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July 2: 2025: why the CBC?

July 2, 2025 By Notes No Comments

I can’t imagine life in Canada without the CBC. I recognize that makes me part of a particular demographic, but our national public broadcaster (and its French language service, Radio-Canada) are critical outlets for the ever evolving Canadian story. In the recent federal election, the Conservative Party threatened to eliminate public funding to the CBC. That is a bad idea. But talking about the CBC is a good idea, warts and all, and today the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has a very good set of discussions on renewing the CBC’s mandate. The piece on communications in the North is particularly good.

Bahamas is a good reason to keep the CBC. Not the country, the musician. Last night we saw Bahamas perform live at the Canada Day concert in Whistler. His music is familiar to me through the CBC, but I don’t know his stuff that well. His groove always reminds me of Feist, with whom he played for many years, but he has his own distinctive style. His characteristic staccato guitar work, jazzy chord progressions and beautiful rich voice make 90 live minutes of his music an absolute joy. His inspirations are varied, and his aspirations are noble. Bonus: his drummer last night was Don Kerr, a former member of my favourite Canadian band, Rheostatics.

July 1, 2025: canada day

July 1, 2025 By Notes No Comments

Caving (not the spelunking kind). Yesterday, a day before our country commemorated Canada Day, Canada scrapped the implementation of the Digital Service Act intended to tax large tech companies on their commercial transactions. Today, while the country celebrates its “sovereignty” I’m mulling over the fact that we allowed another country’s irrational leader to dictate what domestic legislation we would enact or not. Blech. (Yes I shared a YouTube link, which made Google money).

The time for Liberatory Leadership is always now, so perhaps your own Canada Day activities might involve reflection on how we can help ourselves and others become more free. Non Profit Quarterly is publishing an ongoing series on Liberatory Leadership which is thought-provoking and practical and inspiring to me. At it’s best, Canada is as aspiration to explore what might be possible in spaces of relationship, peace, friendship and reciprocity. We need tools for that. All kinds.

Darn Folksinger. Bob Snider is out of retirement for a show at the Mariposa Folk Festival, and that’s the most Canadian thing I can leave you with today. If you lived in or around Toronto in the 1980s, and you followed a particular niche of what is probably now called “alt-folk” you knew Snider. He is the folksiest of folk poets, incisive with his insights and an absolute master of the word. Darn Folksinger is a pretty good song. So is What and Idiot He Is which was my favourite song of his back in the day and which might bring us full circle to the first item in this post. You can decide who I’m talking about, but it’s not just one person.

June 30, 2025: life emerging from structure

June 30, 2025 By Notes, Uncategorized No Comments

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.”

Resources for Participatory Narrative Inquiry

June 28, 2025 By Complexity, Featured, Stories, Uncategorized 2 Comments

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.

June 28, 2025: Truth, change and singin’ in the rain

June 28, 2025 By Notes No Comments

An interesting review about a novel about fact-checking, (Austen Kelly’s The Fact Checker), a story which surely can only end in nihilism. It looks to be a book about books and the truth about truth, and I like those kinds of stories. These are the kinds of things that literary fiction is for.

Singin’ in the Rain is also about truth. Friday night our local Bowen Island film society showed a program of films featuring Singin’ in the Rain on the big screen. I have never seen the whole film, and for sure the context of the times gave it a profound spin for me. Fundamentally the film is about major changes in the technology world from the silent movie era to the talkie era. It’s a parable of the two loops. And it was made in an era when television was coming into being. The technology revealed the truth of people’s deficiencies – Lina can’t sing or speak, but her looks alone carried her through the silent film era. When she railed against the changes and tried to coerce the studio into bending to her will, they exposed her, embarrassed her and cast her aside. She did everything expected of her. The world moved on, and kicked her to the curb.

Lina is cast as a villain, but in these days when artists are exploited and deposited in the scrap heap of history, her character arc is tragic. I found myself rooting for her at the end, despite her narcissism and the fact that she “complained to the manager” and got Kathy fired from her only acting job. The world is full of jerks, but when the wheels of moneyed power turn, there is no cruelty worse than simply being treated as disposable.