Insights on the nature of the times

May 23, 2011 By

I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice.  We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of  ”What time it is in the world?”  We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing.  We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were emerging.  At the end of the Cafe, the hosts gathered in a fishbowl in the middle of the rest of the group and shared their insights, sensing into the patterns that were emerging.  I listened with a poet’s ear tuned to the harvest and this is what I heard:

 

You have to be ready to die on the hill atop which you have heard the deepest call of the world

 

When you open the smallest space in your life, passion can erode obligation. You become more social, unable to be unaware.

 

You cannot see yourself in the window of a rushing train but only for a second.  You need to slow down so that the reflection can be studied, a life examined.

 

What would a world looki like that is flowing in responsibility, courage, reverence and wakanza?

 

Responsibility and courage are individual acts.  Reverance and wakanza are products of the collective context, they are responses that are woken up in us by the times.

 

Our children our the gift we make to the future, they are the long stake in the long view, the holders of wisdom, those carriers of what we have learned about how we have lived.

We are the ones we have been waiting for, and we have been waiting for lives and times beyond our own, living in lives and times beyond our own.  We see ourselves as the gift to ourselves when others make it clear in relationship.

 

Our conversations touch every single other conversation.  The world unfolds as one point presses upon another in a great chain of implication and connectivity.  The technology of interconnection is vulnerability – the capacity to be open to one another.  In that small open space, influence takes root.  Ideas enter in that seem to have always been there.

 

I move and leave pieces of myself behind, and I have no story of grieving?  No way to midwife the new in the hospice of the dying?  What is being born when things are dying, what enters in when there is a puase in the breath between generations, between conversations, between breaths and between heart beats?

 

In the moments of silence that open between sounds, there is a chance for the smallest voice to be heard.  The babble dies down and there is a pause and a small call has its chance to invite.  Judgement kills that voice – sometimes aborts it before it even ever enters the world.

 

All we have are ideas – take a stand, do what you can to help others to stand.  You can reach back to the head of every river to see why it is full of what it is full of.  Every tributary signs its joining with specific minerals, with salts and metals, with vegetation and fish.  You can find home by simply following the taste of it.

 

Host others, but host yourself first. Listen to others but first learn to listen to the wind, to listen to the birds and the way the ground moves beneath the feet of the deer.  Learn to listen to why people say the things they say.  To what soil or water fills their syllables with longing.

 

Presence.  When you host you can become the vehicle through which the world speaks its story.  And you hear what you are built for and you speak what you see in yourself.

 

We are not too busy for change, we are instead addicted to avoiding what is real and what needs doing.  People are the agents for their own freedom.  But that freedom cannot be won without something being let go.  We are in a culture that doesn’t end things very well, but instead loads layers and layers of more on top of the foundation.  With no rite of passage available, nothing gets completed and ushered out, there is no way to make space for the new.  Honour and reverence.

 

We are crying for passages through and for the rites to understand them and to be invited into them.

 

Can you be authentic in your work if you’re not authentic in your personal life?  How do you discover you are not aware of yourself without rites of passage and ceremonies that acknowledge what is coming and what is gone, what is to be picked up and what is to be put down.

 

How do we foster self-awareness when we perceive crises and emergency?  We tell the truth and we tell all the stories, even the ones that represent success and resilience and that buck the trend of the depressing scarcity that keeps us embedded in fear, we insert pauses where previously we would rush to solutions.

 

We are a greedy culture, but we can be greedy for community and that hurts no one because it only activates the abundance that sleeps in a cradle of scarcity.  We can’t afford to throw a few things on the grill and offer some to the neighbours?  Come to me in the late sun of the evening when the wind is still and the birds think before they sing, and cars pass by quietly in the languid air.  Come and share a meal, and tell me what is in your heart.

 

Like Meg says,

Notice what is going on.

Get started.

Learn as you go.

Stick together.

 

Filed Under: Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, BC, Collaboration, Community, Conversation, Facilitation, Leadership, Poetry, World Cafe Tagged With:

Why culture matters

May 17, 2011 By
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Analyse this...!

Yesterday I had a chance to grab lunch with Dave Pollard in our local coffee shop on Bowen Island. One of the things we talked about was the supremacy of analysis in the world and why that is a problem when it comes to operating in complex domains.

I have been intentionally working a lot lately with Dave Snowdon et. al.’s Cynefin framework to support decision making in various domains. It is immensely helpful in making sense of the messy reality of context and exercises like anecdote circles and butterfly stamping are very powerful, portable and low tech processes.

Cynefin is also useful in that it warns us against a number of fatal category errors people make when trying to design solutions to problems. The most serious of these is remaining complacent in a simple context which has the effect of tipping the system to chaos. Nearly as infuriating and problematic to me is the applicability of analysis to complex domains.

Analysis has a dominant place in organizational and community life. It provides a sense of security that we can figure things out and operate in the space of the known. If we just analyse a situation enough we can identify all if the aspects if the problem and choose a solution. Of course in the complicated domain, where causes and effects can be known even though they are separated in time and space, analysis works beautifully. But in complex domains, characterized by emerged phenomenon, analysis tends to externalize and ignore that which it cannot account for with the result that solutions often remain dangerously blind to surprise and “black swan” events.

The Cyenfin framework advocates working with stories and social constructed meaning to sense and act in complex spaces. Where as analysis relies on objective data and meaning making models to create rules and tools, action in complex spaces uses stories and patterns to create principles and practices which help us to create small actions – probes in the system – that work in a nuanced way with emergence.

In this respect culture matters. The stories that are told and the practices thy are used to make sense of those stories is the method for acting in complex space. This distinction us helpful for me working with indigenous communities where program management may rely on analytical tools (and culture is stamped out in the process) but practices need to be grounded in culturally based responses. Using stories and social meaning making restores culture to its traditional role of helping groups of humans move together in complex domains while using analysis more appropriately.

Filed Under: Art of Harvesting, BC, Design, emergence, Facilitation, First Nations, Leadership, Stories Tagged With:

What harvesting tool works best?

February 11, 2011 By

A colleague emailed today and asked me this question: “which tool do you use when you have to analyse the content of your harvest with groups?”

My answer was that it depends on so much.  Which means there is no one rule or tool but rather a principle.  The principle would be this: “Participatory process, participatory harvest, simple process, simple harvest”  The primary tool I use in complex decision making domains is diversity.

A story.  Once, working with the harvest of a a series of 4 world cafes that had about 100 people in each, I ended up with 400 index cards, each containing a single insight which we later transcribed.  It would be folly for me to work with a taxonomy of my own design, so I invited eight people to help me make sense of the work.  We all read the 18 peages of raw data and noticed what spoke to us.  From there we created a conversation that drew forth those insights and organized them into patterns.  The final result was a report to the 400 people that had gathered that was rich and diverse and as complex as the group itself without being overly complicated to implement.

So it depends.  If you use the Cynefin framework, which I have been studying and using a lot lately, you will see that different domains of action require different harvesting and sense making tools.  So be careful, use what is appropriate and try to never have a place where one point of view dominates the meaning making if you are indeed operating the realms of complexity, chaos or disorder..

Filed Under: Art of Harvesting, BC, Collaboration, Design, emergence, Facilitation, World Cafe Tagged With:

Society is the still face

December 22, 2010 By

Back in November, I worked with my mate Teresa Posakony on a two day gathering the object of which was to work to apply brain science to policy questions on the prevention of adverse childhood experiences.  On the first day I facilitated an Open Space event that brought together reserachers and brain scientists to discuss their findings and on the second day, we had panelists and Teresa ran a half day cafe to look at the implications of the research for policy making.  I composed a poem at the end of the day.

As a part of the experience, we were shown a powerful video of the still face experiment, a test to see how infants respond when their care givers break the connection with them.  It is very very powerful.  Here it is:

Later in the day one of the panelists, Jennifer Rodriguez, referred to this video by saying that collectively, “society is the still face” when it comes to our children and youth.

That was the hook I needed for the poem, which was also informed by the words I saw and heard during the cafe.  I read the poem and got a generous standing ovation.

Today I got an email from our clients which was sent by the researcher you see in the video, Dr. Ed. Tronick.  Dr. Tronick was responding to our client, who sent him the poem and the recording of me reading it:

I really am quite moved by the poem and your comment about how much impact it has.  When I began this work in my lab I had no idea that it might one day be so useful in getting children and families what they so desperately need.  I love the poem – I will get it up in my office somewhere, especially what it brings together and the rhythm of it.  Please tell Chris how much I appreciate it.  It is just amazing.  And more important than the SF or the poem is the work you and everyone at the conference are doing.

It is not enough to do work in the world without adding as much beauty as we can.  The power resides in the songs, the poems, the images that we use to capture our collective experiences and to throw a light on how important they are to us as human beings.

Enjoy the harvest.

Filed Under: Art of Harvesting, BC, Community, Facilitation, Improv, Poetry, World Cafe Tagged With:

Society is the still face

December 22, 2010 By

Back in November, I worked with my mate Teresa Posakony on a two day gathering the object of which was to work to apply brain science to policy questions on the prevention of adverse childhood experiences.  On the first day I facilitated an Open Space event that brought together reserachers and brain scientists to discuss their findings and on the second day, we had panelists and Teresa ran a half day cafe to look at the implications of the research for policy making.  I composed a poem at the end of the day.

As a part of the experience, we were shown a powerful video of the still face experiment, a test to see how infants respond when their care givers break the connection with them.  It is very very powerful.  Here it is:

Later in the day one of the panelists, Jennifer Rodriguez, referred to this video by saying that collectively, “society is the still face” when it comes to our children and youth.

That was the hook I needed for the poem, which was also informed by the words I saw and heard during the cafe.  I read the poem and got a generous standing ovation.

Today I got an email from our clients which was sent by the researcher you see in the video, Dr. Ed. Tronick.  Dr. Tronick was responding to our client, who sent him the poem and the recording of me reading it:

I really am quite moved by the poem and your comment about how much impact it has.  When I began this work in my lab I had no idea that it might one day be so useful in getting children and families what they so desperately need.  I love the poem – I will get it up in my office somewhere, especially what it brings together and the rhythm of it.  Please tell Chris how much I appreciate it.  It is just amazing.  And more important than the SF or the poem is the work you and everyone at the conference are doing.

It is not enough to do work in the world without adding as much beauty as we can.  The power resides in the songs, the poems, the images that we use to capture our collective experiences and to throw a light on how important they are to us as human beings.

Enjoy the harvest.

Filed Under: Art of Harvesting, BC, Community, Facilitation, Improv, Poetry, World Cafe Tagged With:

The methodology of study from a Coast Salish perspective

April 19, 2010 By

A beautiful extended reflection on the methodology of study in a coast Salish context from author Lee Maracle:

The object of ‘study” from a Salish perspective is to discover another being in itself and for itself with the purpose of engaging it in future relationship that is mutually beneficial and based on principles of fair exchange. We study from the point of view, that there is something unknown to be discovered, that all life contains something cherished, but hidden from us and that if we observe from as many angles of perception that we can rally, engage one another in exchanging observations, and consider the internal dynamics governing the behavior of the being observed from the perspective of its perfect right to be, we will understand it in relationship with ourselves. We do not believe we can fully understand the being under study, but we can come to see it clearly enough to engage it in relationship.

This process is a collective process, requiring many different sets of eyes, many different points of view. This is because if we examine something from one subjective angle [and all human observation and thought is subjective] then we will only understand an aspect of the being under study and we are very likely to engage in huge errors, leap to absurd conclusions based on subjective assumptions and so forth. We engage one another in this process on the presumption that all points of view are valid, but they must be POINTS OF VIEW, not biases. The points of view are accepted. They are never right or wrong, just different. No argument, attempt to persuade one another is useful here and thus we do not need to compete to see who has the best eyes, the clearest vision. The process of discovery requires different points of view, different sets of images, and different perspectives about the being under examination in order for the collective to be able to discuss it’s possible internal dynamics. We first see how it moves, see how it conducts itself, mark its sense of movement, its sense of time and being, we connect its conduct to its own being and then we connect its movement to its desire, its sense of time to its longevity and its behavior to its condition and its history.”

When we do this, we come to see that the end result is a powerful story, a long lasting relationship and this fosters, beauty, hope, heart and song.

via transCanada.ca / Keynote Speakers and Other Participants.

This is a gorgeous inspiration for the power of collective harvesting.

Filed Under: Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, BC, Collaboration, First Nations Tagged With: