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Making a rough and ready pattern language as a creativity tool

April 20, 2016 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Conversation, Facilitation, Featured, First Nations, World Cafe One Comment

Just finished out first day of work with Navajo Area Health Promotion practitioners and 30 community wellness workers, Elders and healers from across the Navajo Nation.  We are blending an Art of Hosting workshop with content and process from  some recent research in neuroscience, epigenetics, and adverse childhood experiences and with wellness and leadership models from our Navajo colleagues with whom we have a ten year relationship.

One of the pieces of work we are doing is supporting these folks in launching or accelerating some community based projects using the social networks they have in place here.  This will involve us spending time in Open Space tomorrow and on Friday running a ProAction Cafe in which 6-8 projects will be able to to be developed. As a way of grounding these projects in patterns that are useful for this context we spent this afternoon generating a Navajo pattern language for resiliency.  We did this with a two round World Cafe in which we asked for stories of supporting resiliency and stories of leadership challenges.  This is a kind both/and appreciative inquiry.  At the conclusion of the Cafe, I asked people to reflect on one teaching or piece of advice that would be useful based on the discussions.  I invited them to write a word or a phrase on one side of an index card and write some explication on the back.

The attached collection of 27 or so patterns include both expected patterns such as “Presence” and “Listening.”  They also include some Navajo principles like “Ádáhodí?zin” meaning ‘Letting our children go, to learn and discover who they are.”

On Friday we will use these principles to help design projects.  I’ll hand a few out to each project proponent and ask them to take a few minutes to brainstorm how to incorporate these pieces of ground tested advice in their project design.

Asking for help

April 18, 2016 By Collaboration, Featured, Leadership, Learning One Comment

I’m in New Mexico this week where we will be back together with our colleagues from the Navajo Nation, working together to keep finding collaborative ways to address health and wellness and community resilience in the Navajo Nation.  Doing this is an ongoing skill and practice.  There are no answers, only different situations that require us to keep working together.

A key skill in being able to address issues you don’t know anything about is to stop and ask for help. My friend Tenneson Woolf, with whom I spent the last weekend in Salt Lake City, sometimes tells a useful story about this. He once asked his then  four year old son Isaac what advice he give if someone found themselves not knowing what to do next.  Isaac said: “Sit down. Think. Ask for help.” Which, if you have ever worked on a building site, you will know is perfect advice.

I value people that can do that. I think the ability to ask for help is significantly devalued in our society, where status and competence hinge on having the right answer. We all probably have stories about times we pursued the “right answer” well past the point of its usefulness, because the vulnerability of not knowing was a bigger risk that screwing something up.

And yet, we are faced with problems as leaders and decision makers to which we have no answers. And we are often faced with a public or employees or colleagues who hold us to account, unfairly I think, for not having the right answers.

Two years ago during a local election on Bowen Island I worked with a candidate in the local election to create a forum on facebook where the only questions asked would be unanswerable ones, and where the candidates had to work together to understand and address these questions.  It provided a safe space for candidates to say “I don’t know” and to go out and share links and find resources.  Many of the candidates that were most active in that forum ended up getting elected and I like to think that their ability to work well with others was one of the reasons why they received the trust of voters.

This sounds good, but last week there was an incident that showed how allowing this kind of public conversation is still and uphill battle.  In the USA Presidential primary campaigns, Donald Trump was asked a question about what he would called the west bank of the Jordan River.  Is it Israel? Palestine? Occupied Territories? Colonized Land?  The question is fraught and of course if a guy like Trump can weasel out of answering it, he will probably find a way. Perhaps he did when he turned to one of his advisors and said “Jason, how would you respond to that?”

Now you might argue that he was dodging the question, but what was most illuminating was the vitriol and backlash that came to Donald Trump criticizing his inability to have an answer.  There was a lot “gotcha” kinds of comments on social media, implying that Trump must be a fool if he doesn’t know the answer to the question. A New York Times blog captured a muted version of some of the general tenor of criticism this way:

The moment evoked a similar reach-for-an-aide episode, when, in an interview with reporters in September 2003, the retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a Democratic presidential candidate, struggled to answer questions about whether he would have supported the congressional authorization for the Iraq invasion that year.

“Mary, help!” Mr. Clark called out to his press secretary as they rode in his campaign plane. “Come back and listen to this.”

Mr. Trump did not make such an overt plea. But he struggled to answer a basic question about a tumultuous issue.

Of course it is not at all a basic question and not just a “tumultuous issue.” It is a loaded question about one of the defining international issues of our time, an issue that in fact suffers terribly from simple and reductionist perspectives.  Taking time to stop, think and ask for help is a pretty good strategy.

I’m no fan of Donald Trump and this is not about the way he handled the question. It is about how quickly his critics rose to attack him for not having an answer. It is a call to citizens to hold our public officials and decision makers not to a high level of expertise, but to a higher level of collaborative instinct.  I don’t want Donald Trump to be President, primarily because he is a dishonest, racist know-it-all who generally takes pride in taking his own advice.  But at the same token I urge us all to be responsible for creating the conditions in which candidates can show that when they don’t know answers, asking for help is a good strategy.   This is the most important decision making skill for facing  the complexity of our present and immediate future.

 

Sharing our vulnerabilities

April 13, 2016 By Being, Featured One Comment

Over the past few days several friends of mine have blogged pieces that capture their vulnerable moments.  I don’t know what it is about the timing of things, but here are a few posts that talk openly about daily struggles that people face.  It is a litany of honesty and thoughtfulness from people who otherwise need to project a more solid image to the world.

Laurie Kingston, an old friend from university days has been blogging for years about her life with cancer.  A couple of weeks ago, she published a letter about where she is in her journey which is powerful in its confronting of fear and uncertainty.

Charles LaFond is the Canon Steward of the cathedral of St. John’s in the Wilderness in Denver Colorado.  Our friendship and colleagueship has blossomed over the years as we have served congregations together and explored the applications of the spiritual resources of hosting.  He keeps a daily blog on the cathedral’s website.  He writes today on despair.

Back in 2002, I kept a blog about the Toronto Maple Leafs, and through that writing I met Jordon Cooper who was the editor of a blog called The Hockey Pundits.  I wrote there for a couple of years until the NHL lockout destroyed my interested in hockey in 2004.  Jordon’s writing ranges from spirituality to sports, culture and to his family and personal struggles with health and the medical system.  Today he shares a peek under the hood of struggling with a chronic health condition and being in relationship.

Lesley Donna Williams is a colleague based in South Africa.  We met once, but I feel like we know each other better from our social media connections over the years then from the one time we met!  She works as an entrepreneur and documents her experience as a mixed race woman living in a country that struggles everyday with integration. It’s a fertile, bewildering, energizing and anxiety provoking context, and so it’s not surprising that once in a while she will experience burnout.  This post today captures what the journey with burnout is all about.

Tenneson Woolf is one of my closest friends and professional colleagues.  We tumble through the world together in mutual admiration of each other’s gifts, and we bring so much that’s different, that we complement each other beautifully.  It’s easy working and hanging out with him (we’re doing both this weekend in Salt Lake City and next week in New Mexico!).  Tenn writes his heart at his blog called Human to Human, and today he writes about those days when you just have to put one foot in front of the other.

Rebecca Contant and I know each other because we are both Vancouver Southsiders, devoted supporters of the Vancouver Whitecaps Football Club.  The Southsiders are a group of a couple of thousand of us that sing, chant, cheer and create art together in support of our team.  It is a participatory and inclusive activity, and we actively embrace social inclusivity in our activity.  Rebecca uses this awareness opening as a jumping off point for how to create inclusive spaces for gender identity issues to be considered in the craft of teaching physical education.  The post is a vulnerable exploration of what it feels like to confront these issues with compassion and thoughtfulness.

And finally, here is a Storified twitter exchange I got into last week with two gun-loving, anti-gay Americans as we discussed a recent bill in North Carolina that would force transgender people to use the gendered washroom that corresponds to the gender on their birth certificate, despite the situation that would put people into. This discussion is at turns alarming and terrifying and funny and it ends with a major surprise and a crack of vulnerability.

These kinds of posts illustrate the parts of social media that I love.  For many of us, writing is the way we explore our hearts to the world, and the nature of social media – whether through blogging, twitter, facebook or instagram – means that we can engage with each other’s writing and vulnerabilities.  Revealing these insecurities makes for a more empathetic and honest world.

It’s not always easy

April 11, 2016 By Collaboration, Community, Design, Facilitation, Leadership, Learning, Open Space, Organization, World Cafe 3 Comments

Today a client emailed me with a small anxiety about setting up a meeting room in a circle.  The work we will do together is about rethinking relationships in a social movement and the concern was that it was already unfamiliar enough territory to work with.  Setting up the room in a circle might cause people to “lose their minds.”  I get this anxiety, because that is indeed the nature of doing a new thing.  But I replied with this email, because I’m also trying to support leadership with my client who is doing a brave thing in her calling:

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How journalists can help convene

March 22, 2016 By Collaboration, Community, Leadership 2 Comments

Back in the fall I got to finally do some work with my friends Peggy Holman and Stephen Sliha (and Carol Daniel Kasbari too!) with the fabulous organization Journalism That Matters.  I was able to do a little process hosting and participating in the developmental evaluation that was going on during the two day conference in Portland.

Last month Peggy published an overview of what we learned in that conference.  Embedded in that report is this video made by some of the students on the evaluation team.  It contains interviews with many of the participants who had epiphanies about what else journalism could be.

It seems obvious to think that journalists, being storytellers, can help communities tell their stories and represent themselves.  But I’m interested in the “weak signal” of journalists actually doing the convening of conversations.  Journalists don’t only have the power to tell stories, they also have the power to call together people in conversation.  They do it whenever they call up a source for a comment on a story.  They do it on radio or TV when they call a panel of people to discuss or debate something.  They do it in print or online when they host opinions and curate comment sections (and they DON’T do it when they just leave comments sections open).  Why don’t journalists call community meetings?  Why don’t they host larger scale gatherings where people discuss their communities issues, even come up with solutions, find each other and work together?  Sometimes journalists “moderate town halls” but that’s really not the same thing.

I think the new frontiers in journalism are not only in using their media tools in novel ways. I think journalists can now think about how to extend their hosting practice in new ways too, to help communities find the resources they need inside themselves to address the challenges they face.  And that would be another way that journalism could matter.