control with commands sent by text message. groups of texts that come in can be tagged and sorted and then sent straight to Wordle for processing. We also enabled the software to produce a CSV output that we can use for other purposes. Luke was great, developing the tool right up to the moment that his daughter was born on Tuesday. Of course, the tool is open source and you can find it on Github, download and install it and use it for yourself.
Armed with Text to Cloud, we began our first cafe by inviting people to text in the name of their tribe of origin. We created an instant wordle that showed who was in the room. That immediately connected people together (and showed we were blessed with Crees!)./ Following that we had people enter into the cafe to start telling stories of successes with listeners paying attention to the factors that made those successes possible. People gathered information on tablecloths and texted in wisdom and insights and by the end of the cafe we had 438 text messages to make meaning from. We had a half hour to do something with all this.
So we sent it all to Wordle and discovered a theme: Building Homes, Building Communities and Building Nations. There were six key areas we needed to think about for capacity building: governance, building, partnerships, community, education and ownership. Steven whipped up a digital mind map which we projected on our screens. We invited people at each table to choose one of the topics and dive into stories of capacity building. In our third cafe, we thought about how institutions can support sustained capacity building.
By the end of the day we were soaking in flip chart paper, but we had some great high level meaning through the Text to Cloud output, the wordles and the developmental nature of the conversation. We retreated to Steven’s room and started trying to figure out how to share what we had learned. We realized early on that there was absolute gold on the flip charts, so we decided to create a presentation that combined what Geoff calls “vox pops” – short pithy and insightful comments – along with longer stories. While Steven created a map to chart the highlights, Geoff and I prepared a slideshow that touches on the headlines. Our plan this afternoon is to call the storytellers up to the stage to share their stories with the audience. They are the true key notes.
This gig has been fun. Our client has been fantastic, we’ve created new tools, connected people doing important work, pushed our own edges and done stuff we’ve never done before, and that we could never have done alone. It was a superb co-creative experience and a great way to spend time with good friends.
I was up north on the weekend, working with a small community that has been driven apart by a large and contentious decision. It doesn’t matter what it was, or what either side wanted – the result is the same result that happens in many small communities: people who are friends and neighbours shouting and fighting with each other.
The team I was working with are trying to reinvent the way this community is engaged. We used a lovely redux of Peter Block’s work to help frame our conversation about design and implementation. A few things stood out for this group with respect to Peter’s work.
Changing the room changes the conversation. We talked a lot about the fact that changing engagement starts in this room and in this moment because this room IS the community. When we dove in about what was missing from the way the community engages it was clear that the ownership piece was the biggest one. As in many community meetings the way people traditionally engage is with passion that is directed outward. There is an expectation that someone else needs to change. We joked about the sentiment that says “I’ll heal only after every else has healed!” It was a joke but the laughter was nervous, because that statement cuts close to the bone. So we DID change the room and decided to hold a World Cafe. gathered around smaller tables, paper in the middle, markers available for everyone to write with…
So how do you begin a meeting with people who are invited to take up the ownership of the outcome? I am not a fan of giving people groundrules, because as a facilitator it puts me in the position of enforcer, and gives people an out for how the behave towards one another. So instead we considered the question of what it looks like when people are engaged. What stood out is how people “lean in” to the centre of the conversation. So the question became, how do we get people to lean in right away and take ownership of the centre?
The solution was simple but was later revealed to have tons of power. At the outset of the cafe as I was introducing the process I gave the following instructions:
“That paper in the middle is for all of you to use, as are the markers. We want you each to record thoughts and insights that other need to hear about. So before we begin I invite you to pick up a marker and write your name in front of you. <people write their names>. Now I want to invite you to answer this question: what is one thing you can do to make sure that this meeting is different? Write your answer beneath your name.”
People took a moment to write their names and their commitments. And they shared them with each other at the table. That is how we began.
The first round of conversation proceeded as usual, but I noticed something very powerful in the second round. When everyone got up and moved around they took a seat in someone else’s place, and often the first thing they did was to read the name and the commitment that was in front of them. Can you imagine coming across the name of someone who you have a disagreement with only to see that they have written “I won’t fight anymore” beneath their name? The core team is now going through all of the tablecloths and making a list of the commitments that people made. Taken on their own, they form a powerful declaration of willingness.
People reported that this was the best meeting the community had in a long time. And it had a lot to do with this tiny intervention of public ownership for the outcomes.
This is an estuary. It is the place where a river goes to die. Everything the river has ever been and everything it has carried within it, is deposited at it’s mouth where the flow slows down and the water merges with the ocean. These are places of incredible calm and richness, but they lack the exciting flow of the torrents and waterfalls and cascades of the upper river system.
Yesterday I was speaking with a client who worried that an initiative we had begun together was heading towards the estuary of action – a long term visioning processes where lots of things are said and very little is done. “We’ve done that before,” she said. Nobody likes that. I wracked my brain to see where it was that I had led this group to believe that this is what we were doing. We had done a World Cafe to check into some possibilities for the organization and we had done a short Open Space to initiatie some experimental actions. We had learned a little about the organization from these two gatherings, and we were, at least in my mind, fully entered into a participatory action learning cycle, working with emergent ideas, within several well established constraints. I was surprised to hear the fear spoken that what we were doing was “visioning.”
Then I realized that what we were dealing with was an entrained pattern. People within this organization associated dialogue with visioning, and the results of dialogue with a mass of post-it notes and flip charts that never get typed up, and action that never comes of it. Likewise, it turns out that the associated planning with a process that begins with a vision, and then costs out a plan and takes that plan to a decision making body which then rules on whether the project can proceed, by allocating resources. Both of these views are old thinking, rigid patterns that lock participants in a linear view of action that looks like this:
The truth is that I had been viewing the process as an action learning cycle:


So now that we are a little clearer on this, there was a distinct relaxation among the group. We are heading into some uncharted territory and it is too early to nail down concrete plans about what to do and likewise simply visioning doesn’t take us anywhere either. Instead, we are harvesting some of the rich sense of community that exists, opening some space for a little leadership, inviting passion and responsibility and making small starts, The small starts are confirming some of what we suspected about how the organization works, which is good news, because we are developing a pattern of action together that will help us all as we move forward to do bigger things with more extensive resource implications. This is the proper role of vision and planning in emergent and participatory processes – gentle, developmental, reflective and active.
Graphic from puramaryam.de
Last night as part of a leadership retreat we are doing for the the Federation of Community Social Services of BC, we took a bus into Vancouver from Bowen Island to listen to Adam Kahane speak. He spoke last night on the ten laws of love and power (the essence of which you can see amongst these Google results). There are a couple of new insights from the talk he gave which I appreciate.
Love and power as a complimentary system. Adam’s project is to recover useful definitions of love and power and to see them in a complimentary system. Seeing these two forces this way creates all kinds of important strategic imperatives in systems – moving from degenerative power to generative love, from degenerative love to generative power. This is polarity management in it’s core…the ability to keep a system of complimentary poles in a rhythm that oscillates between the upsides of both, but never rests in one or the other. This dynamic approach to love and power invites us to become skillful at both. The approach is fundamentally Taoist!
Turtles all the way down. We had a brief exchange about what is going on with the #Occupy movement in terms of this framework. A question was asked about whether #Occupy represented a love move or a power move. I said that I saw #Occupy representing a drive to wholeness, a unifying effort to unite the 99% – a love move. Much of the process evident at the three Occupy camps I have been to has been about inclusion and joining. Adam saw it differently. By distinguishing ourselves from the 100%, #Occupy is a power move because it is a drive towards the self-realization of the 99%. This is fascinating to me because it pointed out that love and power drives operate in different ways, in different scales even within the same process, This is what makes it so tricky to be in thiss dynamic. You have to understand at which level your love or power move is working. In everything we are involved in there are multiple levels of scale and focus (“turtles all the way down“) and skillful leadership is as much about knowing which scale you are at as it is about making the right move. Also Taoist: moving in line with the times and the context. This idea of acting in scale has come into our work today where we are looking at the living and dying systems model developed by Meg Wheatley, Deborah Frieze and a number of us in Berkana. Living systems scale, and exhibit similar patterns at each level.
Holons. That leads to the next insight, which is Adam’s use of the concept of holons to describe how systems are influenced by love and power. I like this a lot, because holons represent a stable structure at every level. I first was introduced to the idea of holons through Ken Wilber’s work, who developed the concept frost proposed by Arthur Koestler. Adam’s use of holons to illustrate love and power is very useful. Love in this case is the holon’s drive for connection and integration and power is the holon’s drive towards self-realization and differentiation. There can be many drives moving simultaneously, hence my use of the above graphic, which gets the picture across.
Power/love moves in process design. Adam spoke about “moves” that are called for when the power/love dynamic tips too far to ones side or the other. This comes from Barry Johnson’s work in polarity management, and for process designers, it has important implications. Using the love/power dynamic, we can make choices about the kinds of processes that we use to bring people together or to create the drive for self-realization. Adam mused that in process design and facilitation, World Cafe was a good example of a love move (as it tends the group to wholeness based on the fact that there is one questions that the whole group explores) and Open Space Technology as a good example of a power move (as it is dependant on agency and diverse streams of self-realization happening simultaneously). I though this was a pretty useful observation, and it behooves us as process designers and facilitators to think about this construction in the design choices we make.
Adam’s work on this stuff has legs because it is a very simple concept which becomes immensely complex in practice. But importantly, it is practice. Efforts to understand it in theory can be limited. The dynamic of practice, the complicated roughshod effort to get it right is where the reward is.
Leaving New York today. It has been an incredible four days here working with my good friends Kelly McGowan and Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Lex Schroeder, Aniestla Rugama, Alissa Schwartz, and Aswad Foster. We were running a workshop called the Art of Social Justice in which we were investigating the intersection of participatory process and social justice work. Over three days we explored a framework that Tuesday has developed and investigated with Kelly for the past year. The framework includes and transcends the gifts and drawbacks of traditional social justice frameworks and of what we know about participatory process.
Tuesday is writing a lot more about this, but the essence of the framework is that neither social justice analysis nor participatory process are enough on their own to move us into the new forms of leadership that are needed in a world where social inequity and power are becoming increasingly complex, and where traditional forms of organizing are no longer reflective of the interconnected nature of global society..
A gift of traditional social justice analysis is the way it understands personal and collective power and privilege. This analysis concerns itself with transformation of both the personal and the social power dynamics in society, but it often contains within it an invisible current of control that runs deep in the architecture of social change process. It posits a social separation between those of us who are working for change in or allied with the struggle of oppressed peoples, and people in the system that are thought to be – traditionally – the enemy. Or it sets up a struggle between the system that perpetuates oppression and the people who are oppressed by it. In this world, in this time, that analysis is out of date. We are all connected to the entire system. As I showed in my last post, you can even discover how many slaves you employ. Even if you are heavily marginalized within the mainstream, you are connected to the system itself. As the sign said at Occupy Wall Street, “you are us.”
Those of us who are facilitators of participatory process often make grand claims about the power of processes like Open Space Technology and World Cafe to even out power differences. In a circle everyone is said to be equal and leadership can come from every chair. While participatory process does provide a useful methodology for decolonizing how we meet, it has several risks associated with it. For one thing, if we fail to take into consideration the context in which we are working, power can show up in participatory process in a dangerously invisible way. Some participants may be able to operate much more resourcefully because of their power or privilege by, for example, becoming the scribes for small groups and speaking for the group. Those who cannot write may not feel comfortable posting a session in Open Space, meaning that there is no way that their voices can be heard or their contributions incorporated. Furthermore, participatory processes, like all facilitation processes, heavily depend on the role of the facilitator. If the facilitators (and the process designers for that matter) are not aware of the currents of power and privilege within the context in which they are working, they run the risk of designing structures that keep marginalized people marginalized. If they come to the hosting role without awareness of and good practice around their own power and privilege, the social architecture that emerges can be very exclusionary.
Both of these fields of analysis have something to offer to one another and both have their own drawbacks, In Tuesday’s framework, she identifies a middle path, which she named co-revealation. It is going to take me a while to unpack this concept, but I can at least begin to see how it works. In the space of power-aware participatory leadership, the gift of relationship is active. As we move together through process, the emphasis on relationship is key and in working together relationship becomes more revealed. In the process, we treat each other with more and more grace and compassion, coming to see that as we are all interconnected both to each other and the systems in which we are working to change, we recognize that personal and social transformation is also both inevitable and required. In Saskatoon last week, one of our participants in the Art of Hosting was carrying the question “how do we collaborate with dictators?” as a way of trying to discern the limits of participation. In several conversations over these last two weeks I have come to ask that question of myself, and reframing it as “how do I collaborate with myself when I am being a dictator?”. With that inquiry active, we may find that dictatorship behaviors are present everywhere, and we may also allow ourselves and others the grace to be imperfect in our lives and behaviors. This doesn’t excuse violence or oppression, but rather it gives us serious skin in the game in trying to address oppressive systems. If we are not a part of the problem we cannot be a part of the solution. And in being a part of the problem we need to treat each other with some kindness and latitude, qualities that are born in relationship, even relationship with people with whom we have fundamental differences.
It may feel as if this stuff is a little old hat, but I experienced it differently in practice. During our gathering in New York a group of three participants brought a proposal into the third day check in circle that required a complete think of our agenda, in doing so they were both proposing a new idea but also challenging the power structure of the system. The design team had been designing the days as we went and hosting the process, but here the participants were inviting us to practice what we preached about awareness of power. The group could have chosen to create a drama around the situation, but our field of relationship was very strong. And so they issued the challenge as an invitation We immediately went into a circle process first to seek everyone else’s thoughts on the proposal and second to gain clarity around how to make it work. It was clear in our group that the idea being proposed – that we all go down to Occupy Wall Street and learn what we can there – was both an excellent idea, and also not one that everyone wanted to do. In the circle, I expressed my faith in the resourcefulness of the group and the design team to offer and hold multiple options so that the decision did not have to be an either/or choice. Towards the end of the first round of circle a proposal began to emerge that made some sense, and seemed workable. Kelly and I, as host and guardian of the circle, invited a round for additional clarity followed by one more round of any refinements to the proposal. Then we thumb-voted on it, took care of two small questions and went forward with a great new design for the day.
What emerged was a process whereby the morning would be spent in proaction café which offers people a chance to work on projects. The group that wanted to go down to Wall Street decided to use that time to prepare a learning journey for themselves while others worked on other projects. The afternoon was devoted to nuts and bolts learning in our space while about nine people went off to the occupation. We reconvened at 300 and had two short fishbowls to report on what each group had learned. That harvest was recorded both in video and on flip charts so tat it could be made available to the wider community.
Among the many lessons of the day was the fact that Tuesday’s ideas take us beyond the realm of analysis and into a practice of this middle space. In fact the middle space of co-revelation can only live in practice, it has no power in analysis or in the kinds of theoretical debates that rage without relationship. In those domains the middle space disappears.
It is hard to capture exactly the effect this week has had on my practice, but it deeply continues the theme of “seeing more clearly” that has been the greatest gift of my journey in and around the Art of Hosting community of practice for the past seven years. In our workshops and learning events, we seek less to train people in methodologies and more to situate participatory process in its wider context. Doing so gives the methodologies power and effectiveness and activates the deeper gifts of invitation, collaboration, participation and transformation. And although the word feels raw and new and vague, I think I can finally describe what we do as assisting groups to enter into the space of co-revelation. That was Tuesday’s gift to the group, and that was the group’s significant gift to ourselves.
And as if to confirm it, I sensed this new space active in Liberty Park on the two nights we went down there. The young people who are organizing Occupy Wall Street are doing so in a way that gives profound insight into this concept, but that is the subject of another post.