I pointed to this paper, How stories affect human action in organisations, last week, as it came by way of a regular mailing from the Plexus Institute. I’ve had a chance to read it and it posits a number of interesting points.

My reading of the paper follows the development of these key ideas:

1. Organizations are not “things” but rather relational processes.


2. Human beings use story to represent and understand the patterns of experience.


3. Stories only represent partial versions of reality and so narrative interpretation is subject to power dynamics.


4. Powerful storyteller can make people “captives” in the story; this is the process of mythmaking.


5. “Organisations, in fact the ‘organising via relating, exist in order to ‘do something’. Hence somehow, the individuals in the organisation need to ‘act’…if our identity is clear and we are actively interconnected in interdependent processes that when information comes available, action can emerge. The information sharing happens in interactive processes between individuals (either inside or outside the ‘organisation’).”


6. “In the language of Gover (1996) ‘our identities are being constitutes and reconstituted with their physical, cultural and historical contexts’. The roots of narratives and identity, he claims, ‘merge, inextricably embedded and nurtured in the soil of human action’.”


7. Narratives that resonate with an individual’s experience create meaningful and sustained emergent action.


8. If people in organisations don’t pay attention to the Individual Intention, the likelihood of the vortices of the narratives in those organisation resonating with the vortex of the Individual Intention is purely one of chance. It is due to individuals themselves to actively spend the time to understand other people�’s Individual Intention.


9. By consciously working on understanding Individual Intention and consciously work on fuzzifying the narrative the complex responsive process of interaction between the people will move to the attractor at the critical point. This can only happen in self-organised process of interactions where meaning can start to flow.

All of this is interesting stuff, especially the deep connection between narrative and action. Organizations as relational processes, as arenas for the practice of storytelling and mythmaking (with it’s attendant careful attention to compassion) and all of this as a propellant to emergent action. It’s a lucid thread.

For my money the last point is the most interesting and an example of it cropped up for me in an Open Space meeting I facilitated last weekend.

I was working as part of a team developing a transportation demand management plan for a city in British Columbia, basically coming up with a strategy to get people out of their cars. As part of the process we convened a 1.5 day Open Space meeting with the intention that the participants would begin to work on citizen-based initiatives to get the message out.

These people didn’t know each other, and so Day One was taken up with a lot of conversation about the “typical” issues. The day was essentially about getting to know each other, testing out ideas and theories, exploring the stories and myths about the issue and basically sussing out the power relationships, the allies and the opponents. There was very little new content, but the day was a rich field of developing and dissolving structure, process and relationships, coalescing around stories. Because we were in Open Space and the agenda was driven by deeppersonall passion and responsibility, the process of group-forming was accelerated. By the end of the day there was one story that emerged to invite action. Someone mentioned that in the veryneighborhoodd in which we were meeting, the world’s first curbside blue box program had been initiated. Whether or not this was an observable fact, it became the story upon which we hung the potential for citizen action in Day Two.

Day Two was a two-hour action planning session, and I opened with that story and my interpretation of the fact that we simply don’t know when and how smallinitiativess will blossom. And so the invitation for action planning was to start something small that could change everything.

Within two hours there were three major initiatives sketched out. One involved closing a street down for a one-day festival promoting biking, walking and bussing. One was a project to havecoporationss sponsor evening busses into town from the suburbs on weekend nights to encourage teenagers to stay out of their cars. The third idea was the formation of a website and the coordination of letter writing and lobbying campaigns to align actions on specific issues. All of these ideas had champions, follow-up meeting dates and committees or teams of people committed to working.

I found the way this Open Space event evolved to be right in line with a few of the paragraphs from Smits’ paper:

This is exactly what happened, with people saying in the closing circle that they were very surprised at how quickly the action plans came together. This echoes my experience of using an Open Space action planning process we call “non-convergence,” so-called because it eschews voting, preserves the diversity and complexity of the Day One converstions and keeps the space open for subtle pattern and meaning-making by those motivated enough to initiate action.

Smits’ paper gives me a nice theoretical frame to understand that process.

David Wilcox at Designing for Civil Society has just posted six essentials for effective engagement, which is accompanied by a link to a great resource on public participation that he wrote ten years ago. David’s post trigged my own thinking on consultation.

Consultation is one of the backbone activities in my business. I simply love designing consultative processes that bring together stakeholders from multiple worlds to help co-create something. Most of my practice of course has centred on Aboriginal issues, but the lessons I have learned extend into any endeavour.

A few years ago I was asked to put together a think piece on my consultation philosophy. I chose to start with some stories that have informed my practice from the very outset.

It begins with two stories from my Elders.

Many years ago when I was embarking on my first serious consultation job with the British Columbia Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres, I had an Elder staying with me, His name was Bruce Elijah, and in addition to being an Oneida chief he did a lot of work healing communities. A couple of nights before my first trip, to Chetwynd, British Columbia, we were sitting at my dining room table drinking strong tea and talking about this work.

Late into the night, as we were finishing up our conversation, Bruce summed it up by telling me that the first thing that he does when he goes to work with a community is ask to be taken to the community�s place of power. Sometimes it is a mountain, sometimes a school. It can be a natural place or an artificial one, it doesn�t matter. What matters is starting from there. If you start at the place where the community is most powerful, you can continually revisit that place in the healing work.

The second story was one told by Utah Phillips, the old anarchist folk singer at the 1996 Vancouver International Folk Festival. He told of a time when he was a young man in the 1940s and he had an opportunity to visit a cowboy who knew dozens of songs from the great cattle drives of the 19th century. The cowboy lived in a small house in New Mexico and was dying. It was a tremendous opportunity to get these songs from the mouth of a man who had been on these cattle drives so Phillips arranged a visit.

When he arrived at the cowboy�s house he was met at the door by a nurse who said that although the cowboy was in poor health, he was looking forward to the visit. It would take a few minutes to get him ready so Phillips was invited to make himself at home in the living room.

Phillips began perusing the bookshelves and was immediately struck by the huge number of books from the ultra conservative John Birch Society. His initial reaction was to ask himself what he was doing there, about to have a conversation with a man who was bound to feed him political babble that Phillips would find deeply offensive.

And then he caught himself and he realized that he wasn�t there to talk politics with the cowboy, he was there to get songs. He realized that talking politics with the cowboy would only result in a conversation full of canned ideas recited from a book. Phillips was after the truth, and in concluding the story he said, �if you ask people about what they truly know. They will always tell you the truth.� And what they truly know is not contained in the books they read, it is contained in who they are and what they do and what is close to their heart.

These two stories are the basis of everything I do with consultation, because the pose the two fundamentally most important questions that need to be answered in any consultation process:

• Who are these people really? And
• What is true for them?

The job of the consultation manager is to find the answers to these questions. And both these Elders give a very useful clue about how to go about finding out the answers.

Consultation is required when one group of people needs to know something about another group of people. It is not about selling ideas or concepts, nor is it about eliciting support for a position. It is fundamentally an investigation, an inquiry and an engagement. The selling, messaging and consensus building can come later, or can even be a sideline to the consultation process but those things have no place in consultation. On the contrary, consultation is often used as a tool in the service of those other activities.

So we can speak of consultation as a part of other processes, like building shared vision, developing consensus, creating new relationships, finding mutually beneficial solutions, mitigating impacts, demonstrating openness. Indeed none of these activities can be conducted well without knowing something about the �other� party. And the process of finding that something out is consultation.

So my job, as a consulter is to discover something about someone else that will help me to further my goals. How do I do this? And what is the job of the consultee?

My job is to know my stuff. I have to be intimately familiar with everything I am consulting on, because it is not the job of the consultee to know these things. My job is to know clearly what my motives re for engaging in consultation. My job is to communicate clearly to my consultee about all of the above. My job is to learn as much as I can about the consultee, interpret this information honestly and apply it to my work.

The job of the consultee is to tell me stories. They may know a little bit about what I am doing, and I may fill in some gaps, and they may be able to tell how they think what I am doing will impact on what they are doing, but I never consider this the responsibility of the consultee. The consultee needs only to tell me the truth about their life. The rest of the job is mine.

I’ve been a strong advocate of this starting position for my whole career, and it has served me well. Listening to people’s stories about who they are and what they love to do gives you the context that the stats and studies can’t give you. Ultimately whatever you are doing will hinge on this context, and all the numbers and objective data in the world are no substitution for being out on the land with a logger or an Elder listening to them describe their connection with the place.

A new Hubble deep field photo

From the Hubble Space Telescope comes this view of the very early cosmos:

The description notes that this slice of sky is comparable to looking through an eight foot long soda straw.

Sometimes, it just helps to know that there is a bigger universe out there.

Two new websites of interest to Open Space Technology practitioners and friends. First, my friend Lisa Heft has finally got her consulting practice website up and running. After being in business for 30 years, she really knows what she is talking about and she is one of my all time favourite space openers. She has taught me, more than anything, how to model enthusiasm and cherish participants.

Also, my other California friend (and close friend of Lisa) Jeff Aitken, has just launched his own weblog which is going to rock you. Jeff’s blog impresses me with his ability to hold a multiplicity of worldviews all spinning together at the same time. Jewish, Celtic, Hopi, Buddhist, Hindu, Grateful Dead, all swirl together in a stew of emergent meaning. Dig it:

He’s one of my very favourite embodiments of post-modern identity – holding open the reality of living within a multiply paradoxical identity. I’m tuned in. Welcome Jeff and Lisa!

Canada’s Best Blogs has just released the March list of the Top Blogs. These don’t mean anything other than the fact that the blogs have been nominated and judges liked what they saw.

But the fun part is that Hockey Pundits, a group blog I am a part of, got picked this month. Congrats go out to all the Pundits who keep that group blog a fun place to write about hockey.