Profiles of Courage in Zimbabwe

October 2, 2011 By Bob Stilger

More than a thousand years ago, they came from the north of Africa, leaving the violence and seeking peace.  They came and they settled in an area that became known as the Great Zimbabwe, a kingdom from 1200-1500 AD which is estimated to have had a population of more than 10,000 and famous, today, for its unique stone architecture.  Little is known about Great Zimbabwe.  There was no written tradition amongst the people who came to be known as the Shona.  Some speculate that perhaps somewhere, lost in the archives describing the travel of Arabic traders across the African continent, there might still be records and more information.

I’ve just finished a week at the Great Zimbabwe, in the company of a little more than 30 passionate, committed, insightful and experienced Zimbabweans who are the leaders of a number of nonprofit initiatives.  My colleagues Marianne Knuth and Simone Poutnik offered a four-day training in the Art of Participatory Leadership under the guidance of Sabi Consulting, which is the steward of a network of nonprofits called Profile. When I arrived in Zim a little more than a week ago, it just felt good to be home as the spring Jacaranda trees release the majesty of their purple blossoms against the African sky.  I realized that I’ve been to this country more than any other in the last decade, except my own.  Zimbabwe has been a great teacher for me.  It has shown how people can come together to develop resilience in times of collapse.

My mind makes up stories when I don’t know what to expect.  I try to stop it – but it has a will of its own.  I arrived not knowing what to expect of this week.  Will the political stasis of Zanu PF and MDC hold a grip over this training?  So many have fled from Zimbabwe in the last decade, who is left that will come to this training?  Will they be eager to engage and learn or will they be reserved and cautious?  Who will they be?  Especially given that my work these past two years has concentrated in Japan, will I be able to speak and host in this culture in a way that is useful?  What will happen?

I’m just humbled and amazed.  WOW.  What an incredible group of people.  Each day as I learned more of their stories and their work I just felt deep gratification.  They are the people who are tirelessly working with what they have to build resilient communities.  AND, much of their work is confined within somewhat traditional structures where hierarchy is the only organizing pattern and where the priorities of the donor dictate many of the parameters of their work.

It was a difficult and demanding week.  They came expecting to be trained in participatory leadership, and found themselves sitting in a circle.  Some of them arrived wanting to know our definitions and expecting us to be carefully articulating frameworks and theories.  Instead, we invited them into exploration and questions.  Some wanted us to give them answers – we said good questions are more important.

In the Art of Participatory Leadership, we believe that a participatory experience is the key component of the learning field.  By the end of the first day, some of the participants were asking is your only theory one of keeping us confused??

 As our time together continued, there were many times of push back:  people here learn by being instructed – they are not asked questions, they are told answers?  People want to be delegated clear tasks with clear performance measures.  We’re not all that free, ourselves, to ask questions:  our donors tell us what they want us to do and how to measure it or our funding will be revoked.  In Zimbabwe’s crises, too many of our staff are just here because they need a job – they are not that committed and some are not all that well educated.  What is motivation for participation when the Director is paid eight times as much as others on the staff?

But beneath these questions was a yearning, and a knowing.  Some of our language didn’t make all that much sense, but as we hung in there together, there started to be a listening beneath the words.  I think the participants were beginning to connect what we said was possible with their own sense of yearning.  And the listening wasn’t all one-sided:  I certainly came to understand more and more how thoughtful, careful and strategic people will need to be in implementing more participatory learning processes in organizations.

In many ways part of this is the continuing burden of colonialism where people here were told that their own indigenous knowing and their own ways of building and maintaining community were woefully inadequate.  The white experts from the north would organize things in a proper sort of way.  They brought with them burearcracy for organization and new ways to measure, control and account for progress. The colonialists also brought a view that the resources and bounty of the world were there for the use of the most intelligent and powerful.

These views have been super-imposed on top of indigenous knowing and don’t fit. But formal education in Zimbabwe is based on learning from someone who stands in front of a classroom and tells them day-after-day that the world is mechanical and predictable.  Someone has to be in charge and tell others what to do.  Policies and procedures will guide actions under which people will use the authority delegated to them by the person at the top to achieve pre-determined results.

We worked in this dance between the really old – indigenous knowing, the old – traditional leadership from the colonial and modern era, and the new – participatory leadership to co-discover what would serve Zimbabwe well, now.  Each offer insights into ways of seeing the world and ways of being in the world.  The chart I drew, above, is pretty dichotomous chart and can lead to either/or thinking.  That’s not really useful for many reasons.   What is useful, I believe, is seeing how participatory leadership can be brought in to organizations to open up new insights, new possibilities, and new patterns of accountable action.

Those who came are more than able to work together to create a new Zimbabwe.  They have the fire and the will.  I suspect that many from this past week will take some of our ideas, structures, processes and tools and begin to adapt them for use in their own organizations.  I hope they will continue to find ways to support each other in stepping into this area of practice.  I know they have dedicated their lives to their work.  And I know they have perseverance!

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Design of Four Days:   Day One; Day Two;Day Three; Day Four

Many thanks to Simone Poutnik for the photos and for the design day depictions!

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Filed Under: Art of Hosting, BC, Bob, communities of practice, Participatory Leadership, Resilience, Zimbabwe Tagged With:

Bootcamp is Over

January 1, 2010 By Bob Stilger

Bootcamp is over. Those are the words that came to me last month when I was working  in Phoenix with people from the St. Luke’s Health Initiatives.  My trip to Phoenix came right after I returned from almost a month in southern Africa.  What I heard and saw in Phoenix fit into the same pattern as my experiences in Africa.

My sense is that I, and many others, have been in deep training for this past decade.  We’ve been learning how to see our world, our selves, our relationships and our work in new ways.  The learning didn’t start ten years ago, and it won’t stop now, but I’m feeling like this is the time when we need to move on.

On a phone call yesterday my friend Chris Corrigan used three phrases which really caught my attention.  He said we are not yet a community that practices and we are not yet a system that influences.  He went on to speak about the work that needs doing now is practical decolonization.

  • A community that practices… My friend Robert Theobald used to always talk about how we needed to listen to the music, not the words.  We’ve heard and used many words in the last decade.  And they are powerful:  presencing, hosting, healing, zero-waste, appreciation, feeding ourselves sustainably.  The list goes on and on.  Many of us have learned how to dance with words like power and love, warrior and midwife.  The dance is good.  But it is time now to practice, practice and practice.  It is time to hear the music with our bodies.  It is time to embody these practices.  It is time to practice together as if our lives depend on it.  They probably do.  No, I don’t know exactly what this means.  But I sense it means now is not the time to feel satisfied and complete in what we’ve done and learned so far.  Now is the time to push our edges more than ever before.
  • A system that influences… Together we have a chance to create a new era, a step beyond the era which is disintegrating all around us.  Many of us have been pioneers, engaging in promising experiments with new forms, processes and ventures which carry the DNA of the era we might create.  Much of this work has been powerful, rewarding and exciting.  And, it is not enough.  We must find ways which allow this work to easily and naturally spread.  I’m not talking about going to scale, I am talking about creating systems of influence.  Systems of influence require the creation of eco-systems which are larger than our individual work and which connect that work so it can GROW.  Communities of practice can create systems of infulence, indicators can create systems of influence, scenarios can create systems of influence.  In South Africa I saw a reality TV show create a system of influence.  What else?  How do we help this work grow.
  • Practical decolonization… I love the phrase, simply because it hasn’t yet been overused!  Decolonizing is the process of shrugging off the shackles of domination that have controlled our lives.  We’ve all been colonized.  Certainly the colonization and extermination of indigenous peoples all over the world has been the most obvious and most brutal.  Many of us have been victims and perpetrators of practices of power over which has separated us individually and collectively from our selves, each other and all other life on this planet of ours.  Now is the time for us to step out of our roles as colonized and colonizers — practically, clearly, irrevocably.

We know how to do this!  That’s the good news from our work of the last decade.  No, we don’t have a road map.  Hell, we don’t even really know the destination.  But we do know enough to continue, to deepen, to go to a next level.  But we have to move.  Part of this is, I am sure, learning how to be comfortable working with the Alchemy of Opposites.  All of it, I know is done collectively in community, not individually in isolation.

A lot of my own thinking about this over the last couple of months has been influenced both by Adam Kahane’s new book Power and Love and an essay from Barry Oshrey that grew out of a conversation he and Adam had, also called  Power and Love.  I’m personally a little leery of both these terms — power and love — but they have been an important doorway into my current learning.  Oshrey speaks of the need to develop robust systems which combine power and love and I think he’s got it right.  I think that I’ve spent much of the last ten years working on relationships and harmony and listening.  I think the focus of the next ten needs to be more on getting real work done.

Many blessings as we end the era of the “oughts” (aught 1, aught 2, …) and come into the era of the “tens” (inTENtion)  <grin>

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Filed Under: BC, communities of practice, emergence, Resilience, Robert Theobald, Social Innovation, systems of influence, Zimbabwe Tagged With:

Alchemy of Opposites

December 19, 2009 By Bob Stilger

I thought when I headed off to southern Africa in early November, I would have a spacious time for reflection, learning, and writing here.  That wasn’t the case.  I was engaged in pretty much non-stop work in various systems.  AND, because I went with the intention of reflecting and learning, I carried that spirit into my work.  I hope this will be the first of a number of posts here.

I started experimenting with a new Mac software — View Your Mind — and it was really help in chasing some ideas down.  What I want to write a bit about today is holding the tension of an alchemy of opposites.

I think that many of us are being called to find our balance in this ecosystem of forces which are seemingly in opposition to each other, but which are each needed to find right direction and right action in these times. We must learn to be equally skillful in the role of midwife and warrior. We must be clear about our intentions and also able to surrender them. We must step into our own power from a place of love. It’s critical that we learn to listen more deeply than ever before, and to speak out without blame or judgment. We need to rigorously apply everything that we’ve been learning and do so from a place of spaciousness. We need to learn to travel the spiral of work that is both planned and emergent.

Calling this tricky is, of course,  a huge understatement. It’s so easy to become trapped in either the upper or lower section of this ecosystem. None of us can let that happen any longer. I’m curious about where you find your self standing and working in this alchemy of opposites and look forward to some holiday discussion here.

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Filed Under: BC, emergence, Resilience, Zimbabwe Tagged With:

A New Zimbabwe Emerging

November 15, 2009 By Bob Stilger

I arrived in Zimbabwe several days ago, my first visit this year.  Since before Kufunda Learning Village was a glimmer in the heartmind of its founder, I have been journeying here.  When people ask what I do at and with Kufunda it is often with a typical assumption of people in the global north that I am coming here to teach them something.  I come here to learn.  Of course, this dichotomy between learning and teaching is a false one.  But mostly, I come to listen.  To witness.  To ask questions. To be present to the changes taking place at Kufunda and in Zimbabwe.  I also come to connect Kufunda with others around the world — calling forth connections and relationships which help us all learn.

I first visited Zimbabwe in 2001 and have been witness to many years of things falling apart.  Everything I’ve thought I knew or understood about collapse have been challenged.  Each collapse is unique.  Perhaps the only common thread is that times of collapse are a call for resilience.  In some ways the country “hit bottom” last year.  Some progress has been made since then, but for people who feel like they are at the end of their rope, it is slow and agonizing.

I came here aware of the pain and agony some were feeling.  It wasn’t until I arrived that I also felt how strong the winds of shift are as well.  So it is all present at the same time — agonizing stuckness, emerging creativity, willingness to change.  When you’re stuck, what do you do?  I was thinking this morning about cross country skiing on groomed trails (perhaps an odd thought since the daily temperatures here are in the 90s).  When I’m skiing and see a crash coming, it is almost impossible for me to remember to simply lift my ski out of the track, and to take it from there.  That first step, lifting out of the current track, can be so darn hard.

At Kufunda the need to do so is clear.  The structure and processes which brought Kufunda to where it is today cannot continue.  Among other things, the global economic crisis has shown up here in the form of fewer donor dollars.  But even beyond that, it is clear that changes are needed.  Kufundees have been able to spend a lot of time over the last five years learning how to host processes which help them develop deep relationships with each other.  They have learned how to do permaculture.  They have learned how to build with local materials and how to move towards zero-waste.  They have learned how to use herbs for healing.  They have learned how to share knowledge with surrounding communities and are beginning to learn how to help those communities reach out to others.  Everything from bee-keeping to “arbor-loos” are part of the culture.  There are many pieces in place and part of the work over the last several days has been looking at how to shift those pieces into a more productive overall pattern.

One of the questions I’ve had for years is about how Kufunda reaches out beyond the six communities it has ben working with since 2003.  Even that is more clear.  It does it through partnerships.  For example, one of the friends of Kufunda founded something called “Tree of Life.”  It is a process which works with victims of torture to help them heal.  It is a powerful process led by the former victims themselves.  Once people in villages are more healed, what next?  Perhaps a partnership with Kufunda provides part of that answer — Kufunda can come in and help them remember ways of being a healthy village again.

Enough for now.  Lot’s happening and I’ll be writing more!

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Filed Under: asset-based, BC, emergence, Powers of Place, Resilience, Zimbabwe Tagged With: