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Inviting diversity

June 17, 2026 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Design, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured, Invitation, Learning No Comments

I don’t shy away from the fact that diversity is essential to creating processes that are inclusive and give us as much situational awareness and access to distributed intelligence as possible. The current attacks on diversity from ideological perspectives are direct attacks on making groups of people smarter. If you narrow the opportunity and the resources to look at and understand situations you limit the scope of possible action, and you make yourself a lot less intelligent and responsive that the context or your competition.

If your organization used a DEI policy as the only addressed the need for diversity of lived experience in your work, you were probably not doing it right. Performative diversity doesn’t help. Mandating a certain amount of diversity is still a technical solution to a complex problem. The problem is “how do we best understand the current context in which we are operating in order to find the best ways to act.” If the context is a complex one, increasing the degrees of diversity in the process gives one more access to the distributed intelligence of the field in which you are operating.

One of the places that this shows up in participatory work is in the way we invite people to the work. How do you find people you don’t know and generate enough comfort, trust and ease that they can show up and contribute?

Trust is an emergent property of relationships so one trick here is to work with the constraints of connection and exchange. The challenge is how to find people that have proximity to the issue at hand and that are unknown to those who find themselves in the centre of the problem. And it is compounded by a need to overcome trust issues stemming from factors such as status, knowledge, power, power and resources.

We once addressed this problem using this constraints strategy when working with a local foundation who was conducting some community engagement sessions for a new program design. The issue for them had always been the “usual suspects” problem: the same people kept showing up in the same way. Part of the problems was structural: meetings were held during the day and there was no child care for example. Part of the problem was the power and status gradient between the foundation – who was a powerful presence in the community – and the community itself. Many of the people who would show up to engagement sessions were those hoping to secure grants or those who were already funded but the foundation. This would skew participation in unhelpful ways as people tried to balance competing agendas around their own participation.

Yet the tension was real. We needed familiars to extend the reach of invitation to those who had knowledge to contribute to the problem and who would have enough trust to share it.

We began by making a list of invitees and we contacted them to ask them to personally invite one person in their network who was different from them and had never been to a foundation event. We didn’t specific how they had to be different, but we did ask that the invited person be new to foundation events. This simple action extended the invitation beyond the group that was known to the foundation staff and used existing networks of trust and relationship to cultivate difference and diversity. The resulting gathering was positively received and the program staff and participants said the quality of learning was noticeably different. Many of the new people who came felt pleased to be directly invited and so the level of engagement and participation at the meeting was higher than usual as well.

This idea and this approach was enabled by our understanding of how constraints work in shaping complex environments. Working with constraints to shape interactions between people is the work of the host in complex environments. We don’t know what the outcome will be, but when we want to change things, we settle on a direction towards “better” and work with the constraints available to us to see what will happen. In this case simply removing barriers – by providing food and child care for example – was not enough on its own to increase diversity. We needed to work with the exchanges between people to piggy back on existing trust networks to see if we could generate more trust and a different profile of participants.

It worked. What emerged at the event was a broader perspective on the issues at hand and ideas for crafting the new program. It alos brought new people to the work of the foundation, some of whom carried on to be involved with the new program.

Increasing diversity didn’t require a policy or a program. It was rooted in the real need in a complex context, which will always require diversity to scan, plan and design with the community in a context-appropriate way.

Dawn chorus, Opus 25

June 13, 2026 By Being, Bowen, Featured 5 Comments

A baby barred owl seen last Wednesday by Terminal Creek, near our home. These owls breed every year in the same place and the babies sit in the trees and wheeze at passers-by until their hoot-makers come in.

Today I turn 58 and In a couple of weeks I will have lived on this island for 25 years. Being here for that length of time – a duration that has long exceeded anywhere else I’ve lived – tunes one to the finer rhythms and changes of time and place. Today, the thing I’m noticing is the change in the dawn chorus year to year. The sound of the dawn chorus which begins in April really and shifts through a few movements in May and June before abruptly stopping in the summer, is like a developing symphonic piece. There are distinct movements to it that are consistent enough year after year that one can discern the mark of the composer on them. These include the constant buzzes and questioning whines of the towhees, the two note calls of the chickadees: the black-capped clear and bell-like; the chestnut-backed buzzy and wheezy. There is always a distant goose call from the bay, about 600 meters away below us to the south. Juncos chip in the garden. Flickers hammer on roofs and power poles. Crows harass whatever predator is threatening them or call to each other from the beaches down below us. From high above it all, ravens offer their occasional grumbled commentary on the state of things. Creepers and kinglets sing the hyper-soprano parts.

As the spring progresses though, the yellow-rumped warblers (affectionately named “butter-butts” by birders in these parts) and the robins take pride of place in the chorus. These will be later joined by the orange-crowned warblers. As we get into June, the black-headed grosbeaks start singing with their clear, loud phrases. White-crowned sparrows begin calling and a visiting western tanager will offer both flashes of colour and lovely ringing song. Flycatchers round out the chorus, with the western offering a whoop-dunk, the Pacific a wolf-whistle and the willow a sneeze.

But it’s also the variations that grab my attention. In 2020 we had nuthatches meeping away everywhere and then they disappeared from the chorus the next year. Pine siskins, who will migrate hundreds of kilometres east or west in search of eruptions of insect populations will almost overwhelm the chorus some years, while in others, like this year, they will be completely absent. This year western warbling vireos are everywhere and seem to be the most common mid-range voice in the choir. And little packs of bushtits move through the understory like gangs, something we don’t get every year.

This is the body of work that the land here produces. When I travel at this time of year, I notice ways in which the niches of voice are filled by other birds, but after living in a place for a quarter century one can discern the subtle movements and compositional techniques that the island, in this place, and at this time of day employs in its expression of the season. This little patch on which I have sat for 9,000 mornings has its own body of work, and every day, every season, and every year offers variations on the theme.

Where do we go when the world has moved on?

June 11, 2026 By Being, Democracy One Comment

The iron fence around the head office of the Canada Life Insurance Company in Toronto. I painted this fence twice during my summer jobs in 1987 and 1988. It was the required shit job of the summer students who came to work on the building maintenance crew, assigned to us by an authoritarian jerk of a boss who made sure the painting happened during the hottest and most humid week of the summer. This was also the company that cruelly fired downsized my father four years later, which I mention below.

Cory Doctorow has a long piece today that centres on the theme of “the world moves on.” it is a survey of how the 21st century has gone, the concentration of wealth, the degradation of products, law, governance, environments and organizations. The rise of a fascist view of the world that divides us into those “born to rule” and those “born to be ruled.” It is a push to acknowledge that the real feelings we are all having that something is fundamentally broken is not just a nostalgic throwback. The idea of “Making * Great Again” is not that we go back to a time when it was great. It is that we go forward to a time which the persona that declares that intention is in charge of everything. And others are not.

I had a lovely call yesterday with a younger colleague, a person whose dreams and aspirations and talent propelled her into a relationship with power that helped to meet her desire to have an impact in the world. But she found herself trying to wrestle with the cost of that. What does it mean to get close to power, to have a hand in the policy that changes lives, to be involved in a tangible way to make the world better for many people? There is a cost to it, and I can relate. One feels as if one is selling a soul for the chance to grab some influence.

It strikes me as an interesting bifurcation. When I worked for the federal government in the 1990s I was part of a team of people that ran a very important third party stakeholder process which brought non-Indigenous voices and interests into the treaty process. I didn’t;t always like or agree with the people that I was working with, but as a representative of the Government of Canada I took my job seriously. We were doing the work of treaty making and not including the voices and intelligence of people who would be affected by those treaties was to do a disservice to the First Nations with whom we were crafting a sustained and historical relationship.

My colleagues all had different interests in our work. Some were generally distrustful of government to be able to represent citizen interests and they were motivated to ensure that third parties, especially business interests, were as involved as possible. Others were motivated by the history we were making and desired to be a part of something that was sustainable over time. Still others were deeply motivated to ensure that First Nations found themselves in a just and reconciling process and that the honour of the Crown was of the utmost importance. And some were just good public servants which meant they did what they were directed to do and did it well.

I left that job when someone senior to me told me that “I cared too much” about the work. I wore my passion on my sleeve which led to a disagreement with a new boss who didn’t have the lofty goals of my former boss and whose inattention to relationships and the historical nature of the work was lost behind her need to establish technocratic credentials. I hung out my shingle and went to work for Indigenouos organizations, non-profits and governments that were committed to the work of building communities and caring for people.

Several of my friends went the other way, into industry or saw out their careers in the public service. We had been held together in the common project of treaty-making, even though we had many different motivations and purposes for being there. I don’t know that anyone ever felt like they were selling their soul to do the work they did after they left. But they made choices to find them places they cared about and aligned them selves with that. There is always a tradeoff.

In speaking to my colleague yesterday we both shared a sense that over time our sense of impact had shrunk, perhaps to a more realistic size. We all have huge desires to make a legacy in the world, and it takes true encounters with power to find out if we have what it takes to do that. I am in awe with my friend who have successfully run for public office and formed important pieces of federal and provincial governments, or those who has started non-profits or advocacy organizations that have pushed the needle on public policy. I have done a little of that in my own way, but the older I get, the more I appreciate the local work I get to do, by which I mean what happens in the encounter with people who are confronting real particular problems, often with no solutions. I love sitting with 80 year olds in church halls talking about the future of their congregations and accompanying them in the transition. I love sitting with leaders who are exploring how to expand their ability to work with multiple voices and multiple perspectives. I love to watch our Bowen Island business community wrestle with what a local economy might look like in THIS decade. Or a social services agency who has the talent and connections to deliver good quality services in new ways becasue the context seems to drive them to impossible situations.

Cory’s piece names a dynamic that he associates with “conservatism” and its worth quoting in detail:

I collect definitions of “conservatism,” and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin’s book, The Reactionary Mind. Robins asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies – various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc – “conservative”? What binds all these views together?

Robin’s answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.

That’s why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That’s why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO.

If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that “diversity hires,” promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that’s just proof that shit happens – it definitely doesn’t prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power.

For conservatives, virtue is “whatever the people who are born to rule desire.” Hence Frank Wilhoit’s definition of conservativism, “exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” It’s not a crime if the president does it. It’s also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It’s not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein Class do it. “Taxes are for the little people”:

Now I don’t think that’s necessarily “conservative” although it certainly captures a big wing of the current American conservative movement. I think it’s a description of fascism. But it nevertheless points to a feature of our current times that derives from the concentration of wealth a power: we are increasingly isolated from he levers of real power such that stuff we CAN is not stuff that can FIX whatever is happening.

Doctorow concludes with a kind of muted optimism that the way to be in this world is to be political. Join a union, join a political party, get political. Put your hands on the levers of power while we still have them:

Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that’s not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can’t save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it’s so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must.

I like his spirit. But I don’t know. I don;t know what to tell younger colleagues and I don’t know what to tell activists. Politics has become thoroughly enshittified. I have great respect for the people that run for office and chose to govern, especially in the local sphere, but the way politics is related to governance is constrained to serve the interests of the market, the “economy” and those that wield power in those places. That doesn’t mean I don;t think we should devote ourselves to one another and the things we believe in. And I do think we need more unions. The law is still somewhat intact which is why First Nations in Canada are coming in for so much attack. The powers that be know that Constitutionally protected rights throw a wrench in the works of global capital interests who wish to be as unfettered as possible to extract, ship and profit from resources that are located in territories in which First Nations exert a legal form of title. The law still matters a bit, at least in Canada. If I was a young person want ting make social change, I might go into law. I found myself donating to organizations like Egale that fight for the protection of human rights.

My father’s world was different to mine. I started my first real job the same week he was downsized from his, from a company where he had spent 26 years, where he had reached to ceiling of promotion and where he was happy to live out his life as a junior executive. He was escorted from the building at 6pm on a Friday night, because he had been working late. His sole piece of advice to me was “don’t give your loyalty away.” That served me well. Perhaps my advice to folks now is “don’t surrender your love, purpose or integrity.” But I done;t know ho you also make money doing that.

I think the world is different than it has been. Maybe you feel the same way. All I was able to offer my friend yesterday was a connection to someone I felt she might resonate with, and a willingness to just stay in the inquiry because she was so genuinely committed to doing good work in a full-hearted way, with incisiveness and discernment.

What kinds of things are you doing to find your way in it? What do YOU tell younger colleagues who want to do the work you do?

Getting to know my BOOX

June 10, 2026 By Being One Comment

For a long time I’ve been trying to practice a kind of harm reduction to my addiction to digital devices. I love reading, books most of all, but when I’m travelling or when I just HAVE to get a hold of something that would otherwise take a while to arrive in physical form, ereaders are the way to go.

The problems are of course increasingly down to both eshittification and the dopamine hits that come from how our digital devices lock our attention. Enshittification means that our devices are tied to a seller – be it Kobo, Kindle, Apple Books or whatever – and DRM locks means we cannot transfer material to a better reading device. Getting myself off Amazon has been a challenge because the kindle really is a great device. (Ton’s posts inspired me) And my subscription to things like BookBub means I have a bunch of books on my kindle that I want to read and for which I paid a couple of dollars. I don’t want to lose those. Kobo seems like the easy answer, but again, won’t let me read kindle ebooks.

The obvious answer is to read on my phone or buy a tablet that can download apps. But that’s another problem. As I’m trying to manage my sleep better, blue light screens at night are not a good idea. Over many months I can see on my Apple Health app how blue light has affected my sleep if I use my phone within a half hour of bed. Reading on the phone is no good. And an iPad is just one more computer that I don;t need, with less utility than my MacBook, with all the toxic attractor basins of a connected device and with a poor reading experience.

And so ChatGPT and I launched into a small research project to find a device that reads like a kindle, allow me to install apps and read from them and tightly constraints its access to the web. After reading some Reddit threads and fitting some ideas to my constraint regime, I decided to order a BOOX Go 7. This is an android device – the first I have ever owned – and it allows me to load my kindle library, my Kobo library and the Libby app (which I use for library books and magazines like the New Yorker, Harper’s, Poetry and The Paris Review). It also allows me to sideload books which means I can download epub files and pdfs from places like The Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and so on and easily transfer them to the device.

And it was the cheapest device of all the options I looked at, coming in at a little over $270.

It’s all set up now and it was helpful to have ChatGPT accompany me as I learned the ins and outs of the device. Nearly every question I had got answered by the LLM which was great. It’s a whole other world learning a Chinese-designed android device that is neither a phone or a kindle, but so far I’m there, and I like it and it feels good to have my library in my hands again in a way that means I can lie in a hammock with my phone in the house and spend the summer free of distractions.

Home again

June 9, 2026 By Being, Bowen, Travel No Comments

On May 1 we left for a month in France. When we returned we got the weekend at home which meant hastily harvesting spinach and making 15 spanakopitas for the freezer and a bunch of spinach pesto. Then it was off again on Tuesday morning and a few days of work in Toronto and then a lovely weekend with my brother and sister and nieces and nephew in Simcoeside, north of the city.

And then yesterday home in time for a Carmena Bowena rehearsal. The less said about that the better. I was dirt tired from the jet lag and the weekend, and as a whole, let’s just say it’s great to sound like that in rehearsal. We got to take a look at some deep holes that need patching up. We will be fine come June 27-28 for our concerts.

It is rainy and cool here on the coast, a little taste of what we call “Juneuary.” Stage 3 water restrictions have started on our island meaning that we can only water our garden by hand now. So despite a welcome steady drizzle, we are into summer gardening.

As the year is nearly half over I’m checking in on my quest to log 365 birds. When the year started with a trip to Costa Rica in January and knowing that we were headed to Europe and Eastern North America this year, I thought that might be an achievable target. Today I logged birds 300 and 301 – a Western Wood Pewee and a Western Tanager. So 64 birds to go for the year. The thing about the northern hemisphere is that there aren’t that many more birds I’m likely to see here. Migration season is pretty much over. There will be a window of birds coming back through here in the fall and then the winter birds that hang out will return. So even though it looks like I’m nearly there, there aren’t many I can add from here on Bowen Island. Most of my birding is on the coast, but I might do a trip or two to the Fraser estuary or towards the interior to see some different birds this summer. At this point, it’s about going to where the birds are.

I have one more work trip this season before finally being able to put my feet up until the fall. This summer I’ll be working through our Complexity Inside and Out materials which need some updating as we get ready for the fall 2026 offering. This is a course that is geared towards folks that are leading in complexity from an organizational position or as a consultant/facilitator/host. Given the amount of writing, thinking, and reflecting I’ve done this winter and spring prompted by Dave Snowden’s absolutely prodigious output, there is lots to say, do and clarify. Specifically I need to find clear ways to shape how my practice lies adjacent to hosting and, I hope, drives that practice into a deeper coherence with the challenges and imperatives complexity throws up for us.