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We’re not so very different after all

October 18, 2008 By Invitation One Comment

This post from Jack is so useful and powerful that I’m quoting it whole here:

 

One of my seatmates from Phili to Boston last night was Portland’s city planner, a gentle giant of an AfricanAmerican man who spent the post-war Bosnian years doing amazing work in economic development and country re-building.

He lead the first public school integration in the country, a school where Serb, Croat and Muslim children went to school at the same building in 8 hour shifts in order to prevent any inter-contact. Taking key leaders and school administrators for a month in Geneva, he asked them to start by sequestering themselves in the three segregated groups and dream of the future they wanted for their own ethnic children.

When they assembled together to share the newsprint report outs, the dreams were identical. He then asked one of the participants to lead the group in a song all knew from before the wars and the group simply melted.

When they returned to the community, the community embraced the plan for two reasons. One was their faith in their leaders. The other was that when the children were asked to dream, they dreampt of a learning community of all being together.

 

How to make fougasse

October 16, 2008 By Uncategorized

Fougasse

As I promised yesterday, here is my recipe for fougasse.  Actually this comes from Richard Bertinet’s excellent book Dough: Simple Contemporary Breads.  It’s easy and quick and very satisfying.

First the ingredients:

1.5 teaspoons of active dry yeast (or one .25 oz envelope)

18 oz of all purpose white or white bread flour.

2 teaspoons of salt

12.5 oz of water.

It’s important to measure the ingredients by weight to get the proportions correct.  If you don’t have a kitchen scale then use 2.5 cups of flour, but don’t pack the measuring cup full, just scoop it out of the container and sweep the excess off the top.

Mix the ingredients together in a bowl until they are well mixed and then turn out on an unfloured counter and stretch and fold the dough for about five minutes, or just until it starts to become stringy and the gluten strands begin to develop.  It’s important NOT to add extra flour.  You want a wet dough and a light dough to avoid baking bricks.  You also don’t want to knead the dough or it will get too tough.

Richard Bertinet’s stretching and folding technique is excellent.  Watch this video carefully to see him in action.  It develops the gluten and traps a lot of air in the dough.  You can watch him do it in this video, where he is working with a sweet dough, but uses the same technique.

Rest the dough for an hour in a bowl, just as he does in the video.  As the dough is resting pre-heat the oven to 475.  If you have a pizza stone or baking tiles, be sure they are in the oven so they can get hot.  If you don’t, you can use a baking sheet.  Take a little pan of water and put it in your oven so that it can steam while you bake.  This will give the bread a nice crunchy crust.

After an hour, turn the dough out on to your counter, as he does in the video and carefully shape it into a rectangle.  Using a dough scraper or a spatula or a sharp kinfe, cut the rectangle in half, and then cut each half into thirds.  If you cut them into triangles, you can make a nice leaf shaped fougasse.  If you cut them into rectangles, you can make a nice squareish ladder bread.

Next take the pieces like this woman does (start the video at the 4:30 mark), place them on your baking sheet or (a peel if you are using a stone), sprinkle some flour over them  and cut holes in them.  Make them as fancy as you like, just dont cut through to the edges.  Gently stretch the dough so the holes open up. and place the dough in the oven.  Bake it on high heat (at least 475) for 12 minutes.  The breads are done when they are golden brown and starting to get dark in places.  Let them cool on a wire rack and eat!

Happy Bread Day!

Happy World Day of Bread

October 16, 2008 By Uncategorized One Comment

Yay.  It is the world day of bread.  What a great idea to celebrate the human ingenuity behind combining flour, salt, yeast and water.  These four basic ingredients are responsible for more comfort in the world that almost anything else.  When I return home from a day of working in Vancouver, I will post a recipe for my standbay easy bread: fougasse.  

 

In the meantime, enjoy the offerings at my favourite bread site  The Fresh Loaf (including this excellent Daily Bread recipe, and perhaps even try a batch of no knead bread.  If you start it tonight, you can bake it tomorrow for dinner.

The death of smart conservatism

October 14, 2008 By Notes 14 Comments

Reading Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Barak Obama reminded me that there was a certain kind of conservatism that used to appeal to me, before the culture wars made it possible for conservatives, formerly the most francophilic of all, to even hate France.

It seems as if the prevailing image of conservatism in America at the moment is the loud and brash Fox News/Little Green Footballs/Rush Limbaugh hate mongering.   It is a fear based conservatism, appealing to masses of terrified voters who are convinced that their way of life is threatened by Muslims and Mexicans.   They are embodied in the screaming anti-ethos of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and they have come to roost in the person of Sarah Palin, chosen to do the bidding of “the base:” a large demographic of middle class, middle American Christian fundamentalists with a taste for blood and war and a short leash on their tempers.

The rise of this populist mob mentality had it’s basis in the attack dog years of the Clinton Presidency when only sleeze would dethrone the adminstration that had balanced the budget and provided a great business climate, thereby out Republicaning the Republicans themselves.   It has come of age in the twin contexts of popular media (blogging and YouTube and Facebook) and fear based war mongering.   And what it has done is to have displaced the intelligent, thoughtful and witty conservatives of another time.

When the loud mouths rail against the arugula eating elites of the east coast, it seems to be wholly without the irony of the fact that until recently those arugula eating elites were almost entirely conservatives.   You would be hard pressed in the old days to find upstanding working class families that made arugula a part of their regular salad mix.   But class is a funny thing in America: Democrats and Republicans court the elites for their money and power but the working classes for their authenticity and sheer numbers.

I grew up in a pretty conservative part of Toronto, the son of a big city elite business family on my dad’s side and a working class farm to suburb family on my mother’s side.   Both families held conservative beliefs, and both were largely supporters of the Progressive Conservative Party in Canada, seeing populism as a tad unseemly, and providing rational arguments in their defense of things like free markets, apartheid and traditional family values.   As I was never in their camp, we had heated arguments about these things, but they never descended to name calling, and we always seemed to remain civil in our political differences.

Moreover we enjoyed the same culture, being fond of classical music, theatre and poetry.   I watched more independant cinema and listened to more jazz, but we substantially shared the urban middle class cultural landscape without grief.   We disagreed on society, economics and politics, but we saw eye to eye on plenty of other things.

And so I come to Buckley’s column and note with some alarm that things have shifted for the worse in the United States.   When Christoper Buckley (and David Frum and Christopher Hitchens) have endorsed a Democrat, it means that the Republicans have gone so far right that they are verging on popular fascism.   Hearing some of the comments from the mobs of supporters at McCain/Palin rallies certainly bears that out.   Voters are angry, not at the economy or the loss of their manufacturing sector or the nine trillion dollar debt their government has racked up, but for the way “the scialists are taking over.”   The moral compass is broken.

The level of rhetorical screed in the United States coming from the Republicans is alarming, beacuse it is tapping a mob mentality and verging on violent difference making.   It posits the election of Barack Obama as the end of America and provides a narrative in the culture that makes it frighteningly possible that outright violence will erupt.   McCain and Palin have taken to lowering this emotional tone in their campaign just to provide some plausibility for a denial of responsibility if anything should happen.   How did it come to this?

Republicans have abandonned the intellectual centre of their party, and have set loose the rabid margins.   In doing so, they have lost the capacity they need to reinvent the intellectual backbone of their party.   It seems clear at this point that they will be out of power for a while, and they face a choice to reinvent American conservatism from a considered and reasonable bassis or to let the attack dogs run loose and fire negative volleys at the Democrats in power for the next four years or more.

Republicans need to overcome the anger, and get back to the real business of providing an alternative political vision for America because so far only one guy is doing that, and he’s about to make history as America’s first black President.

Patterns for building community

October 13, 2008 By Collaboration, Invitation, Leadership, Organization, Practice 2 Comments

Finally settling into  Peter Block’s book, Community: The Structure of Belonging.  My partner has been hoarding it since it arrived a couple of months ago.

In the opening chapters, Block takes inspiration from the likes of John  McKnight, Robert Putnam, Christopher Alexander and others to crate some basic patterns for collective transformation.  These are beautiful and quite in line with the work I do and the things we teach through the Art of Hosting.  In fact, I’ll probably add this list to our workshop workbook.

Here is the list, with my thoughts attached.

From  John McKnight:  

  • Focus on gifts.  Look at what people are willing to offer rather than what people are in need of.
  • Associational life.  There is great power in the associations that people form to come together to do good work
  • Power in our hands.  Who do you think is going to change things? In doing Open Space action planning, I sometimes make reference to the fact that there will not be an angel that parachutes in and saves us.  It’s up to us to find the way to make things work.

From  Werner Erhard:

  • The power of language.  What we say about things and people makes a huge difference.  Speaking and listening (and therefore conversations) is the basis of changing things.
  • The power of context.  Contexts are the worldviews which we employ to see things.  Powerful contexts enable powerful transformation.  For example, in First Nations the context of self-government vs. Indian Act government represents a powerful context for community development.
  • The power of possibility.  Once a possibility is declared, it comes into being and with skillful invitation, work can organize around it.

 

  • Work with bridging social capital.  Social capital is the relatedness between citizens  We express this through  bonding social captial, which helps us find others like us, andbridging social capital  which helps us find relations across groups.  Bridging social capital  is the holy grail that takes us from insular groups, to true communities.

 

  • Work with aliveness and wholeness.  One of my favourite ways to think about work that changes minds is to ask “How does a forest change a mind?”  How do you react in a forest?  How does it happen so suddenly?  Why do old growth forests leave a permanent mark on us?  How can we transform minds like a forest does?
  • Transformation as unfolding.  What is known by the whole of a group or community cannot be exposed all at once.  You have to journey to the centre of it, one small step at a time.  As you go, you harvest more and more of it, and as it becomes visible, it accelerates the collective consciousness of itself.  

 

  • Appreciating paradox.  Paradoxes help us to see the creative tension that lies in complexity.  Chaos and Order, Individual and collective, being and doing, work and relationships…all of these contribute to our understanding of the kinds of questions that take us to collective transformation.
  • Choosing freedom and accountability.  Freedom is not an escape from accountability.  “the willigness to care for the whole occurs when we are confronted with our freedom, and when we choose to accepts and act on that freedom.”

 

From the founders of large groups methods like  Open Space,  World Cafe,  Future Search  and others:
  • Accountability and committment.  What I, and Harrison Owen, calls “passion and responsibility.”  Don’t just ask what is important, ask what people are willing to do to make it come to pass.
  • Learning from one another.  Co-learning rather than experts preaching to students is the way to build the capacity for collective transformation.
  • Bias towards the future.  We leave the past where it is and focus on now, and the conditions that are arising to produce the futures we want.
  • How we engage matters.  Or, as we were fond of saying at  VIATT, the system is the conversation.  How we relate to each other in every instance IS the system.

 

  • Small scale, slow growth.  Big things begin from very small ideas.  Cultivating the Art of Calling, whereby we learn to issue and embody invitations, and find the people to work with who will bring these into being, is the key practice here.

 

From  Allan Cohen:
  • Emergent design.  Everything is in flux, and constantly adapting.  Ask why the organization hasn’t been moving naturally in the direction that it desires and convene conversations on what you discover.  Feed those back to the whole and the course corrects.  Cohen also says that he CAN herd cats…by tilting the floor.  Deeper contexts often have more leverage.

 

I realize that I have just provide a precis of Peter’s first chapter, but it is such a cogent summary of all of these ideas, that I couldn’t resist the temptation to add thoughts and links to his synthesis.