Menu

Helping to improve the public conversation

November 13, 2014 By Bowen, Community, Conversation 5 Comments

another bown from strachan

For the past few weeks I have been trying an interesting experiment in civic dialogue.

Here on Bowen Island we are in the midst of local elections.  We are a small community of 3500 living on a liece of land about the same size as Vancouver, with fairly limited resources in terms of being able to fund local services.  It is a beautiful and inspiring place to live, a place that almost wills one to dream about it.  It inspires people to move here, to build, to steward, to preserve, to write.  Folks run for election because deep down they love this place and they want to do something about that.

We are close to each other on Bowen.  We are a pretty homogenous place.  We live close to the land and the sea, and close to each other’s dreams and frustrations.  The major difference between us is our opinions of the way the world should be.  And, ike most small communities, I think we suffer from what Freud once called the narcissism of small differences. We project a lot on to each other and it surprises me that some of the vitriol that is produced at keyboards and published online and in print does not translate into real life all that often.  I have seen neighbours who seem to be at war with each other online greet each other cordially in the street.  Relationship seems, in most cases, to trump things.

This anger and frustration is not surprising.  Even in a country like Canada there is an increasing dissociation between citizenship and government.  There are massive global entities that operate beyond the influence of many of us, massive blobal issues that affect our daily lives that we have no say over and our democratic governments don’t give us many effective ways to be heard, although we can still cast a vote for them.  We seem to be subjected to arbitrary decisions all the time, whether it is what is poured into our land and air and sea or what time the ferry runs.  It doesn’t seem to matter what we think.

In that sense, local politics feels like the last place we can actually make a difference.  And when it feels like the only way to make a difference is to shout, that’s what we do.  We shout at each other.  We lose ourselves in the thought that our enemies have to be defeated, that ideas have to be extinguished, that worldviews and ways of seeing and being held by other people are invalid.  And maybe by extension that others are invalid.  It’s just a little to easy, when you live on an island, to suggest that other people love it or leave it.

And I have been as guilty as others in the past, so I’m nothing special.  And I facilitate dialogue for a living.  Being human is hard.

So I wondered if this election cycle would be different, because in the past 10 years or so we have had some unbelievably bad civic conversation about major real estate developments, amenities, by-laws and community plans, ferry marshalling, village planning, a proposal to establish a National Park, and suspicions of conspiracies, conflicts of interest and nefarious motives of our neighbours.  I wondered if this cycle was to be different.  And I wondered if we could do anything to make it different.

For me, when voting for people, I’m not interested in their position.  Anyone can write down a list of things that are good and true and ask if others agree with them.  What I want to see is how you think about stuff that is not so easy to reduce into a yes/no polarity.  I want to see how you confront complexity and how you work with others to figure stuff out.  I saw glimpses early on between a few rookie candidates running for office who started engaging in an online discussion about transportation options for our island.  I saw people doing two things well: admitting that they didn’t know something and sharing information with each other.  It was fascinating.  It gave me a glimpse into how these people might act if they were elected to serve with one another.

I wanted to see more, and regretted that I hadn’t set up a forum for this very function, until one of the candidates on his own set up a facebook page and invited me to moderate it.  And so I stepped in.  Here are the guidelines I posted (if you are on facebook you can see the forum):

1. If you want the candidates to consider a question, either have one of them post it here, or send it by facebook message to me.

2. If your question is a yes/no question, and you send it to me I’m going to ask you to rephrase it because the world is more complicated than that, and dialogue is encouraged by asking questions we don’t know answers to. If you want to see the candidates’ POSITIONS on things, go to their pages. If you want to see them DISCUSSING things together, hang around here. Candidates: please feel free to engage with each other. It’s more interesting to see you discussing things than it is just to read a statement.

3. I’m not sure if we have the setting right, but the intention here is to only have candidates post and respond in the comments. I’m not going to go around deleting comments, but if you are not a candidate and you want your say head over to the Bowen Online Forum. Feel free to “like” things. This space is primarily intended for us to watch candidates working together to figure stuff out.

4. Candidates are allowed to and enouraged to say things like “I don’t know” and “what do you think?” and other admissions of vulnerability, humility and discernment.

5. As things become busier, I’ll prioritize questions from those that haven’t asked any yet. It’s always better to send one great question to get the candidates talking than it is to send a bunch in all at once.

6. Nobody’s perfect. Let these guidelines be good enough to get things going. Message me if this doesn’t work for you.

7. And yes, not everyone is on facebook and there is no way to share this page if you’re not signed on. Perhaps next time we’ll choose a better forum for this conversation. in the meantime, you can certainly cut and paste what you are reading here and email it to others.

Smile. Democracy is more than just voting.

I have to say that it has been a great experience and it has stood in contrast to the Bowen island Forum which is where the rest of the citizenry works out its opinions of one another with a lot of vigour, spontaneity and sometimes quite hurtful attacks.  It gives me a clue to what is possible when we change the way we frame conversation in the public sphere.  Here’s what I learned:

1. The hardest policy questions do not have yes and no answers and we are not served by reducing them to a binary resolution.

2. We need a public conversation that allows us to be wrong or unsure and allows us to share information with each other to make skillful decisions.

3. Everyone needs help to ask good questions and to get away from “gotcha” politics.  (It is interesting how a few people have told me that the facebook page is for “softball” questions because the conversation there has been civil, nuanced and searching.  I have responded that this is because we were trying to deal with real issues rather than gather future ammunition for “i told you so” campaigns.  There is no shortage of material for those searching for conspiracies and nefarious motives, if that is how you choose to view people.)

4. Radically different opinions can actually add nuance and value to a decision if we are able to see the differences and not dismiss people out of hand.  In fact we need this difference.  But learning to live WITH this difference is what qualifies you to a position of stewardship in a community.  Demanding the elimination of difference either by saying that “we should all get along” or “you are fundamentally wrong” erodes community.

5. Facilitating this middle ground requires a commitment to a process, to principle and to boundaries and it requires working with people kindly and respectfully to help them ask the questions they want answers to in a way that opens them for the possibility that they might not get the simple answer they are looking for.  People have responded positively to my private chats with them as we have added more nuance to questions.  We all need help to participate well in the public sphere.

6. Local governance is hard. We do well as citizens to remember this.  Those who will get elected on Saturday are about to take on a job that is many pay grades above what they are going to earn doing it and they will all be confronting novel situations, problems and ideas and will be required to navigate in a good way through difficult waters.  No one knows how to do this perfectly, and I think we owe a little grace and latitude to those who will be entrusted with our future.  And I say that even as I have had significant differences in the past with some of the people likely to be elected.

I have a lot of respect for the candidates that were able to show up in the forum over the last couple of weeks and I have enjoyed the process of putting my money where my mouth is.  It feels to me like I can trust the folks who WILL get elected to carry this tenor of collaboration across and with differences into their four year terms on Council and I hope we have chances to continue to have these kinds of civic conversations face to face.  I am willing to continue exploring forums for better civic dialogue and participating as I can to host and encourage this kind of exploration and collaboration to continue.

Good luck to all on Saturday.

The importance of the disorder domain in Cynefin

November 12, 2014 By Complexity, Organization

Powerful day yesterday in our Art of Learning Together training in Asheville.

 

One of the ways I teach the Cynefin framework these days is by using a series of exercise to illustrate what it is like to be in each of the five domains. The exercise I use for the disorder domain is to ask people to organize themselves according to a word that is both a verb and a noun.  This causes a bit of confusion especially if people start moving to organize themselves according to what they think I told them. This is exactly the way the disorder domain functions in Cynefin – as the domain of problems one hasn’t thought about, resulting in addressing them with strategies one also hasn’t thought about.  That is what makes it different from chaos.  Usually it is a short exercise that easily drives home the point.

 

I forgot the word I was going to use to prompt the exercise.  Instead the word that came to mind was “economically.”  Okay it’s an adverb, but it has multiple meanings and I thought it would serve.  “Organize yourselves economically,” I said.  I mostly thought that people would just get stuck in trying to define the word and then have their insights about what “disorder” means.

 

Instead the conversation got real.  Fast.

 

You have to understand that this is a very mixed group of people, and economics is one of the ways in which this group exhibits tremendous diversity, and especially diversity that is hidden to the eye.  Economics, money and wealth has a very sharp edge.

 

The group began feeling it’s way around the topic.  All the domains came to life.   One person offered the SIMPLE suggestion that we just stay in a circle as this is the most economical and efficient way to organize ourselves.  Someone else saw this as COMPLICATED but solvable and began to offer insights on the nature of an economy, concluding that we could organize ourselves according to our net worth (and later, feelings of abundance, access to cash, actually cash in our pockets and other criteria).  Soon we discovered the COMPLEX features of the problem.  People had different relative wealths, they participated in all kinds of different economies and there was no static way to organize themselves.  One person suggested that the little dynamic systems exercise we had done earlier was in fact the was to organize ourselves like an economy and still someone else suggested we break into groups and try and come up with a bunch of different solutions.

 

All this time the conversation became more and more fraught with emotion, with issues of visibility and invisibility, with privilege and possibility. There was a full range of emotions expressed including anger sadness, joy, frustration, impatience, relief, curiosity and indifference.  This eventually became a chaotic conversation with everyone offering perspectives without any organizing scheme and several people offering solutions which were undermined by perspectives that made them unworkable (yes we could just throw a number into the middle to see how much wealth we collectively had access too, but there is no way I will betray my partner’s financial situation that way).

 

Eventually, after a couple of proposals made with half formed decision making processes, we passed a piece and had one round of circle that allowed for people to share their perspectives. and feel complete with the exercise.

 

It was powerful because the conversation exposed the differences in the group in a spontaneous way.  We had lots of time built into our agenda so the hour or so we spent on the exercise could actually be accommodated and in the end it generated a lot of learning.  It was an incredible illustration of how fraught the disorder domain is and why it is absolutely an essential element of the Cynefin framework.  Here lie dragons.  And it was a perfect illustration of the need to skillfully identify and deal with the ontological nature of the problems we face, because just addressing problems with knowledge can be undermined all the time with who and how people actually are, how they see the world and how they are oriented to their contexts.

Setting the stage

November 11, 2014 By Art of Hosting, Leadership, Learning One Comment

 

Asheville, North Carolina

We are about to begin three days of learning together, Ashley Cooper, Dana Pearlman and me.  And 27 other folks who are coming to something we called “the Art of Learning Together.”

One of the core inquiries of the Art of Hosting, since it’s beginning has been “what if learning together was the form of leadership we needed now?”  It’s not that other forms of leadership AREN’T important, but that ihis particular form is not well supported.  We think of learning as something you are doing before you become a leader.   Something to do before you ramp up to the next level of leadership.

But of course there are situations in the world – complexity, confusion, innovation, disruption – that require us to learn, sometimes almost too fast, usually only until we can make the next move “well enough.”  We need tools, heuristics (my new favourite word, meaning experience based guidelines or basic principles based on previous experience) and ways of quickly understanding our experience so we can be open to possibilities that are invisible when we take a narrow view of change.

Over this three days we will teach and learn about frameworks for personal and collective leadership, including Cynefin, The Lotus, and principles of improvisiation.  We will use dialogue methods of World Cafe, Pro-Action Cafe, Open Space, Circle practice and other things.  We will use movement, improvisation, music and art.  And we will employ walks in the neighbourhood, silence, reflection and raid prototyping.  We are alos going to be diving into the art of working with core teams and understanding the dynamics of power, identity and relationships as they unfold in a context that is disruptive, changing and complex.

And we are doing it in a sweet space called The Hub in Asheville, which, if you don’t know it, is the most amazing, creative, and moldable space in an amazing, creative and moldable city.   You can follow along online if you like at our weebly.

An anniversary

October 20, 2014 By Being

My first mentor John Lawson and me at a Bruce Cockburn concert c. 1984

My first mentor John Lawson and me at a Bruce Cockburn concert c. 1984

 

Thirty years ago today as a 16 year old, my life changed. On October 20 1984 I participated in a massive anti-nuclear weapons march in Toronto.  It was an eye opener for me.  i met hundreds of people who had come together across the mostly left side of the political spectrum to march for peace.  I had never been exposed to social justice and action coalitions before, and became almost overwhelmed by the leaflets and pamphlets that I collected that day on issues like Kurdish independence, sanctions against South Africa, cruise missile testing, Central American civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, native issues such as logging at Temagami and weapons testing in Labrador…the list went on and on.  Acronyms from that time seem like distant memories: FMLN, FSLN, IRA, CND, ANC, ACT…

I was involved in peace and social justice issues through my church, St. James-Bond United Church, which had a very active social justice program.  Our associate minister, John Lawson (who ran for the Green Party in Kitchener in the last federal election) was really active in challenging us young people nto engage with the world and not accept the standard narrative of upper middle class Toronto; money was everything, social justice and peace were communist-loving sympathies and solidarity was for naive idealists.  (Years later, after touring the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, I felt extremely vindicated for having held on to the principles i cultivated in those days).

On that day, John took some of us downtown to march.  Later that day he leant me two books that changed my life: a collection of Franz Kafka’s aphorisms and short stories and the first volume of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s “The Political Economy of Human Rights Vol. 1.”  I devoured both of these works.  i think the Chomsky book was actually not even legal in Canada at the time.

That day was indelibly marked into my memory as the day in which my love and interest in serious literature and progressive politics emerged.  My world opened up, my eyes opened up and almost every part of my life’s work that has been important to me got an acceleration on that fall afternoon with 100,000 other people and one mentor on University Avenue in Toronto.

Training in structures that support humanity

September 15, 2014 By Art of Hosting, Conversation, Facilitation, Organization 2 Comments

45f520776b8c41ad7c4f9bcf75db5f2b

in this video, Organizational practices applied  by Tim Merry he talks about an organization that adopts basic practices to restore humanity to its structures.  Predicated on the idea that the quality of results are directly dependant on the quality of relationship in the organization, he describes using circle practice as a simply way to activate relational capacities in a team.

The link between relationship and results is well established. It is the basis of relational theory and is a core assumption underlying a whole world of organizational development thinking and practice, including the Art of Hosting.

Good relationships are fundamental but not completely exclusive to getting great results.  It is also important that people in the organization are skilled for the work they are doing and that there is a clarity about what we are trying to achieve.  Skills include the technical skills needed to do the job as well as adaptive skills needed to be able to respond to changing conditions.  Clarity includes personal and collective clarity of purpose.

i find that many organizations excel in a technical skills focus and spend a lot of time on clarifying organizational purpose through strategic plans and the operational plans that are meant to connect everyone in an organization to the central purpose.

And what passes for good management is this technical axis of organizational life.  It is privileged by using terms like “hard skills” and when push comes to shove the “softer side” of organizational life is often sacrificed in favour of strict accountability to the plan.

Restoring relational skills is often the first step to stabilizing a team that has lost its way.  I have worked with highly skilled team – for example in university professional faculties – where there is no shortage of extremely talented individuals and an audacious but achievable drive to be the best of their kind in their market.  But very often highly skilled and committed people get into tough disputes with one another as egos clash and personal purposes become more important tha organizational ones.  Over time toxic environments can appear that, when combined with the unskillful use of power and authority, can create pain and trauma in organizations.  Almost everyone I know has a story of this.  It is absolutely rife in organizational life as we seek to balance self-fulfillment with collective strategic direction.

What Tim points to, and what we cover in the Art of Hosting, including in our offering on Beyond the Basics, is that a restorative approach to human relationships can steady the ship.  This means taking time away from strictly strategic objectives in order to attend to relationships.  And it is not simply a thing that happens in offsite meetings to deal with organizational conflict.  It is about instituting practices – such as week-starting and week-ending circles – to discuss strategic objectives, and to do so in a way that honours and deals with the struggles that naturally occur as we try to do things we’ve never done before.

A weekly practice of PeerSpirit Circle for example becomes a strategic leverage point for better organizational life and more humane working environments.  It doesn’t replace technical skills or organizational goals, but it ties those things to personal aspirations and provides a rich ground for creativity, adaptability, cohesion and sustainability