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Including difference to strengthen a movements

October 26, 2012 By Conversation, Facilitation, Leadership

Heard a great story today.

I’m at a conference of union activists who are working to build their activist muscles up and do work in communities.  One of the presenters here is Jason Sidener, who I’ve enjoyed spending a couple of hours with.  Jason is the Member Mobilization Coordinator for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).  he is abased in Madison, Wisconsin and played a key organizing role in the upheavals there in 2011 when public sector unions successfully stood up to Governer Scott Walker’s anti union agenda.

Jason told a story today about some of the work he did long before that high profile action.  He was brought up on a farm, a conservative rural young man who was raised Republican and came from a Republican family.  He changed as he grew up, and when he started working for the union he discovered that in the AFSCME about a third of the members are Republicans.  They like their guns, they are social conservatives and they don’t trust outsiders.

Jason noticed that at union meetings and conventions, these conservatives, who nevertheless were supporters of fair wages and benefits for public sector workers, often found themselves silenced, ostracized and marginalized.  The temptation is to argue with conservative union members and try to convince them that their politics are wrong.  But Jason took another approach.  He saw that the split between conservative and progressive members was dangerous to the unity of the union, so he set about creating a Conservative caucus within the union, where Conservative members could have a safe place to discuss their ideas.

Although counter intuitive, this initiative paid dividends when Republican Scott Walker tried to pass his radical legislation last year.  Many of the members of the Conservative caucus started coming to Jason saying “take me off that list.”  They were realizing that the guy they had elected was no friend of theirs after all.  They appreciated the Conservative caucus but saw that in this case, the bigger movement was more important.

I was struck by Jason’s unfettered approach to this work.  His confidence in the right thing to do, his commitment to inclusion and his presence of mind to care for the bigger movement is inspiring.

Rainbows, snow and dolphins

October 21, 2012 By Uncategorized

A dry summer and fall has switched to cold rain and high snow.


This mornings rainbow on Howe Sound.


First snow as seen from the Bowen Queen, our replacement ferry, while our regular boat is in for an annual refit.


And a not very good photo of a small pod of dolphins seen off our starboard side while heading home.

The Art of Harvesting

October 18, 2012 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting

in the Art of Hosting world we put a lot of emphasis on the Art of Harvesting.  Locally, Amanda Fenton has been paying attention to this practice a lot and is harvesting tons about hosting and harvesting on her blog, which is worth a regular read.
We’re in an interesting time in our inquiry around harvesting.  At the Stantenberg learning Village in Slovenia. Monica Nissén hosted a great session on the chaordic design of harvesting processes and a really useful tool will be developed out of that.  But until then, here is some high level summary on where we are with the practice, that I gleaned from an email I sent out to some local folks today.
Basic principles around harvesting from participatory processes include:
  • Participatory processes should also have participatory harvests – what is co-created is co-owned.
  • Meaning making should be shared.
  • Harvests need both artifacts and feedback loops.  Artifacts make learning visible and portable and feedback loops making learning useful beyond events.  Both need strategic conversations so that needs can be met.  these conversations include what media the artifacts need to be in, and how to use our harvests with existing power structures and methods of enacting change in order to maximize impacts.
  • Harvesting can be both intentional and emergent.  Intentional harvests are the fruits we set out to gather – in this case the report that we know we will be writing.  Emergent harvests are the surprises we learn along the way.  As these often require different eyes (focused vision for intentional harvests, “soft eyes” to see what is emerging) I often have people take on these distinct roles.
There is lots of work being done in our global community of practice around harvesting.  You can find some of that work at the global Art of Hosting site,  including our most recent thinking on harvesting.  You can also see some of my musings over the years published here.
One of the really interesting things that this harvest inquiry has produced is a process initially developed by Monica Nissén and Mary Alice Arthur called Collective Story Harvest.  I use this tool a lot to learn from community stories that can benefit a collective inquiry.  But more important than its use as a tool, it actually embodies all of these principles above and is a fantastic training ground for learning to become a skilled practitioner of harvesting.
Next March along with some of my Danish colleagues, we are planning an Art of Harvesting retreat  in Copenhagen where we will dive in more fully.  We continue to think deeply about how to strategically use harvesting to accelerate the work that happens within powerful processes.
And if you want to learn more right away, consider joining us for the Art of Hosting retreat on Bowen island next month.

 

Status, knowledge, learning and adaptability, Part 1

October 15, 2012 By Uncategorized

As a facilitator, people often comment on “safety” in group settings. Most group work I have done in my career has been safe, relatively speaking. There may have been the possibility of retaliatory actions for speaking up, workplace bullying or general boorish behaviour, but I have hardly ever (!) worked in spaces where real physical safety was an issue.

Still, the issue of safety and fear comes up surprisingly often, and this article at the edge.org gave me a few insights about this problem.

This article looks to ancient human history to understand some of these dynamics and it begins by looking at two kinds of status in humans: dominance and prestige. In dominance hierarchies we are afraid of the higher status person and there is deference and backing away. In prestige hierarchies we are drawn to the higher status person because they have information that can help us survive.

In some organizations where there is fear it may be that dominance is the mode. So the teaching here is to find ways to gather information so that you are valuable to the organization. What questions does the organization not have answers to? Gathering that information. It levels the playing field so that people who are physically dominant find themselves in a different status relationship.

Another area that we’ve worked on is social status. Early work on human status just took humans to have a kind of status that stems from non-human status. Chimps, other primates, have dominant status. The assumption for a long time was that status in humans was just a kind of human version of this dominant status, but if you apply this gene culture co-evolutionary thinking, the idea that culture is one of the major selection pressures in human evolution, you come up with this idea that there might be a second kind of status. We call this status prestige.

This is the kind of status you get from being particularly knowledgeable or skilled in an area, and the reason it’s a kind of status is because once animals, humans in this case, can learn from each other, they can possess resources. You have information resources that can be tapped, and then you want to isolate the members of your group who are most likely to have a lot of this resources, meaning a lot of the knowledge or information that could be useful to you in the future. This causes you to focus on those individuals, differentially attend to them, preferentially listen to them and give them deference in exchange for knowledge that you get back, for copying opportunities in the future.

It turns out that adaptation to fluctuating environments makes it important for people with knowledge, as opposed to force, to be dominant. Physical dominance won’t help you survive fluctuations that are bigger than you can control.

Of course, the evidence available in the Paleolithic record is pretty sparse, so another possibility is that it emerged about 800,000 years ago. One theoretical reason to think that that might be an important time to emerge is that there’s theoretical models that show that culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments. If you look at the paleo-climatic record, you can see that the environment starts to fluctuate a lot starting about 900,000 years ago and going to about six or five hundred thousand years ago.

This would have created a selection pressure for lots of cultural learning for lots of focusing on other members of your group, and taking advantage of that cumulative body of non-genetic knowledge.

Status is a really interesting phenomenon in group settings. In the improv world we play with status and rank: rank is fixed but status is malleable. Organizations are rife with status games. Watching any episode of The Office will quickly alert you to this fact. It’s funny when Michael Scott, the manager, adopts the high handed status of a mini CEO and equally funny when he makes a trip to the warehouse and cowers in the shadow of the highest status people on the show: the warehouse workers.

Because status is malleable, we can work with it to get the best from groups of people. When we are confronted with fluctuating environments for example, processes like Open Space Technology work well to level the status field and to invite anyone with knowledge to assume a leadership role. Such a process allows us to learn from others and allows for the emergence of communities of practice, which, if the are harnessed right, can support deep organizational and collective learning.

More on that in part 2.

One way to do it

October 4, 2012 By Learning, Unschooling One Comment

Just thought I would share this piece of communication from my son’s school.  he attends a middle school that has a unique focus on its approach to learning and character development and there is a lot I like about it.  I especially like the way there are certain traditions that flow, giving a time for mentorship and responsibility.  Check this out:

November 1st Late Start

It has been a tradition  for the grade six class to try and formulate a valid argument (i.e. in the Practical Reasoning class) as to why students should be allowed to come late to school (i.e. 10:30) on November 1st (the day after Halloween). Given that the older students often tutor the younger students with the best arguments over the years, it is a fair bet that the students will win their argument. Just a heads-up, then, that it is almost certainly the case that there will be a 10:30 start on Thursday, November 1st.    Off-island students can therefore board the 10:00 ferry, if they choose. Note that the school will be open at 8:30 am as usual for those students who need to come in early, in any case.

As a life learner, my son has chosen to attend this school as part of his learning in life.  It’s stuff like this that confirms my insticnts about his ability to choose his mentors and his learning opportunities to balance wisdom and fun.