I’m back in Johannesburg after three days on the veld west of the city running an Art of Participatory Leadership workshop with my friend from REOS Social Innovation. The weather here has been crazy – constant rain showers and thunderstorms for the whole time we were away, and there is flooding locally here. Driving back into the city we went fender deep through many intersections; major thoroughfares were rendered into fords, water coloured with deep red soil flowing everywhere.
Usually its easy for me to write about these kinds of workshops, but I have to say that South Africa is an overwhelming context. It does not at all lend itself to a simple set of observations. In many ways it is the quintessential study in contrasts: squatter camps next to luxury suburban malls, torrential rains in Joburg and 30 minutes away, lovely summer weather on the safari. Somehow these things have much in common. You are always taken by surprise by the contrast while at the same time struck by how normal it all seems.
REOS Partners is working with two major teams right now, both of which are present at this training. One is Kago Ya Bana (Building together for our children), which is a program that works in the municipality of Midvaal, aimed at ensuring that every child is cared for. The other is a team of people who work with distance learning at the University of South Africa (UNISA). On the face of it, these tow teams have nothing really in common, but in mixing together over the past three days they discovered much in common about moving towards a culture of participatory leadership with stakeholders, funders, learners, parents and children. One project even got started that uses KYB leadership with some support from UNISA folks to build it and see it off.
I think South Africa is a country that exists only because of partnerships and particiption. But much like Estonia, two dynamics are at play. First of all, with the struggle against apartheid now over, a creeping complacency has set in. There has long been extraordinary expectations on the ANC government, but what is catching people by surprise is the decreasing impulse for people to take charge in their communities. I heard this often over the course of the workshop – that there is a hunger for the kind of community leadership that was present in the struggle days, but which has seemed to have waned in the past 15 years. And secondly, like Estonia, South Africa is an emerging country and as such it is trying to perform well on the world stage. To do this, it makes a point of meeting the world’s expectations of it, trying to prove that things are going well and that progress is being made, and I notice that some people re reaching the breaking point in encountering the culture of management by measurement. This was another frustration spoken by many.
Participatory leadership is simply the application of what we have learned from hosting participatory meetings to bigger and bigger contexts. It asks the question what if we applied these principles to ongoing team, organizational and social contexts. To that end participatory leadership offers some relevant antidotes to groups that are suffering from the apathy of a surfeit of chaos or control. This week we found that out in spades I think. People are just quite open and interested in a way of doing things that involves others, that engages that somehow returns humanity to work.
In our work we shared models of hosting participatory meetings, described maps and practices that help us stay grounded and open, and explored ways of harvesting that were inclusive and holistic. In the end, several people stepped forward to crack open and lead projects within their workplaces to make work more inclusive, to work more with clients and learners, and to explore ways to apply some of these ideas and skills. One thing that I love about this work is how REOS is offering it as a part of an ongoing capacity building initiative with their clients. In doing that it continues a shift of seeing in ways that one participant described as “Changing the way change works.” With an ongoing relationship, coaching, and real work at hand, those that take up the practices and explore them in their own contexts will embark on a cool learning journey together, and my sense is that people will begin seeing the results they are looking for as their projects become more inclusive and co-owned by the people with whom they are working. And that is the whole point.
I was watching the Cop15 conference at a distance and I have been thinking that big conferences are maybe not what it will take to shift things. Bigger and more may not be what is needed, or what works. One of the problems is the pressure and expectation that comes from big gatherings – it tends to result in a level of planning and pre-ordained outcomes that actually suppresses emergent behaviour, and emergent behaviour is the mechanism I believe we need to evolve our next level of being, if we are to have a next level as a species.
An exception to my mind has always been the Open Space conference which is built on self-oganization as a mechanism for fostering emergent understanding and work. In fact, recently I have been returning more and more to Open Space in its most pure and extended forms to generate emergent results embedded in sustainable relationships. I find that as a designer I am maybe sometimes a little guilty of frankly pandering to the fears of clients who want me to design results rather than process. The inclination to control is a strong one, to feel like there is much at stake and so therefore everything must be tightly scripted. And yet the reality is that in the world outside of conference, innovation and emergence is happening all the time in fact most conferences, even conferences of amazing and talented people, are a let down because a small group of people – the organizers – seek to control what happens, making sure everyone has a good experience, as if people aren’t perfectly capable of a good experience on their own. It’s a bummer, and real life, where people get to make their own decisions and take responsibility for what they care for, is a whole lot more exciting and productive.
Of course a sole four day Open Space, powerful as it is for fostering surprising levels of emergence and action, still requires much skillful design. I place a great deal of emphasis on the quality and mode of the invitation. How we invite people – how we ACT when we invite people – often says more about the invitation than the text of the invitation itself. Assembling the right people around the right call is a deep art, and in fact might be the deepest art of all the arts of hosting. But once they are in the room, I think most folks, and especially thoroughbreds, like to have the space to run. To be scripted and moved around, have conversations prematurely cut off or started around false or half guessed-at topics, is a travesty. To see a group of highly talented and motivated people create their own emergent agenda and go to work offering everything they can is a truly inspiring sight and to see them doing so over two, three and four days is to watch a community get born. I have experienced three and four day Open Space gatherings a handful of times, both as a facilitator and as a participant and without exception powerful, enduring and totally unexpected results have emerged. And these results have lasted, evolved and morphed into amazing things. I have never seen those kinds of results from other kinds of tightly scripted conferences.
I have been thinking about this for a while, and the missed opportunity in Copenhagen combined with some other observations about over the top conference planning has led me to really question whether the ONE ALL PURPOSE GATHERING has not seen better days. We are so muich more able to work in local and disbursed ways that we don’t need to wait for the big conference to do good work. We can just get on Skype and start going at it. In fact I’m surprised how few people actually do do this. Instead they wait for the big gathering to start something. Having said that, Open Space offers the nearest conference based analogue to this marketplace of life. As designers and conveners, we simply need a powerful invitation, the influence to connect to the right people, and then stand aside as skillful and motivated people connect with one another and find the work they are meant to do together.
Writing from Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island which is about as far west as you can go without leaving North America. I’m here this week to run an Art of Hosting training with a number of community coordinators for 14 Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities around Clayoquot, Barkley and Kyuquot Sounds. We’re going to be learning together about methods for community engagement and participatory leadership and all of it based very deeply in the concept of Tsawalk (from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth principle of “heshook ish tsawalk” meaning “everything is one.”)
Last night I drove out here across the spine of Vancouver Island, from Departure Bay on the east side, through Port Alberni and along the shore of Sproat Lake, through the pass and down to the west coast. It’s a landscape of high mountains, big trees, big clearcuts and huge beaches. Everything is scaled so big that you can’t help feel small and humbled in this landscape. And to beat it all, last night I chased the sun across the island and it beat me to the open Pacific. By the time I made the turn for Tofino it was pitch dark and the sky was ablaze with stars and the Geminid meteor showers littered the heavens with fireballs and frequent streaks of light.
The first time I ever cam to BC, in 1989, I came here, or more precisely, I stayed a week in Heshquiaht, on the north edge of Clayoquot Sound, visiting with my friend Sennen Charleson and his family. Sennen died a few years ago in a road accident in northern BC, and I can feel his presence here in land from which he spent many years in exile, but which always called him strongly. There is a riotous complexity to the rainforests of the west coast, and a presence unlike anywhere else on earth. Everything is quiet, knowing that you cannot make more noise than a storm from the ocean or the clatter of rain through the canopy. Human noises disappear here, like a the ripples from a pebble tossed into surf.
I’m excited to be designing a three day learning experience here with some apprenticing mates, Norinne Messer and Laura Loucks. We are using the framework of tsawalk for our work together, a concept that is deeply rooted in the Nuu-Cha-Nulth worldview and that influences everything from resource management to spiritual ceremony to the role of community. It is forming the basis of a unique partnership that will produce a marine use plan for Clayoquot and Barkley Sounds, and over the next few days, we will look at how tsawalk informs our work with communities, influences design choices for community engagement and self-development.
One of the processes we will be using is based on the Nuu-Cha-Nulth spiritual practice of “oosumich” which is a form of prayer and self-knowledge that helps us to access knowledge from the interior worlds of spiritual source, individual persoanlity and community. It is a form of investigative methodology that is complimentary to science, which examines and makes sense of the external world. Working together with these methods, we can come to a holistic understanding of the world, a practical expression of tsawalk. Oosumich is a spiritual practice, intended to connect with the spiritual aspects of the world that we can also understand materially. Oosumich itself is a secret and a scared practice, but what we know of it can be used to work in leadership learning and process design.
Some of the basic values that are involved in the expression of tsawalk are aphey (kindness), isaak (respect) and he-xwa (balance). As I sit here designing today, I am thinking very carefully about how these three basic show up in hosting work. Some of my preliminary thoughts are:
aphey
- being helpful for the common good (“hupee-ee-aulth”)
- paying attention to good relations and increasing more of them (an appreciative approach to growing community)
- ask for what you need, offer what you can (PeerSpirit Circle principles that apply to Nuu-Chah-Nulth life from the way in which people help each other with work, food gathering and preparation and ceremony)
isaak
- every voice has it’s place. When we hear a voice of dissent or confusion, it is not out place to judge it, but rather to figure out how it is related to the whole. If tsawalk is the principles, there can be nothing outside of that, and so all voices have a place.
- all creation has common origin and we pay respect to that common origin by acknowledging the relationships that are present in the world.
he-xwa
- balance comes from having a core, which can be a purpose or a solid centre or a ground
- the world is a constant balance between energies that create and those that destroy. Balance is not a static point in time, but a dynamic practice. We have to learn to be sensitive to imbalances both in the external world and in the internal world. Where there is too much red tide, people notice, and they know it means something is out of balance with the marine environment. When there is too much chaos in a meeting, it means that people are confused and more order and clarity has to be found.
All of these ideas form the basis for some teaching, for some play and learning. I’m thrilled to be here.
A smart observation on the deep architecture of good design:
One conclusion so far is that the possibility space for change opens up when we connect different people who can begin resonating together around shared stories, opportunities, and dreams. It’s a process of liberating people from the confines of clusters of sameness and ideological colonialism so they can move toward more diverse connections and pragmatic alignments.
As it turns out, the fusion of difference and resonance is a powerful approach because in that space, people move away from trying to change each other, which opens the space for the possibilities of creating innovative and scalable changes together. Resonant listening to one another’s differences allows us to join in both-and innovations that could never be possible in an either-or constrained world.
via jack/zen.
So we had our little learning village today with the kids at Aine’s learning centre which my partner, daughter and I designed. We explored these questions of what kind of inner climate is needed to engage around questions of climate change and the kids followed the energy. They got really interested in what kinds of things they could say to the global leadership meeting in Copenhagen. They wanted to convey a sense that, yes this is a serious issue, but how you choose to meet together matters. They were dismayed and discouraged by the prospect of a lot of angry and worried people sitting around for a few days trying to reach a creative agreement. One kid said that she doesn’t work very well if she thinks there is a tiger behind her about to eat her.
So we had a little circle and talked about what we know about principles of meeting together. The kids generated this list:
- Be serious but not bitter
- Optimistic
- Not grim
- Respectfully, without insulting each other
- talk with civility
- peacefully
- consider the whole planet
- Be calm
- happily and confidently
- include everyone and make sure everyone has a voice
- be positive and useful
- get different opinions
- have fun
- break into groups to get more ideas
- make sure groups get mixed up.
- no shouting
- come with an open mind
- talk nicely and treat everyone as if they were a relative
- make sure to move. maybe dance together.
- feast
- have music and entertainers, and hire a jester to make fun of yourself.
We even took this advice, and broke into groups to see what kinds of things we could brainstorm around climate change solutions. The kids worked for 40 minutes in a world cafe, and then we shared some ideas (“Someone needs to develop shoes that massage your feet while you walk.” “Busses should be free”). We discovered that if we practice some of the principles, they really do result in creative thinking, and a more civil tone.
So the kids were pretty clear that they didn’t have answers about climate change, but they did have recommendations about HOWthe leaders should meet in order to find creative and sustaining solutions. We made four videos (the kids chose to do sketches) which we are editing and will get quick parental approval before sending off to Copenhagen through various channels.
My takeaway on this is that there is a lot of science and highly technical information that is required before you can make useful contributions to the global warming debate. Very few of us have access to that level of understanding and while we might have some good ideas, we don’t really have the ability to engage at the level of understanding that results in concrete solutions.
We do however all have experience of conversations that work. Youth are very clear about ways in which learning takes place. I was delighted when they began naming principles of participatory process and conversational leadership, which are just fancy terms for what we already know about how to collaborate. Twelve year olds CAN make a contribution, and can learn and reflect on process as they share their own experience about what works.