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Watching others be great

February 7, 2026 By First Nations, Football No Comments

The weather has been glorious this week on the west coast, warm and sunny with beautiful conditions for walking and bird watching. Since I knew we were travelling this year to Costa Rica, Texas, Europe and eastern Canada this year I decided to see if I could observe or hear 365 species of birds during the year. I’m off to a good start with 151 so far (104 of which we saw in Costa Rica) and the weather has brought about plumage changes in the gulls so it’s getting easier to pick out the Californias from the Glaucous-winged. Yesterday I added the year’s first Black Oystercatcher and Hutton’s vireo (heard but not seen).

This weekend the Men’s Six Nations has started and it is know as rugby’s greatest championship for good reason. France absolutely dismantled Ireland yesterday and I just watched Italy nick a famous victory at home over Scotland in a downpour. England hosts Wales now, and although I would love the Celts to recover some form, I doubt this will be a very close game. Still, rugby delivers fantastic surprises.

Thursday night I finally got to see Tanya Tagaq live at the Chan Centre at UBC, as part of the PuSh Arts Festival. She is one of the most powerful performers I’ve ever seen. She channels and works with power, rage, love, sensuality, joy and the raw, wet, glossy work of life. Her art has always had a @sit down and pay attention” quality to it. I can only listen to albums like “Retribution” maybe once a year, in a dedicated sitting. Her work this week – Split Tooth Saputjiji – contained elements of her “Inuit mythic realism” book Split Tooth and recent to-be-released album Saputjiji. Predictability there were a couple of walk outs but you don’t have to know much about Tagaq’s work to know that the throat singing is not offered as an ethnic curiosity but rather as the vehicle for her to draw the source power from life itself to put hair raising power behind “Fuck War.” She is amazing.

Face to face helps agreements to endure…

February 6, 2026 By Collaboration, Community, Containers, Democracy, Facilitation, Featured No Comments

For those of us who facilitate for a living the question of online vs virtual dogs is constantly. The surge of good online technologies has enabled participation across massive distances at very little financial and environmental cost. A good online facilitator (and they are NOT common) can create a warm and effective dialogic container using virtual tools. Online tools are useful and online spaces are a brilliant option for accessibility. They help in all kinds of ways. Since well before the pandemic I have offered courses and workshops online but I have to admit that I still prefer face to face especially if I know what we are doing requires building a strong and enduring relational field.

Yesterday a prospective client told me for the first time that they no longer do zoom trainings for their staff. It is not a good use of their training budget because staff don’t like it, it’s is not effective and by now most folks have figured out how to be online with as little participation and attention as possible. As a teacher I too find this state of affairs to be pervasive and I expressed my admiration for this policy.

This person is pointing to the biggest problem I have with online: it doesn’t seem to build the enduring relational field that face to face meetings do. For transactional outcomes I suspect online is fine but if you spend all of your time relating to people mediated through technology, I suspect that it has an enduring negative effect on relationality, and therefore long term sustainability of a team’s culture and intangible outcomes.

I’d welcome research on this. Today I came across an article in my feed that reports on a court case from Ontario that ruled on the question of whether online was the appropriate forum for a settlement conference. The judge ruled it was and the article summarizes his findings this way:

Spiegelman does not state that mandatory mediations should presumptively be virtual, nor does it elevate technology over judgment. Justice MacLeod was careful not to replace one rigid default with another. None of this will surprise experienced mediators or counsel. But the decision carefully probes the lingering assumption that physical attendance is inherently superior and reframes face-to-face presence as a question of process design, evidence, and proportionality.

For mediators and counsel this confirms the reality and post-COVID experience that virtual and hybrid processes are no longer provisional. They are part of how mediation in civil justice now operates and they will be evaluated by courts by considerations of function, not nostalgia.

This case provides a clear message. Courts will have little patience for procedural skirmishing over mediation logistics unless a genuine process concern is identified as the issue. What drives settlement is not the room, but the readiness of the participants, the authority at the table, and the quality of the process design.

Spiegelman is a reminder that, in every mediation, form should follow function and disputes about form should not be allowed to derail the goal of resolution.

The article points out that there is little evidence to suggest that there are differences in outcomes between online vs in person settlement conferences. My observation is that this is probably true depending on what you consider the outcome to be. If the outcome is simply “a settlement” then perhaps this is the case. But alternative dispute resolution, practicesd more broadly, can also be about conflict transformation, relationship repair, and enduring accountability.

To that end I looked for some research that discussed this further. To my surprise there was very little. I would have thought over the past five years that justice system researchers might be interested in this question. but perhaps they were simply not asking the RIGHT question. Also, it should be said that I didn’t scour the entire internet for answers!

But I did find this paper from Paul Kyrgis and Brock Flynn at the University of Montana: The Efficacy of Mandatory Mediation in Courts of Limited Jurisdiction: A Case Study from the Missoula Justice Court.

The authors examined a number of landlords-tenant disputes to see if virtual conferences were effective in not just settling a case but creating an enduring settlement. To do that they simply looked at whether cases returned to court.

Finally, remote mediation appears to have mixed results. Remote mediation has undeniable benefits in facilitating participation and program scalability. But those benefits come at a cost. The ultimate settlement rate for remote mediations was a full ten percentage points lower than the aggregate ultimate settlement rate. That lower ultimate settlement rate suggests that remote mediation may not foster the same level of accountability or engagement as in-person sessions.

Their full paper is worth reading for the literature review and their methods. They alos spend a lot of time discussing all the various factors that may or may not contribute to enduring settlements and the cases that make up their sample. And I am definitely extrapolating from their conclusions a bit when I say that something happens face to face that builds relational accountability.

But still, this is one useful way to look at what else happens in face to face meetings vs online because in dispute resolution I surmise that some forms of relationship repair helps to make the settlement enduring.

Those of us responsible for designing and hosting meetings of all know in our bones that something different happens when we are all in the room together. We know that relationships come into play much differently. we know that strong fields are built and these are essential for building enduring results.

Six years after our pandemic started do we finally have data to be able to look at this question? If you know of good research in this field drop it in the comments.

Footballers hit their next level

February 5, 2026 By Football No Comments

Kian Proctor scoring his last goal for TSS Rovers in a 7-1 rout over Burnaby FC last season. Last night he turned pro in a debut for the ages. Photo by Residual image for AFTN

The North American soccer season is slowly awakening from its winter slumber. This week the CONCACAF Champions Cup competition got underway with several Canadian teams in the mix for the continental championship. Last season the Vancouver Whitecaps made it to the final only to be pummelled by Mexican giants Cruz Azul 5-0 in Mexico, who won their seventh title. Last night, Vancouver FC debuted in the competition. They are the Canadian Premier League team who finished last in the league last year but qualified through the fact that they made it to the Canadian Championship Final against the sam Whitecaps. And the team they faced was Cruz Azul.

It was an underdog story of the highest order and there was almost no chance of VFC scoring goals, let alone winning this first leg, even at home, in front of a pretty full house, on a mild mid winter west coast night. Indeed Cruz Azul won 3-0, but the game held some special significance for our TSS Rovers FC owners and supporters, because two of our former players dressed for VFC.

Marcello Polisi marked his return to Canada with his first start for VFC. He played for our Rovers teams pre-pandemic from 2017-2019 appearing in 32 games as a stalwart defensive midfielder. He then moved to the Canadian Premier League first for Halifax Wanderers and then the late departed Valour of Winnipeg. After two years there, he moved to Detroit City FC in the USL where he played alongside a number of other Canadians in Danny Dichio’s side. This winter he signed for VFC, coming home to play and last night he started and he looked terrific. He will be a key piece of the VFC midfield going forward this year as they try to finally put together a decent season after three season of being the worst team in the league.

The other notable appearance last night was Kian Proctor, who subbed in at 64′ for VFC and made his professional debut last night. Kian is a tall, strong full back, who also plays as a forward and is a set piece threat. Kian played 40 games for us from 2023-2025 and is still only 20 years old. Because the CPL has under 21 roster rules, I reckon Kian has locked his spot. To appear for the first time against Cruz Azul is magnificent and he looked absolutely the part. Sometimes you see a footballer who rises to every challenge they face and you really don;t know what they are capable of. Marcello and Kian both represent those kinds of players and last night we witnessed the beginning of a next level for a talent who is still learning his game. This domestic season – which doesn’t start for another three months! – will be one to watch for Kian.

The moment we walked away from the climate crisis

February 4, 2026 By Uncategorized No Comments

When Mark Carney killed the carbon tax, Canada gave up its last shred of honesty about addressing the climate crisis. Oil companies got their way. We have built them pipelines, we have passed legislation to ease restrictions on their infrastructure projects and we are now pandering to an astro-turfed movement Alberta that is funded by the oil and gas sector and which, if it ever became a more serious threat than simply a partisan shill show, would threaten the unity of the country.

We are a climate change pariah, a position that we have never been very far away from. But it is clear now that the Canadian policy sphere is far more interested in crating the conditions for profiting from climate change than it is from doing our part to address it. We are working to enable a bunch of people who are shorting life on earth.

Catherine McKenna, the former federal environment minister, was quite candid about why the carbon tax didn’t stand a chance once the oil and gas lobbies, aided by a movement of “conservatives” who were doing their bidding, got their tendrils into the policy shop. She has published a new memoir and excerpted part of it on a Substack post which makes for fascinating reading.

In the end, Canada lost a climate policy that worked to reduce emissions in the most cost effective way, ensured that most families were better off (especially middle- and low-income ones), while creating an incentive for people to save even more money by choosing more energy efficient options, and which provided an opportunity for businesses to innovate and develop clean solutions. Losing a policy which leads to one of the most significant reductions in Canada’s emissions makes hitting the country’s climate target even harder.

Justin Trudeau can take the blame for a lot of this. Carney too. We will never hit the targets we need to. The Conservatives, who backed off their own preferred policy choice and convinced the Canadian electorate that a program that fairly priced carbon AND put money in the pockets of most Canadians was the height of evil.

Now you have Pierre Poilievre touting a further reduction in industrial carbon pricing to somehow make groceries more affordable for average people. He’s wrong about that, but Conservatives these days will cite any rationale, no matter how flimsy as long as taxes on the wealthy can be reduced.

The net result of all of this bad policy and a decade of stupid politics is a world in which there will be no more climate change solutions addressed by Canadian lawmakers until such a time as the market prices renewables so low that braying for markets for bitumen will look as archaic as whale oil. And our country will not be part of that conversation, because we will be relying on Chinese and European technology and resources to do it while still trying to jam sticky oil into tubes and send it to the coast to markets that don’t want it at a price that doesn’t make mining it profitable.

Theory for Practice 2: Holding space

February 2, 2026 By Art of Hosting, Complexity, Containers, Facilitation, Featured, Power, World Cafe 2 Comments

In this first instalment of this series I moved the focus of facilitation practice from tools to context. In this instalment I want to explore what it means to “hold space” and why this is only part of the work in the dialogic container.

Dialogic facilitation is concerned with meaning making events in a discrete space and time. This space and time is both physical and social, and it is what I call a “dialogic container.” These are places in which people come together to engage in meaning making and action. The dialogic container is context for the work that happens and the container gives rise to meaning between participants in the dialogue. Within the container, participants engage and interact and make meaning together. The dialogic container is the scale at which participants can take immediate action. It is intimate and vibrant. Meetings and gatherings host agency, and for this reason I think we often think of them as important for making larger changes.

Many people have talked about the role of the facilitator as “holding space” and I even wrote a book on that practice. “Holding space” is a vague term that has many definitions. It doesn’t even really convey the practice well. Nothing is actually “held” and “space” can mean a bunch of different things. The term describes a practice that is ineffable and intangible and yet important to good dialogue.

Despite its importance, I don’t want to talk about “holding space” as a practice. You can go and read my “Tao of Holding Space” for more reflections on the practice. Instead I want to point to the space that is being held: the dialogic container.

This is the first and closest level of context inside of which dialogue happens. In large group meetings, other containers form in small groups. In the large group facilitation work I do, it isn’t possible for one person to hold the variety of spaces that appear and emerge in complex dialogue facilitation. Instead the role of the facilitator is to shape the constraints of that space to enable maximum agency and self-organization of the participants and to encourage the emergence of desired insights, outcomes and actions.

Good facilitators make choices about how constraints are used to shape interactions between people. Once these constraints are put in place the role of the facilitator is to be, in Harrison Owen’s words, “totally present and completely invisible” until such a time as the group process needs to change. Facilitators have a great deal of power in these contexts. We can cut off a conversation, make a subtle adjustment in a space to separate people or encourage or prevent different things from happening. Conscious facilitation requires us to be hyper aware of our impact in dialogic spaces and to be clear and honest with our influence on the proceedings.

Take a moment to reflect on the meetings and conversations you are a part of. Think about how the setting influences what happens, how the physical space constrains or invites different possibilities. Think about how choices that are made in that meeting influence the conversations that are being had and what happens.

On reflection it should be very clear that this context is extremely influential in the process of dialogue. No two conversations are ever alike. No two conversations will render the same outcomes. No two people will experience the conversation in the same way.

In World Cafe conversations we see this happen all the time. Because that process is structured around small groups which change every 20-30 minutes, participants quickly get the sense that just changing two or three people in a conversation or taking up another spot in the room can significantly change the nature and quality of the conversation. That can be frustrating if a conversation is going really well, because a “sticky container” can form, one which is difficult to break. In other cases, having the conversation end can be a relief as people look to get out of an unpleasant discussion or an uncomfortable dynamic.

Dialogic containers form around constraints, including attractors that draw people’s attention together. A powerful and necessary question is an attractor. A shared purpose can be a strong attractor. Attractors bring coherence. In a conversation about the future of a social services agency, it doesn’t make sense to talk about manufacturing cars because the topic is incoherent in the context of the conversation.

Power is another form of attractor. When powerful people are in the room it changes the nature of the conversation. We say of circle for example, that the shape does not equalize power relationships. It simply gives people equal access to the centre of the room, and figuratively it symbolizes that participants are offered equal access to the dialogue topic. But power still exists, and it is endlessly fascinating in a highly democratic process to watch a group organize itself around the twin attractors of shared purpose and powerful people.

At some point in a dialogue session the facilitator is the most powerful person in the room. To the extent that there is trust between the group and the facilitator, participants will consent to the proposed process of dialogue. In situations of extremely low trust, it is possible that a meeting will simply fail to get off the ground. Sometimes the facilitator becomes the common enemy, and the group rebels against any shaping of its time together.

But in situations of high trust, a group may consent to a process because they are clear that it helps them to address as persistent need amongst them. As a facilitator I spend massive amounts of time with my clients in design and co-creation of processes – especially novel processes – so that we don’t show up on the day and need to overcome suspicion and anxiety before getting started. If I am to occupy to most important space in the room, even for a short time, I must be able to have trust to be there.

In this respect there are no neutral facilitators. The role is far from neutral; rather it is influential. One may be agnostic or even ignorant about the content of the gathering (and I’ve run meetings in languages I don’t speak, like Irish, Turkish, Estonian, French, and multilingual meetings too, which shows that connection to content is not essential) but you are not neutral in terms of influencing the group’s process. The choices that the facilitator makes, especially in a container in which one has a lot of trust, will shape the process significantly and influence the nature of relationships between people going forward.

So the dialogic container is important, because in any process, it is the space of immediate encounter and immediate agency. People will make meaning and act together. They will bring story and expectations and history into the room with them and they will form relationships (or break them) which will influence outcomes as much or moreso than the decisions made in the meeting.

While meetings are important, my experience is that the most significant results of most meetings is the relational field that is built by being together. Many clients expect high stakes meetings to produce miracles – fundamental transformations in insight or decision making that changes everything. In my experience, a single meeting is inadequate for this. However, dialogic containers can be powerful places where people learn new things, change views, form new relationships, or discover new insights. That is their promise.

Still, it is common to hear from participants in a container “this is all good, but how will it be when we return to the ‘real world’.” This is a valid question and it has to do with the next post in this series, on the contexts in which dialogic work is embedded. Dialogic containers are necessary for meaningful action, but rarely sufficient for sustained change. They are embedded in larger contexts that shape what happens once the meeting ends.

For now though the point of this post is to establish the importance of container and context in which dialogic works happens. The nature of the container, in all of its complexity, plays a significant role in the tangible and intangible outcomes of dialogue work. Once we see that, we can begin to see that the work of dialogue facilitation is both about “what happens in the room” as well as what happens in the context in which that room is situated.