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The Golden Rule: a principles setting exercise

May 2, 2022 By Collaboration, Complexity, Facilitation, Featured, Organization 13 Comments

A ferry worker in a safety vest is ready to open a gate and let cars of a ferry docking at horseshoe Bay

One of the quotes I keep rolling out all the time is this one from Christina Baldwin:

No group can prove itself safe by the definition of one member; it can only prove itself healthy and responsive to the the needs of different people over time

Christina Baldwin, Calling the Circle, p. 172

I sometimes reframe this quote as “No one person can be responsible for safety in a group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for its own safety.”

For a group to work well, especially if it is confronting challenges, uncertainty, complexity, or conflict, it needs to be safe enough for members to freely share and contribute, and also challenging enough that ideas that no longer serve can be questioned, stretched and broken to make space for the new. Rather than saying “we will create safe space” it’s useful to take some time to explore the polarity of safety and danger. We often talk about “safe enough” or “brave space” or similar terms that capture this space of leading and facilitating.

So the way to do this is to enlist the group itself in co-creating the conditions that create a creative, generative, challenging and supportive space. I usually do that by facilitating this process that I call The Golden Rule Principles Setting Exercise.

The Golden Rule, of course, is the principle that underlies the perennial tradition of many religious and spiritual traditions. In Christianity it is worded as “Love your neighbour as yourself.” It recognizes our interdependence with others and it invites us to practice offering to others the same things that we ourselves need.

The process is very simple.

  1. Invite people to reflect and discuss these two questions: During this meeting how do I want to be heard? During this meeting how do I want to be spoken to?”
  2. It’s good to do this in pairs and folks can record some of these needs and place them on stickies or a virtual whiteboard or chat log.
  3. Have the pairs share a few of their needs into the whole group.
  4. Next invite people to reflect on how to offer to others what they want for themselves. If I need to be allowed to ramble a bit uninterrupted because I think out loud, I can put this need in the centre and also commit to not interrupting others.
  5. Have people commit to a single practice that they will endeavour to live up to, one that they may even be willing to be accountable to, and place it on a sticky note.

That’s it. Except under very specific circumstances, I don’t ask the group to vote on these principles, or approve them in any other way. Rather, I trust the people to do their work. From time to time of course as a facilitator one needs to step in, but usually when this process is put into play, I need only offer a period of silence and reflection on the commitment for a group to restore its collective responsibility to care for the container.

As a way to begin a meeting, this is a first foray into co-creation of something that the group all needs and is therefore an excellent way to set the tone for collaborative work, creating a space that can hold the range of emotions that show up in complexity work

The essence of sectarianism

May 2, 2022 By Being, Community, Culture, Practice 3 Comments

I have a little more than a passing interest in the politics and history of Ireland and Northern Ireland in particular, from whence my father’s family of 17th century Scottish transplants emerged.

One of the blogs I follow on this subject is the Unionist blog Slugger O’Toole which offers very thoughtful commentary on Irish and British politics from a Unionist – but not sectarian – perspective. It is very hard not to conflate the two when discussing Northern Ireland, Glasgow or Liverpool-based football, or Canadian history (yes they all have a Protestant v Catholic underlying animosity). This is especially true if you only know a little bit about what you’re talking about. The more you know, the more nuance you will find.

And so here this morning, buried in this review of a new personal history of Ireland by Fintan O’Toole is a really nice succinct quote about sectarianism:

…here we have the essence of sectarianism, the inevitable by-product not of misunderstanding, but of understanding to the point of caricature without compassion and human respect.  Such an environment could only fail to foster a political culture able to sustain the give and take of a mature democracy. It made the recourse to violence more immediate and appealing.

That is really a good and useful description of a dynamic that usually unnecessarily complicates the already complex politics of colonization and conflict. It strikes me that overcoming dynamics like sectarianism is work that can be done by each of us personally in order to engage with the bigger issues of policy and politics that affect all us collectively.

The Vahdat sisters are divine

May 1, 2022 By Featured, Music

A garden of fox gloves and small ground cover plants

Some unbelievable gift of nature and spirit and technical mastery has conspired to provide the Vahdat sisters – Marjan and Mahsa – with voices that exude impeccable vocal control, deep passionate expression, and unending soulfulness. Marjan Vahdat’s new album, “Our Garden Is Alone” is outstanding and topped World Music Central’s Transworld Music Chart for May 2022. That is a list which never fails to deliver amazing music, by the way.

I must have first heard of the Vahdat sisters about six or seven years ago when I stumbled on a recording that Mahsa Vahdat made with Mighty Sam McClain, called “A Deeper Tone of Longing” which is a collection of love songs that cross continents. I think that seemingly impossible collaboration really needs to be SEEN, and so here they are in a short concert from 2010. The sisters write and sing about love with the imagery of the natural world, of gardens and oceans and skies. They are living, breathing vessels of the kind of language and spirit that infused Rumi and Hafiz’s poetry.

The sisters are world famous outside their own country, as the Iranian government has banned the public performances of women’s music since 1979. As a result the perform in Europe and the USA, exploring sounds and collaborations with artists and activists from those places. Spend some of your day immersed in this music.

Doing it for the likes?

April 30, 2022 By Collaboration, Conversation, Democracy, Featured 3 Comments

Euan Semple was the first person I ever linked to on my blog. Today he posts a little reflection on his blogging practice:

…I’ve always said, my blog posts are mostly memos to self. They are for me to react to the world around me and to see those reactions placed before me for inspection. Yes inspection by others but mostly by me. Being concerned about whether or not people like what I have written affects how I write.

I guess this process mirrors our struggles to identify our true selves in the rest of our lives. The draw of relationship becomes pressure to conform.

Can we know ourselves without relationship? Can we truly be ourselves if it becomes too important?

In Jonathan Haidt’s latest essay in The Atlantic entitled “Why the past ten years of American Life have been Uniquely Stupid” he writes about how the “like” and “share/retweet” functions came into social media. It changed everything, mostly by gaming the algorithm with likes and speeding up the uncritical consumption of information.

Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.

By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.

This new game encouraged dishonestyand mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.

These two functions definitely changed the way I write when I moved most of my writing to social media from the blog. Likes and shares are both powerful attractors but the most powerful of all is the comment. Because that one fosters reflective community and relationship.

How to blog

April 29, 2022 By Being, Featured 29 Comments

I’m single handedly trying to lift a near dead art form up from a seven year slumber. It seems like everyone stopped blogging in around 2015 In the intervening years folks would post “I really should get back to this” blog entries but then would find themselves deep in Facebook world where their writing was hard to find and search and sometimes limited only to friends. Or they would post on twitter where the link sharing would happen but without the added reflection and sometimes you’d have to battle bots and trolls to participate. Sure twitter threads are okay. But why not just blog?

(And when I say “folks” I mean me. Projection is a specialty of mine)

I get why folks don’t blog and would rather post on Facebook. It seems like it needs too much work, seems too polished. Requires a regular schedule. So I want to make it easier with a few things that might help you get blogging. (Again, even)

Get a free platform with an RSS feed. If you don’t know what that means, just sign up at Blogger or WordPress. Those sites have good mobile interfaces so you can write from your phone (like I’m doing right now). They come with great templates. They are upgradeable and transferable to your own domain and they can export your posts. An RSS feed is how we can subscribe to your writing via a newsreader like Inoreader.

Don’t be perfect. It’s a blog, not the front page of the Globe and Mail. Think out loud, make typos (typos drive engagement, lol), put half formed ideas out there. Post whenever you want. Whatever you want.

Don’t worry about your brand. I think this one hamstrung me once I had a professional redesign my site in 2015. My brand IS learning and curiosity and half thought out ideas that folks are interested in. I support innovation and learning. That’s messy and edgy sometimes. Also I’m human. It’s nice to read words written by a human. But I don’t blog to sell my brand.

Give stuff away. If you make things, give some of them away. Blogging is a gifting culture. We up lift one another. My site here is full of stuff that I have made and others have made that has been released into the wild. Generosity is beautiful. Having said that, let us know how we can hire you or buy your art, because that’s how you make a living and it’s nice to give back.

Share links and quote people. Sometimes a blog is a place for your opinions or personal thoughts. Also take time to share good things on the web. The etymology of “blog” is a contraction of the word “weblog” which comes from the idea that we log cool things that we find on the web. You want to know who is REALLY good at that? Dave Pollard especially his periodic link collections. Incredible things to read and think about.

Comment on stuff you read. Facebook has done a marvellous job of colonizing conversation. I have seen some amazing threads there with all kinds of useful content shared and explored. Same on twitter. But, can we find them again? Are they indexed and easily accessible? Nope. They are fleeting. Facebook and Twitter are happy they happened because it improves their semantic learning, but they aren’t interested in your community or your colleagues or you. So go directly to people’s blogs and share your thoughts. I am interested in you.

Basically I’m encouraging you to blog with just as much care and attention as you do with a Facebook post or a tweet. but by blogging you are doing it outside of those places in the wild where everyone can see it and participate. You don’t need to battle trolls or get drawn down algorithmically generated attractor basins because of what you write. You will be free.

What other tips do you have?