One of the things I love about my mate Geoff Brown who lives in the lovely Airey’s Inlet, Australia, is his incredible willingness to be playful and creative in his facilitation work and especially in his harvesting work. He is one of the few that gets how important the harvest is – at least as important as the hosting. In this great post, Geoff shares his recent experience with Open Space and with a fantastic harvest that captures that creative brilliance of the group he was working with: The day after Open Space
- Dad makes pancakes on the BBQ when the power went out this am He was sad to bring them in when it came back on! http://yfrog.com/9dua6laj #
- A crisp clear North Toronto fall morning which feels more like the early spring days of my youth in this neighbourhood. Old skin remembers. #
- Maximizing the use of PVC in Thunder Bay http://yfrog.com/1ahgxkj #
- The snows of November have come in earnest to Thunder Bay. Slowly rising in the dark and cold to prepare for an #openspace today. #
- Early morning Thunder Bay. The city waits for winter and relishes the last spell of mild weather. Me, I'm off to Montreal. #
- This flight from toronto to Montreal is full of the most serious, stressed out and fearful looking humans I have seen in a long time. #
- The Montreal sunrise as seen from Dorval. The ancient mountain sits through another dawn, island washed by flow. http://yfrog.com/3w11kjj #
- Light snow falling. A gentle morning back at home. http://yfrog.com/eod18bj #
- Just because the world needs to see this again today. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKnY8tBLG3g&feature=youtube_gdata_player #
- Last night my beloved and i won our Bowen Coed Soccer League final 5-0 along with our fab teammates. One of the best collective flows ever. #
- A fierce Squamish last night knocked the power out but it all blew all the snow away. #
- Big Squamish blowing http://post.ly/1E2LC #
- RT @paulrickett: ATTN Bowen: U need to turn things off, the instant draw when Hydro turns circuits back on overloads them and takes us down #
Yesterday I was on a commuter flight from Toronto to Montreal. For those of you not in North America, these two cities are the biggest two in Canada and the flight is full of corporate looking people who are wearing ties, nice trench coats, shiny shoes, power rim glasses, and carrying leather portfolios. In short it was a flight of business travellers, mostly men, mostly white.
What struck me as I watched people coming on was how grim everyone looked. Everyone looked deadly serious. They were quiet, travelling alone for the most part and quickly avoided making eye contact with others. It seemed as if most people coming on were worried or fearful. It was as if people were moving with a kind of forced confidence but what was so clear from the outside was how afraid everyone seemed to be of appearing to make a mistake.
At one point a man sat down next to me after expertly throwing his rollaway into the overhead bin. He mumbled a forced “good morning” without looking at me and then cracked open his newspaper. A minute later a woman appeared and showed him her boarding pass which indicated that he was sitting in her seat. The man looked mortified, stuttered out an apology to me actually tried to defend himself and justify his mistake and very nervously and clumsily moved across the aisle.
I was filled with a wave of sadness in that moment. I wanted to say to him “Hey, I won’t be the one that yells at you today for that little mistake.” I looked around the plane. People were so scared of making an error that everyone sat clenched in their seats quiet and grim. I was shocked…it became clear to me that some part of our society – let’s say “Corporate Canada” in this case – was gripped by fear. People actually looked traumatized or abused. They looked like people I know who are residential school survivors or who had survived a bad and abusive foster parenting situation. I can imagine them being yelled at for little things that have happened. It looked like the most risk averse group of people I have ever seen in one place. Risk averse because somehow each of them had paid a dear price fro sticking their necks out, a personal price.
The temptation to generalize is great. But let me say that most airports on a weekday morning during the fall and winter are full of faces like this. Business travellers, corporate sales managers, directors of HR, regional market analysts, associate finance directors, senior planning officers…all these middle management corporate positions staffed by people so full of fear that they shake with nervousness at the smallest mistake in their day.
I don’t work much in the corporate world, but maybe I should more. Maybe a little honest conversation, a little tolerance for exploration and creative problem solving, a little space opening could go a long way to softening the lives of those who wear a hard visage.
An email from a participant in a recent Art of Hosting-type workshop where I brought my juggling balls and taught juggling. One of the participants, a teacher, picked up the skill and left with my three balls in hand to evangelize play!
This may end up sounding like the silliest email ever but thanks for showing me how to juggle. I am really enjoying it. I have never found something that I am not hard on myself to perfect until now. I go outside, or inside and practice for a few minutes and if the balls drop, I just pick them up. Very cool. And I love feeling that I am improving. Yesterday I was showing my boss what I learned and I almost had to stop juggling because it was the longest I had gone. Then the balls fell and solved that problem! But one of the students as he got off the bus yesterday asked me what I learned at school and I told him I’d show him. I have never seen this child so enthusiastic about anything and when I was finally able to show the class, they all applauded! That was cool. But it was fun to be able to show the class something they could understand. Except there was another child who after my juggling display says, “what else did you learn”. So I go on to tell the class we learned a lot of what we are learning in preschool such as how to calm your body down. Then the same boy, “then what did you learn”, so I continue by saying I could host a world cafe. And again, “what did you learn”. I think this child has a future being a lawyer!
Far from the silliest email I have ever received. This is what makes teaching worth it, and why play matters so much.
I’ve recently been introduced to the work of Al Nygard, a Native consultant working out of South Dakota primarily in Tribal communities. Al’s approach and values are very similar to my own, and it’s cool to see familiar ideas in another person’s hands. Al works with traditionally based models of leadership and calls his community development work “community empowerment.”
My colleague Jerry Nagel sent me a link to a video of Al answering the question of why it is so hard to get things done in Tribal communities. Essentially he identifies seven factors that make community empowerment unique. These seven factors bear out my own experience too. He calls these The Art of the Native View. If you understand this view, the work you do will take. If not, and if your work is built on mental models that don’t take these into consideration, you’re in trouble. In my own success and failures working in communities I can relate to how important it is to build your work on appropriate mental models, appropriate views. Even though Al identifies these seven factors as basically universal, each community has unique circumstances, cultures and histories that also inform the work of community empowerment. This stuff is interesting to me as I am about to embark on a project to work on community engagement and empowerment with my mates in the Berkananetwork, tailoring some of our resources to work in Tribal communities in North America
Starting around 5 minutes into the video, Al gets to the nub of his approach in building empowerment in Native communities. It centres around seven things that all Native communities share which make the work of empowerment unique. I’m summarizing and editorializing a little on his words here.
Trust. This is about building relationships of mutual reliance. It’s about building trust between people, between families and between people and institutions.
Communication systems. The default communication system in Indian country is the moccasin telegraph. Works fast but not always reliable. So we need a variety of ways to communicate – audio, visual, kinesthetic. Reliable commonly shared information is important and doing it in a multi-modal way is important.
Leadership systems. Who are the leaders in the community? Elected leaders, heads of entities and institutions yes, but what about moms, students, Elders, veterans? Leadership is everywhere. The system that develops and directs leadership in all these ways is important. Elections are clear but how are we developing leaders in other areas and how do we get information to leaders so they can act? Leadership in Native communities comes from invitation: you are asked to be a leader. Also, there is an end time. When it’s over, it’s over. In Anglo cultures we seek out leadership and then we hang on to it as long as possible. To me this is one of the reasons why Open Space is such an interesting fit for traditional leadership forums, as these are the same dynamics that underlie that process.
Governance. What are the rules that tell us what we can depend on? Not the same as government. Do your rules help you or hold you back? That is the essence of governance
Lateral oppression. Sometimes called the Indian crab syndrome (in a bucket of crabs, when one tries to escape the others will pull it back down). Lateral oppression is the way that power shows up in shadow in a community. When you are working with empowerment, the shadow work of paying attention to lateral oppression is very important.
Racism and Inequality. A common experience of all Native people living in community is the disparity of experience on the rez vs. off the rez. Over time, experiences of oppression, racism and inequality eat away at self-esteem and colour how we relate to the outside world. Just this evening in a cafe I was running this dynamic showed up as a difference between how a First Nations forest company and non-First Nations forest companies dealt with the stress of uncertainty about the future.
Hurt and Balance. The lingering effects of trauma from issues like residential school abuse, language and culture decline, and the subsequent multi-generational issues create a myriad complex of dynamics that often confuse and confound outsiders.
Al’s framework is a useful lens to view work in Tribal communities. Mental models and world views matter.