Ensconced in the little settlement of Shearwater in the Central Coast of BC, also known as The Great Bear Rainforest. Tomorrow we head out for a nine day supported kayak tour of these waters.
Over the years I’ve written nearly 3000 entries on my blog ranging from short notes and links to long essays and collections of writing. Of interest to facilitators and dialogue practitioners, I am publishing some of these as mini-books, in pdf form which you can now download for free. All I ask in return is that you leave me a little note if you find these useful or interesting. I’m curious how they are informing your practices.
Here are the first three:
- A life lived in the four-fold practice: my journey in the Art of Hosting. A set of essays on the Art of Hosting, illustrated with stories from my own life.
- The Two Loops Model: A Living System of Change. A set of essays on the two loops and how to apply it in organizational and community life.
- The Tao of Holding Space. This book explores the practice of holding space by reinterpreting the Tao te Ching. While written for Open Space facilitators, it has wide application across a number of facilitation approaches.
You will find more of my writing, interviews, videos and podcasts on their own page.
Today Dave Snowden has published a significant post outlining his team’s work and thinking about safety: “we must stop trying to write better rules and start building better processes for rapid decision-making in each unique context.” Taking a complexity view on safety is essential. Organizational life, when it separates accountability from decision making by downloading simplistic accountabilities to front line workers while constricting their ability to respond appropriately, is full of structurally dangerous situations. Dave’s encouragement to look at the substrate for action is exactly right.
Last month Ted Gioia published a post wondering if we hadn’t reached the top of a stock bubble. Just leaving this here in case I want to come back to it.
At Game of the People, one of my favourite football blogs, guest writer Laura Joseph gives us a run down of the current bubble in football and why football economics is a little different from the bubble Gioia writes about.
A couple of films to look out for from Dana Solomon. The first Blood Lines deals with themes of belonging and family in a Metis setting and stars Solomon in the lead role. I love that the film includes Michif dialogue. The second is Solomon’s full directorial debut, Niimi (She Dances) is about an Indigenous ballerina who recovers her sense of self and love of her art after a traumatic episode. Both seem resonant with the themes Michelle Porter explores in the book I’m currently reading, A Grandmother Begins the Story.
I found myself in Snug Cove today, the village centre of our island, and it was like night and day from this past weekend. As everyone who lives in a place that is overrun by visitors knows, the day after Labour Day is like the dawn of a new era. I knew almost everyone in the Village Square, and had enough time to have actual conversations with friends. I saw people I haven’t seen since the wet months, who finally ventured into the Cove for supplies. It has been a busy summer with people visiting the Island from near and far. Lots of folks coming from Vancouver and environs and even further afield in Canada, because people are avoiding travel to the USA these days.
Bowen Island is not an easy place to learn how to get around. We have an arcane ferry marshalling system that runs on a secret code of etiquette that not even islanders agree upon. Many maps and navigations apps don’t work on Bowen, and many people don’t know how to read paper maps, so it’s common to find folks far from where they want to go. E-biking is all the rage but we don’t have great bike infrastructure, and so the roads can get clogged. Restaurants are good, but they are slower than what you expect on the mainland, and folks that are already frustrated with their inability to have Bowen makes sense to them sometimes take it out on our servers and shop keepers. There is an energy of confusion, self-interest (“Influencers.” Please.) and speed in the summer that causes many of us to stay away from the village unless absolutely necessary.
But then Labour Day passes. Suddenly school has started, people have returned home, the only visitors are seniors who are slow enough to begin with that they have no trouble fitting into the island’s pace. And it feels like ours again.
On Sunday I led an impromptu group of Islanders in an annual ritual to sing off our visitors for another year. It was offered in good fun and received that way I think.
Today was a sweet relief.
My friend Amy Mervak, a great facilitator in Kalamazoo, Michigan, shares a bit about using Critical Uncertainties, a Liberating Structures method, that helps a group quickly design and discuss future scenarios.
Chris Mowles takes aim at the ratings culture that is creating yet one more way for folks to experience precarity in the world. 5/5 for the post!
I’ve just unsubscribed from a blog – well, a substack – which had some promise but let me down in two ways. It had promise becasue it was devoted to facilitation. Where it let me down is that I suspect the posts were mostly ChatGPT generated. The posts were shallow, used emojis liberally, and, the kicker, only allowed paid members to comment. Sorry, but no. The last post I read there, from today was entitled “When Your Virtual Co-Host Gets Smarter Than You” and I suspect that the AI wrote it unironically. I wouldn’t normally make a big deal about unsubscribing from a blog, but when you prompt a comment with “What helps you stay human, while tech manages the rest?” on an AI-generated post and then only allow paid subscribers to discuss, then you’re not really “facilitating” are you? We need to do better.
I had a lovely call with my old friend Johnnie Moore the other day. We catch up a couple of times a year and our mutual friendship with Rob Paterson, caused us to connect up on Zoom and raise a virtual glass to Rob’s life and in particular the ways we knew each other, through work, ideas and good friendship. Johnnie’s got a great post up on his blog today about “Facilitation Antlers” in which, as usual, he manages to speak the thing that occupies my mind too: the pitfall of facilitators feeling the need to explain what they are doing, instead of just getting on with it. It’s one we all have to dance around. Johnnie is offering a facilitation training in November in Cambridge, UK. I highly recommend you sign up for it. I would if I was there.
Another friend, Sally Swarthout Wolf, is also birthing an offering into the world. I’ve just had a chance to review and provide a blurb for her new book “Restorative Justice Up Close” which is a broad collection of stories of restorative justice practice, primarily from across the USA. These are the kinds of stories that experienced practitioners crave, becasue it helps to inspire us in our own work. It’s not a how-to manual, but a how-did-I collection. Even if you are aren’t a facilitator of restorative justice, if you work with people in groups, there is a lot in this book to learn from, especially when conflict is afoot. I worked closely with Sally over a number of years when we were running Art of Hosting trainings in Illinois in part with the Illinois Balanced and Restorative Justice Project. I adore her and her colleagues. The book is available for pre-order now.
And while I’m at it, here is a list of the facilitation training offerings I’m involved in the fall. We have spots for both of our Art of Hosting trainings in Vancouver and in Elgin, Ontario, and you can still register for the Stories and System Change workshop I’m doing alongside Donna Brown and my SFU one-day course in the new year.