The National Capital Freenet in Ottawa was the host of my first email address. It’s most famous web page may well be the amazing wood s lot. Today, Mark Woods’ blog turned seven.
Happy Birthday!
The National Capital Freenet in Ottawa was the host of my first email address. It’s most famous web page may well be the amazing wood s lot. Today, Mark Woods’ blog turned seven.
Happy Birthday!
My young friend Dustin Rivers nails the difference between the old system and the new system.
Back in March we ran an Art of Hosting for the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team and all of our comunity partners. At the conclusion of that Art of Hosting we held an Open Space. One of the topics that I posted was about the pattern of our work with community based on the experiences that people had had over the three days of training. I was interested in seeing if anything we did over three days with forty people in an Art of Hosting could scale up to larger levels in the system. I had a couple of powerful insights during that session.
It is interesting to see the way some of these insights have deepened into operating principles. The idea of Children at the Centre has become a simple but powerful organizing principle for all of our community linkage work with VIATT. The idea of TeacherLearners in the community has informed the way that we are developing community circles – policy and decision making bodies that will hold significantly more responsibility for the system that mere advisory committees. At the moment we are looking at using study circles as a methodology for running the community circles.
[tags]VIATT, community consultation, circles, children, child and family services, study circles[/tags]
Today I ran into an interesting situation. I was in a conversation about a community process I have been designing and a potential participant took me aside and said that she would love to participate but that one of the people who had already agreed to also participate had committed some serous abuse against her partner. She wondered how I would do to resolve the situation.
That was a good one, a little bit out of the blue and somewhat unexpected. I thought for a moment and then, putting my best collaborative principles into practice said “I don’t know. What would you do if you were in my situation?” She wasn’t expecting this answer, but to her credit she stopped and thought about it. We stood next to each other in silence for a few moments.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Well then,” I said. “That makes two of us. Let’s think about this together.”
We shared a little laugh and then I started thinking out loud. I mused about the fact that we needed many perspectives in this process, and perhaps even the perspectives of “abusers” whatever that means. Having all voices in a process does not come cost-free. I also acknowledged her needs for both safety and a way to contribute to the process. The truth of things, as Christina Baldwin has said, is that as a facilitator I can’t guarantee anyone’s safety, but I can help a group create the conditions that would look after its own safety. In that spirit I invited her to join our process and be in dialogue with me about co-creating the conditions of safety and participation that would meet her needs and keep the group functioning well. This was an agreeable proposal to her and so we will be in conversation as our process unfolds to make sure that the group is doing its best possible work. She has taken some responsibility for helping us to understand her experience of the situation and we’ll deal with whatever comes up with inquiry, curiosity, imagination and patience.
It is a great gift when individuals in a group step up to take responsibility for co-creating conditions of safety and efficacy in their dialogic container. It pays to be honest with people and as for help when you don’t know what to do, and see if proposals forward can be co-created. I was reminded today how important that is to adopt as a world view and not just a facilitation trick.
Photo by Feng Jiang
I can’t help but wonder if, “if we need to discover that we don’t need leaders”, is just wishful thinking on Corrigan’s part.
Admittedly, many of those who call themselves leaders are just over-promoted managers at best, or administartors at worst, but we all know great leadership when we see it. And we need it to motivate, cajole and direct those who don’t see the bigger picture and their role in delivering it.
Whether we like it or not, hierarchy and its sibling command & control, are here to stay. That doesn’t mean that networked organisations and self-organisation are not valuable additions, but they are just that. Additions, not the norm.
I replied to this comment thusly:
It’s interesting…I can see that that comment at the end of the podcast might be a little confusing. It’s a bit out of context, and so I’ll explain myself a little more.
First off, Dave and I were talking about the role of language in defining who we are and that the language of “leadership” seems to create all kinds of expectations that are untenable.
Second, I’m really interested in freeing up the idea of leadership so that it can be practiced everywhere and not in some designated box on an org chart somewhere. The kind of leadership that you talk about Graham is not just needed in the top boxes on org charts…it is needed, and indeed is available all over the place. Assuming that we can’t practice that is what is stifling alot of leadership potential in the world. I think this is something of the point that Desmond Tutu was making.
I’ll quibble with you a little on the idea that command and control are here to stay. I think the evidence is showing that hierarchy may be here to stay as a way of irrigating and organization with resources, but command and control have long given way to networked action based on relationships and intimacy. It’s how anything actually gets done, especially in large organizations. Don’t believe me? It’s the principle behind “work to rule” slow downs. Command and control aren’t synonymous with hierarchy – one can organize a resource allocation hierarchically but use distributed leadership to get the work done.
I have been playing with the idea that healthy bureaucracy is like an irrigation system in a field: at its best it slows down the flow of resources so that they can be useful and productive. When bureaucracies move too slow the stuff in the fields rots. With not enough control in the system, the fields wash away. A perfectly useful buraeucracy should look something like this amazing photo above, allowing farmers at each level to do their work of growing, nurturing, harvesting and selling their crops. What if we took a lesson from this pattern?