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Campeones!

August 5, 2024 By Community, Featured, Football

One of the things I love about sport is the real life that happens out there. Nothing is predictable, nothing is a given. Competitors try themselves against each other, supporters follow and cheer them on and time is marked by transcdent moments on and off the field of play. The game is the setting for stories that are singular in occurrence or narrative arcs that span generations.

While most of the world of sport has its attention turned to the Olympic games, my own attention yesterday was fully devoted to a critical match for the men’s team of the soccer club I co-own, TSS Rovers FC. TSS Rovers are a club with a men’s and a women’s team owned by three majority shareholders and 440 community owners. I’m one of the Trustees for the Spirit of the Rovers Supporters Trust that represents our ownership group on the club board. Yesterday was the Championship Final of the League 1 BC playoffs and having already won the league, our men were poised to take to the field against our rival from North Vancouver, Altitude FC. Because we play at Swangard Stadium in Burnaby, and Altitude plays across Burrard Inlet in North Vancouver, our rivalry is called the Ironworkers Derby, named for the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Bridge, which connects the two cities.

Over the three years our league has existed, this has been a tightly contested derby, and we have had the upper hand in general. Altitude’s men’s team has had two tough seasons, but this year, they finished second in the league and beat the Vancouver Whitecaps Academy to make it to the final. They chased us all the way and if it hadn’t been for a tough 1-0 victory against them, they might have won the League title.

For our part, we have had a historic season. We won our first league title a few weeks ago with a game to spare. Three of us travelled to Kamloops to witness the historic occasion. After two years of more heartbreak and diabolical situations than I could ever describe, and two second-place finishes, we finally won, which meant we qualified for the third year in a row for the Canadian Championship, Canada’s FA Cup competition. Representing League 1 BC, we have the distinction of being the only semi-professional side to knock a professional club out of that tournament when we beat Vaklour FC of Winnipeg 3-1 on April 18 last year.

Our path to the two-round playoff final for League 1 was straightforward enough. We beat Harbourside FC last weekend 4-1 and prepared to face our rival at Swangard Stadium, our home and also the neutral venue chosen by the League for the finals day.

It was not a beautiful game of football.

We went ahead seven seconds into the game with a set piece that came off perfectly from the kickoff and got another goal in the first half from our towering centre-back, Nik White. In the second half, Altitude came back with relentless attacking energy and got a goal back on the hour mark but went down to 10 meant at the 76th minute. It didn’t seem to matter, as they threw everything at us and finally got some reward from their havoc by tying it up on an 84th-minute penalty. Three minutes later, we were awarded a penalty taken by a long time club veteran, Erik Edwardson. In a crazy game in which there was no certainty, Erik’s penalty was the closest thing to a safe bet.

Needing to defend our 3-2 lead, we bunkered down a bit, and Altitude got at us, resulting in a corner off of which ANOTHER penalty was awarded in the 90th minute. In a moment of utter heartbreak from our rivals, the penalty taker skied the kick, and we were able to kill off the six minutes of added time to win our second playoff championship and our first double trophy season.

A million storylines are woven into this match. We started the season with a team stocked with veterans and former professional players who joined us for another chance to play in the Canadian Championship. We took Pacific FC deep into injury time with a 1-0 lead before the professionals scored on the game’s last attempt and then beat us on penalties. Many of our veterans got injured or retired during the season, and players who have been with us for many of the six seasons we have been in existence stepped away from the game. Professional clubs picked up a few, including two of our more prolific strikers, Devon O’Hea and Gurman Sangha. We needed to play kids, literally, with players like 17-year-old midfielder Tristan Otoumagie staking a regular role for themselves on the side. Our coach, Brendan Teeling, had to manage a team going through a generational transition over twelve games in our short and intense season. We held the top spot in the table for most of the season, being pipped only by Altitude and the Whitecaps Academy during a week in which we had games in hand on them. We battled through curses, heartbreak, and a seemingly systemic inability to finish games dating back a couple of seasons. We got a lot of monkeys off our backs last night and saw our team pick themselves up from disappointment and refuse to give in.

And yesterday, we won our second trophy of 2024 and celebrated with many players who have been with us for many years and many who probably played their last games for us yesterday. At the celebration party last night, it was bittersweet thanking and saying goodbye to these players, and exciting to see the young ones clutching their winners’ medals and watching wide-eyed as the veterans of the team heard their songs for the last time and heard some of the stories of what it means to play for this club, Canada’s only supporter owned team, with one of Canada’s most vocal and creative lower-league supporters groups.

When you own a team and are involved in creating the culture and the conditions for people to shine and thrive, whether on or off the pitch, these moments of success are important markers of meaning. They catch and encapsulate the heart of what it means to co-create something, and they mark collective progress in the long development journey. As Colin Elmes, one of our founders, said, “We’re in the relationship business – the soccer just comes along for the ride.“

What we are doing is community.

Trophies aren’t everything, and there are dozens of stories from this season that make me proud to be involved in this club, whether it’s watching our players turn professional or seeing some of our former players like Julia Grosso, Jordyn Huitema and Joel Waterman playing for Canada’s National teams. It could just be getting to witness the inimitable Maddy Mah, a player whose college career was derailed with a concussion before she got to play and who spent three years recovering before finding her mojo again with us last year, board a plane to Toronto to finally start at university and play for the U of T Blues. And it’s about honouring players like Erik Edwardson and Kyle Jones, Ivan Mejia and Gabe Escobar and Justyn Sandhu and Danylo Smychenko, who have been with our team for three years or more, finally savouring the fruits of their work.

These relationships and moments will last a lifetime for all of us, whether we are players, supporters, owners or staff and they give us all a tangible memory of what it means to create community and why it’s important to do so.

A prophetic turn in populist politics

July 21, 2024 By Democracy

Back in 2022 Peter Levine – whose thought blog posts are amongst my favourite reads on a regular basis – wrote the following:

The left should represent the lower-income half of the population; the right should represent the top half. When that happens, the left will generally advocate government spending and regulation. Such policies may or may not be wise, but they can be changed if they fail and prove unpopular. Meanwhile, the right will advocate less government, which (again) may or may not be desirable but will not destroy the constitutional order. After all, limited government is a self-limiting political objective.

When the class-distribution turns upside down, the left will no longer advocate impressive social reforms, because its base will be privileged. And the right will no longer favor limited government, because tax cuts don’t help the poor much. The right will instead embrace government activism in the interests of traditional national, racial or religious hierarchies. The left will frustrate change, while the right–now eager to use the government for its objectives–will become genuinely dangerous

I’m not as sophisticated a political observer as Peter is, but in general i’ve noticed a trend in the political spectrum away from left and right and towards policy focussed versus populism. Although at the moment I think the right generally align to populous politics, I see it on the left as well and to me is concerning. The pandemic showed us that populist governments struggle when confronted with a real crisis. Humanity faces several existential crisis currently, and in the near future, rooted in war, climate change, economic, inequality, mass migrations, and technological issues such as AI and overreliance on algorithms and social media to shape our thinking.

Peter has reflected on these observations on this inversion in a recent blog post in which he looks at recent election results in Europe and thinks about the current election campaigns in the United States. Of course it’s not simple and there are many dynamics that affect American politics that don’t affect European politics or even politics in Canada. But his observations remind me that the political spectrum is changing and for anybody working to get things done at any level in government attending to the shifts provides very useful situation awareness.

A renewed set of resources for planning and facilitating Open Space Technology meetings

July 17, 2024 By Facilitation, Featured, Open Space

I finally managed to update all the broken links and misplaced resources on my Open Space Technology resources and planning pages.

If you now visit the Open Space Planning page and the Open Space Resources page, all the links should be working.

Anything you can’t find there is likely to be found at the Open Space World home including a library of books and papers from Harrison Owen.

Thanks for everyone who kept poking at me to get this done.

The story of our local whales

July 16, 2024 By Bowen, Featured

A graph showing cetacean sightings in Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound from 2001-2018

Here in Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, the return of cetaceans over the past 20 years has been truly incredible. Having been hunted to extirpation from this part of the world in the early 1900s, a single Humpback Whale made a stunning return to our inlet in 2001. Along with the Humpbacks came hope of a renewed and recovered inlet, washed free of the massive pollution problems caused by a century of logging, wood processing and mining.

The explosion happened in earnest in 2010 when Pacific Whitesided Dolphins returned to Howe Sound by the hundreds. The number of sightings in the above graph doesn’t catch the number of dolphins. There were pods numbering in the hundreds at times swimming in unison around the Sound, riding the bow waves of water taxis and ferries. They were here becasue the herring had returned to the inlet, and anchovies had joined them having moved north from California due to warmer waters.

The dolphins didn’t last long becasue hot on the heels of them came irruptions of sea lions and seal populations and that attracted the Biggs Killer Whales, transient Orcas that eat marine mammals. They are here to stay and in recent years have been joined by occasional visits from the Northern Resident Killer Whales who have forayed south in search of fish to eat.

Since 2018 when this graph ends, the humpback population has exploded and there are now upwards of 60 calves and 400 adults that make their summer feeding homes in the Salish Sea, some spending lots of their time in and around Howe Sound. These numbers are especially encouraging because calves that are raised in a place tend to stay there and later breed. The Humpbacks have returned. It will be amazing the tallies for the last six years.

It is getting to the point where every time I’m on the ferry I take my binoculars and scan for whales. I see whales probably 10-15% of the time, and in every month. Spomtimes the presence of whale watching boats gives them away, other times I just scan the sea and catch a blow or a fin. Just the other day I set up a hammock on the south shore of our island and spent the afternoon reading and watching a pod of four orcas travel below the bluffs.

It’s hard to describe the effect that the return of the whales has had on our Island and on the communities of Howe Sound. Multiple Facebook groups have popped up to share sights and Ocean Wise has set up a ground-based Whale Blitz which concludes tomorrow. Folks are being encouraged to get out and look for whales, contribute to the science and learn how to identify different species and how to keep them safe.

The whales have been the central figures in the story of how we established the Átl’?a7tsem / Howe Sound Biosphere Region in 2021 and they will continue to hold us accountable as we both resist and shape the industrial, commercial and development forces that are at work next to Canada’s third biggest urban area.

Open Space and Leadership

July 16, 2024 By Complexity, Facilitation, Featured, Leadership

A little piece I’ve just written about Harrison Owen’s work on High Performance Systems for an Art of Participatory Leadership workbook on the connections between Open Space Technology facilitation and leadership for self-organization.

From the moment Open Space was formalized as a meeting method in 1985, its creator, Harrison Owen, saw massive potential for the process to inform organizational design and leadership. Watching groups of 100 or more people self-organize a conference over multiple days was simply a microcosm of what could go on in organizational life. It offered a radical view that perhaps there was a different way to organize and a different way to lead when we are confronted with complexity and chaos.

In many ways, Open Space Technology was the doorway to the participatory leadership approaches championed by the Art of Hosting community.  In his book Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World, Owen shares his observation that what he saw happening in Open Space meetings was a practical expression of what organizational scholars were observing in high-performance teams.  He formulated this working hypothesis:

High Performance is the productive interplay of diverse, complex forces, including chaos, confusion, and conflict, characterized by holiness, health, and harmony. it is harmonious, including all elements of harmony, both consonance and dissonance, in that multiple forces work together to create a unitary flow. It is whole in the sense that there is a clear focus, direction, and purpose. It is healthy in that the toxins of its process  (metabolic byproducts in organisms) are eliminated effectively and without prejudice to itself or its environment. High Performance can never be sustained at the cost of a fouled nest. A High Performance System is one that does all of the above with excellence over time, and certainly better than the competition. 

Harrison Owen. Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance, p. 35

To create the conditions for high performance, Owen turned to what he had learned from facilitating Open Space Technology meetings.  Creativity springs from urgency, passion (including conflict) and responsibility. It is facilitated by providing leaders with the time and space to organize their work and choose the places where they make a maximum contribution of learning or doing, and essentially getting out of the way of work. When these conditions are in place, and the leader simply holds the space for self-organization, a high-performing System will emerge.  

In Wave Rider, Owen provides three simple principles for leaders to create these spaces:

  1. “Never work harder than you have to.”  Let the managers manage, and as a leader, focus only on what is yours to do. Take action that feeds the system with resources of time, money, and connection and holds space for outcomes to emerge.
  2. “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.” This requires a leader to be patient and wait for the system’s wisdom to emerge. Too often, leaders respond to their own anxiety and discomfort with uncertainty by rushing to a solution or constraining their people to deliver something—ANYTHING—on time and under budget. For complex problems, staying open longer and allowing people to self-organize and explore many options for moving forward will increase the chances of novelty and innovation.
  3. “Never, ever, think you are in charge.” The myth of control lies at the heart of much management and organizational leadership literature. The assumption is that if you simply maintain control of the situation, including focusing on accountability for deliverables and directing efforts in a single direction, you will hit your KPIs and achieve a return on investment.  The reality is that things are much more messy than that,  Understanding that the leader is never solely in charge of the whole system liberates the leader to address situations with curiosity and invitation and builds the conditions for co-creation.

Owen explored these principles and approaches alongside the emergence of the World Wide Web and the idea that organizations could become more flexible and agile if they self-organized in networks around core purposes.  New organizational forms and emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, enabled by the web’s ability for people to find each other and resources quickly. Manufacturing was revolutionized by agile approaches to product development, and organizational development became informed by complexity and dialogic practices often based on experiences formed using large-scale self-organizing meeting methods like Open Space Technology.  The dynamics of self-organization were harnessed to create currency systems and governance models, which required leaders to be more like facilitators or hosts than dictators or controllers.

Participatory leadership is a set of practices rooted in the need to create spaces of creative self-organization and collective responsibility for new responses to complex and emergent problems.  Facilitating Open Space Technology meetings is a tangible way to explore and practice these transferable skills from a single gathering to years-long project management to creating entire organizational structures.