Driving on PEI
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 03/07/09 at 03:07:26 pmPrince Edward Islanders like to caution vistors to drive safely and not to speed. I understand this, coming as I do from a slow island. However, the motive here seems to be different: after driving around eastern PEI today I have concluded that Islanders like vistors to keep a steady speed so they can pass you 15 km/h over the limit!
Glad to know that. Happy to do my part!
On the road in Atlantic Canada
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 01/07/09 at 06:07:41 am…and searching for summer.
After ALIA ended the family and I went down to The Shire, near Yarmouth for three days of hanging out with good friends from the Art of Hosting community, the Berkana Institute and the Split Rock Learning Centre. Our program consisted entirely to mastering the idea of pacing. We paced ourselves so well, that time itself slipped away. Matt cooked brilliant food, and there was music everywhere.
Following that, one night at Windhorse Farm near Bridgewater Nova Scotia and then on to Charlottetown last night. We are now firmly ensconced in Rob Paterson’s barn, lolling around and enjoying a late morning, before we head into town to catch the Canada Day festivities.
We’re hoping for some decent beach weather while we’re here, but is has been cold and raining for a month. That ought not to discourage us though.
Day zero at ALIA
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 22/06/09 at 09:06:54 amDay zero here at the Shambhala Summer Institute here in Halifax. The staff of the ALIA Institute have been working hard to get everything ready for us, and today people started to arrive. Over the past could of days the faculty have been meeting in a little pre-institute retreat, building our own field and grabbing the chance to have conversations with one another. We’ve been getting a little taste of each other’s modules, playing with some of the creative process that is going on and generally catching up with each and getting a sense of our field.
Today we held a little open space and one of the things we were invited to do was give some thought to what is alive in the field of the Institute this summer. Sensing like this helps us to be able to pay attention to the collective experience and gives voice to what is showing up, and what we can serve. At the conclusion of the Open Space, we checked out and I harvested a little poem that captures something of the flavour or what we’re in. Part of the set up for this poem is knowing that today the weather has been wild with high winds and driving drizzle, and even though the air is warm, there is a sense that the winter/spring part of the year is keen to leave its legacy on the summer/fall part.
Here’s the poem:
What’s alive in this field
We’re going to be at home.
The depth of passion that we own
expands out to connect
the alternatives that sing, circumspect,
from the hill tops,
that reach the ears of the young
who stand in the storm, sung
songs of drenched longing,
wanting to tap creative energy
to quiver with the joy that
lives in the edge of death and life
the light that redraws the breath of summer.
The directions are called,
the integration invites a falling into place
a space of compassionate embrace
of all we are related to.
My daughter – an image held in the hand,
at arms length, on a touch -
there is much that is held here,
much that isn’t here.
What is clear is not-knowing -
uncertainty growing like the clouds
of drizzle that shower our container
Can you feel the wind?
Can you feel the breath?
Settle down. Then step.
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 21/06/09 at 04:06:03 pm
Day zero here at the Shambhala Summer Institute here in Halifax. The staff of the ALIA Institute have been working hard to get everything ready for us, and today people started to arrive. Over the past could of days the faculty have been meeting in a little pre-institute retreat, building our own field and grabbing the chance to have conversations with one another. We’ve been getting a little taste of each other’s modules, playing with some of the creative process that is going on and generally catching up with each and getting a sense of our field.
Today we held a little open space and one of the things we were invited to do was give some thought to what is alive in the field of the Institute this summer. Sensing like this helps us to be able to pay attention to the collective experience and gives voice to what is showing up, and what we can serve. At the conclusion of the Open Space, we checked out and I harvested a little poem that captures something of the flavour or what we’re in. Part of the set up for this poem is knowing that today the weather has been wild with high winds and driving drizzle, and even though the air is warm, there is a sense that the winter/spring part of the year is keen to leave its legacy on the summer/fall part.
Here’s the poem:
What’s alive in this field
We’re going to be at home.The depth of passion that we own
expands out to connect
the alternatives that sing, circumspect,
from the hill tops,
that reach the ears of the young
who stand in the storm, sung
songs of drenched longing,
wanting to tap creative energy
to quiver with the joy that
lives in the edge of death and life
the light that redraws the breath of summer.The directions are called,
the integration invites a falling into place
a space of compassionate embrace
of all we are related to.My daughter – an image held in the hand,
at arms length, on a touch -
there is much that is held here,
much that isn’t here.What is clear is not-knowing -
uncertainty growing like the clouds
of drizzle that shower our containerCan you feel the wind?
Can you feel the breath?Settle down. Then step.
From the feed
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 19/06/09 at 06:06:59 amMorsels for chewing upon from the RSS pantry and the tap of tweet:
- Viv McWaters goes open source with her facilitation methods.
- Tweeting the revolution
The price of pomposity
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 15/06/09 at 12:06:30 pmThank you Euan.
Now, there is a time and a place for judgemental skepticism and cynicism (I suppose) but somehow there is a widespread sentiment that associates these two stances with expertise and prudence. Now I don’t want you to think that I am all about squashing opposition or creative tension, but I have to say that when I am working with groups of people to create processes that will help take people out of their comfort zones, there is a particular cynicism that does not help. Euan Semple calls this “pomposity” and that certainly seems to capture the holier than thou effect that this kind of stifling aloofness has on groups of people. And Euan names the price that it takes:
- Every time someone is faced with a pompous response to a suggestion or idea they take one step back and become much less likely to ever offer their heartfelt thoughts again. Imagine the impact this has on the creativity and innovation that organisations depend on.
- Many, many meetings could be done in less than half the time if there wasn’t a need to feed the ego of the chairperson or more vocal participants. How many times have things gone on way too long because someone likes the sound of his own voice?
- How many millions and millions of pounds have been spent because someone was too pumped up and full of themselves to admit that perhaps the major project they are sponsoring should be aborted?
- How many fledgling social media projects get squashed by IT departments because “professionals” have had their nose put out of joint at “amateurs” thinking they know better?
- How many bright, committed and intelligent potential senior managers have failed to step up to the mark because they couldn’t face the antler clashing and ego massaging that goes on in the boardroom?
I have recently had the experience of people saying to me that the work I do would never work with such-and-such a group of people. My response to them is nothing will work with people if you don’t believe them capable of doing something different or trying something new. I have been responding to these kinds of limiting beliefs with two questions:
- How do you show up with a group of people when you believe they are not capable of something?
- How do YOU show up when something thinks YOU are incapaable of something?
That tends to take care of the holier than thou attitudes. A little empathy, a little creative tension, a little mutual compassion for the other helps makes designs for new and difficult things easier. These questions force us to really consider whether we are more capable than someone else. It forces a conscious awareness of the choice you are making when you adopt the pompous stance.
I choose to believe that people are capable of engaging in all kinds of things, from sitting in circles (the scariest thing in the world, if you would believe some) to radically letting go of huge projects they were working on because they weren’t going anywhere.
Lately I have been making an explcit request of clients that we create design teams for events and processes that DON’T include cynics. That is not to say that we don’t need people bringing concerns and challenging questions to the work, it’s just that when you have someone in a design team that does not believe in the possibility of what you are trying to create, so much energy gets taken up catering to the unhelpful pomposity of the rightous skeptic that the design suffers and in the worst case scenario, the result is a design that just serves the status quo. I have, in the last couple of years actually “fired” a client who wanted me to help create the illusion of a participatory event but who could not allow himself to actually let a participatory event unfold. He was completely unwilling to let go of control and unwilling to trust people. He even described the people he was working with, government employees in First Nations communities, as “children that need to be shown the answer.” There is a huge cost to this kind of stance in time, trust and the ability for groups to actually hold the real fears and concerns that they have. What do you think is possible when you work with someone who considers an important policy gathering to be like a daycare?
So start with possibility and create the space for inquiry, curiosity and yes even judgement to arise. But if you start with these things, you will not be able to create creative spaces of possibility because you will get mired down in the energetics of unhelpful politics, posing and pomposity. Staying in possibility is hard, but it is the only way we get to new places. More of the same is too deceptively simple.
41
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 13/06/09 at 10:06:08 amThe sun is shining here on Bowen Island and I am relaxing on the porch enjoying my 41st birthday. Hope all is well where you are
Home again
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 11/06/09 at 09:06:13 amBack on my home island from a short trip down to the Warm Springs reservation in central Oregon visting with the staff of radio station KWSO and the community members that rely on the station. This was the second site vist for a project I am doing with Native Public Media and Public Radio Capital looking at how to measure the impact of Native community radio stations in the US.
Really struck with the role the station plays in the community. Most radio stations, at least mainstream commercial and public radio concern themselves a lot with reach - are we getting enough listeners. With Native community radio that isn’t the problem at all - in Warm Springs it seems like they reach 100% of the people quickly either directly or through word of mouth. When there is an emergency or a school closure, everyone knows about it right away. The luxurious problem these stations have is how to use that influence to actually help the community maintain wellness and health.
In Warm Springs, the KWSO do this by focusing on health, education and culture. They produce PSAs and short documentary or news programs that focus on important issues like diabetes prevention or language retention or repeating stories that help ground ceremony and history. One of the key impacts the station is having is in the area of education. The bording school experience in the States, like the residential school experience in Canada, left many Native families with intergenerational trauma and a deep distrust of institutional learning. (I share that mistrust in general, and we homeschool our own kids, but for families where that isn’t possible a decent educational experience is important). In Warm Springs, the radio station and the school work together to create a climate of positivity around learning. This has paid off in a couple of ways. First there is a culture of positivity at the school that carries over into behaviours. There have been a total of four suspensions in five years at the school. Kids get along really well there, and the radio station continues to support this positive climate by focusing on learning, by playing good music during the school bus rides that helps the kids stay relaxed on the trip into town and by encouraging parents and kids to be active in the life of the school. There are very few formal parent-teacher interviews, but all of the teachers reported that they have a hard time getting the parents OUT of the school, so involved is the community.
On the diabetes front we learned that the Warm Springs community has a diabetes rate five points lower than that national Native average in the US. There is extensive public health information broadcast all day on KWSO from announcements about classes and workshops to recipes and nutriotion tips. I have a sneaking suspicion that if we look across the country, the reservations with community radio stations will have a lower diabetes average than others.
It’s a fun project, and now with two site visits under our belts, it’s time to write up the findings and see what loacl media really means.
From the feed
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 05/06/09 at 09:06:22 amHarvesting things from the RSS fields:
- Rob Paterson begins a series on The Natural Organization which uses a model of systemic change that is very similar to the one we are using with the Berkana Institute in Art of Hosting learning events.
- Geoff Brown’s new blog design looks great, and his link to Kaki King is a bonus.
- Euan Semple finds a film that describes what it’s like sometimes to be a consultant.
- Time on how twitter can be used in conference settings.
Hosting the harvest
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 02/06/09 at 11:06:54 am 
Really interesting gig this week. Steven Wright and I are working together here in Vancouver at an international conference on restorative practices, the kinds of things that people do to bring relationship and community to the justice, education and community systems that more often than not drive us apart. There are some real heros here and leaders in the field including Howard Zehr, one of the founders of the restorative justice movement, and many leading practitioners from around the world.
The conference itself is a pretty standard set up with plenary discussions dotting a schedule of concurrent sessions. Steven and I are putting into practice an idea that a number of us have been playing with for a could of years, namely hosting a reflective conversation space in which the conference participants can help create the harvest and meaning making about the whole event.
We have a little conversation space set up in the foyer of the hotel, with table tops covered with flipchart paper on which we are writing questions for reflection. All of the insight is being harvested every day on two large murals that Steven is creating, based on a three panel image of a river emerging from the headwaters, travelling through fertile lands and emptying into the ocean. This metaphor is charting the learning journey of the 280 people here. Yesterday we were interested in the questions that were coming up, the droplets of water and insight that lie in the multiple headwaters of our mainstream of restorative practices. Our question for our space was “What are the questions you are hearing today?” From that question we harvest three main tributaries that flow into our mainstream: people are curious about conceptual questions (What are the values and deep practices of restorative community?), contextual questions (How do we do this in education/community/social services?) and individual practice questions (Where do I start? What are the essential capacities?). At the end of each day, Steven, Howard and I have been reporting what we have been hearing and seeing back to the whole.
Today our river is moving into the rich plains and fields of established practice and we are asking the question “What patterns give life to restorative practice?” Already people are engaged in questions of process, listening, showing up, facilitating and working that are suggesting a pattern language of restorative practice. That is our goal for today - to surface that learning for the community. Tomorrow we are looking at the ocean of possibility and the new ground that is created as we extend these practices into new places.
This is not a standard conference facilitation job for sure. Rather we are inviting people into a deeper reflective space, harvesting collective meaning and learning and giving a context for a shared learning journey. Lots to come.