Not every facilitation gig goes great. The kind of work I do – and this is probably true of many of you – is usually novel. It is new to the organization I’m working with and often times new to me too, because every organization’s context is different and we design to what is needed.
This means that I often find myself involved in processes that folks have never done before. Moreoften than not, if we’ve done our preparation work well and folks are well invited to the gathering, the process is fun, engaging, powerful and results in good outcomes.
And sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we get lost, don’t know where to start, flounder and find ourselves surprised. And at times like that I think about Tommy Flanagan.
Tommy Flanagan was one of the best jazz pianists who ever lived. His discography includes 40 solo recordings and some of the seminal jazz recordings of the 20th century: Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus, Kenny Burrell’s Swingin’, and numerous albums with Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, Milt Jackson, and JJ Johnson among others. Famously he appeared on John Coltrane’s 1959 album Giant Steps.
Now Giant Steps featured as its title track a now-classic tune of the same name which is diabolical in nature. Coltrane plays it very fast, and the chord progression is something that no one had ever seen before – embodying Coltrane’s radical approach to jazz harmony – with hardly any time to think between changes.
When Coltrane introduced the song to Flanagan a couple weeks before the recording session, he played it slowly so Tommy could get a sense of how the changes worked, and this left Flanagan with the impression that the tune was a ballad. Ballads are played at 60 beats per minute. When the band stepped into the studio to make the recording, Coltrane played it at nearly 300 beats per minute. Flanagan wasn’t prepared.
On the recording, you can hear Coltrane’s soaring solo of 11 choruses, before he drops and lets Flanagan comes in. Tommy Flanagan has five choruses to solo on and he starts scared and gets progressively more and more lost until by the fifth chorus he is just comping out some chords and probably thanking his stars he survived it.
His solo is perhaps the most famous example of a top jazz musician who tried something and failed. Lost, bewildered, out of ideas, but gamely getting through it.
Some days are like that. Folks loving using jazz as an example of what happens when teams of people really cook together, but they never seem to bring up Tommy Flanagan’s solo. Facilitation is like that sometimes too. You know you’re stuff, you are good at it, and then you find yourself in a context where things are not what you expected and you dry. It doesn’t mean you’re not good at your job. But, Coltrane’s recording of Giant Steps is perhaps the most relatable moment I can describe listening to jazz masters play.
Flanagan, by the way, had more than the last word on this piece of music. After Coltrane died he recorded a lovely version of it on a tribute album that has a solo that rivals Coltrane’s and is maybe even better for its lucidity and cohesiveness and swing.
It’s undeniable that in the time I have been publishing on the web (and before that on usenet and bbs’ dating back to 1992) we have seen a shift from protocols to platforms. Back in the day, people made protocols so we could all talk to each other, regardless of the platforms we used to do it. The web today runs on these protocols, which allows us to use all kinds of different platforms to communicate. Think email. We all use different email programs, but when I send a message, it gets to you regardless.
The enclosure of the commons that I wrote about last year is the fundamental shift in the way we communicate and talk to each other. It creates walled gardens of activity that regulates what happens inside and which limits connection to the outside world. I used to be able to publish my blog posts directly to Facebook for example, but that functionality was removed a long time ago. Facebook will not allow users in Canada to post hypertext links to media sites, which is a pretty reliable indicator that they want to own the web and not participate in it. Platforms limit possibilities and are driven by control. Protocols open up possibilities and enable self-organization and emergence.
Mike Masnick’s paper on Protocols,Not Platforms traces this history very well and makes these arguments for focusing on protocols that “would bring us back to the way the internet used to be.”
I came to Mesnick’s paper after reading an article in the New Yorker about J Graber and her involvement with Bluesky. I was struck at the parallels between the work I do with social technologies and the work that people are doing around social network technologies. When I first got into working as a facilitator, I focused on large group work (and I still do) and my focus was on the platforms of Open Space Technology and later World Café and Appreciative Inquiry and other methods of large group interventions.
These methods for large group dialogue are platforms, but what underlines them our protocols of organization and facilitation the protocol I use is the Art of Hosting, a simple four fold practice, which is applicable to a variety of contexts from meetings to structuring organizations to planning large scale change work. The art of hosting is a protocol that enables more collaboration, more creation, and more resilience among individuals and groups who are leaning into complexity and uncertainty.
On Friday, I’m going to talk about this more and I think I will use the Protocols, Not Platforms idea as the way to talk about how we do change work, and you could join us. The organizational development world is besotted with methods, and a good method for the right need is a good thing. All methods are context bound, however, so to really make change in complex domains, one need to be aware of the context for the work and rely on a context-free protocol to help engage and work. So if you join in on Friday you will learn about how context matters, how complex contexts in particular are composed, the simple protocol for working in complexity that is rooted in the four fold practice, and then maybe some stories of using methods that fit the need.
I think it was 1986-87 academic year that I truly fell in love with the idea of culture. That was the year I began my BA in Indigenous Studies at Trent University and it was during a time when Indigenous cultures in Canada were going through a generational resurgence after recovering from 100 years of state-sponsored cultural, physical and intellectual extinction. I was able to be a witness to communities and organizations recovering by growing deep into traditional practices, and younger generations receiving the teaching of Elders and using them to create new political movements, organizations, economies, governments, and health and well being in their communities. I loved the idea of culture as the ground for this work and loved watching people work with it, and indeed being a part of cultural shifts and and catalysis. Culture was like magic. It appeared bigger than all of us, it shifted and changed and it enabled things to happen. Or not.
I so fell in love with culture that I did an honours thesis in my fifth year that compared two national Indigenous organizations in their attempts to root their operations and structures in traditional cultures. One did it by using artifacts and trappings and firm structures that ended in arguments about orthodoxies and heartbreak, and the other did it by creating a relational, caring, and connected context in which a unique but thoroughly Indigenous way of being emerged.
So early on I learned that culture is emergent, that it transcends individuals and specific artifacts and practices, that it is a context that shapes relationships and behaviours and that it is the product of relationships and interactions over time. Norms of behaviour can’t be dictated, they can only arise.
Since then I would say that the heart of my work with organizations and communities has been working with culture. The sources of joy and the sources of pain are the multiples contexts in which we live our lives. I’ve worked in one-off settings and multi-year large scale systemic settings. I’ve worked with large teams and with little groups of change-makers. And we’ve tried it all, from magic methods to the “this will finally solve it” conference, to multi-year narrative sense-making projects. I’ve spent decades surfing the rise and fall of supporter culture around the soccer teams I’ve been a part of. I’ve spent nearly 25 years living on an island with its own unique slant on the world, creating social enterprises, supporting community economic development and making community through music and play.
About a year ago on the Art of Hosting Facebook group someone asked about changing culture in a very large organization and which methods are best. For some reason that post appeared in the feed that I rarely check, and I responded to it. But because I’m never going to send you to Facebook, I thought I would catch this sketchy set of insights and share them here. This is a back of the napkin kind of list, but these are truths that I will no longer doubt in my work with organizations and communities. So here’s what I’ve learned about “culture change.”
- It takes years.
- Your work will be non-linear and unpredictable.
- All states are temporary.
- If it is necessary for senior leaders champion and support change work, it will only be sustained as long as they don’t succumb to their anxiety and fear of uncertainty and unpredictability.
- You cannot change culture directly, but you can work to change the way people interact with one another and see what kind of culture emerges as a result.
- Learning together is often a good way to approach many different strategic and cultural issues in an oblique and open way.
- If change of any kind in the organization or sector is predicated on the people needing to transform and be different then you are colonizing people. Don’t do that.
- Whatever you think is happening is only ever a part of the full picture.
- Whatever you think you have accomplished is only ever a piece of what you have actually done.
- It will never go according to plan.
From time to time I have conversations that remind me of the principles that guide my own work in different aspects of facilitation and engagement. Today, in two different design conversations, I was reminded of these again, and I took a few notes as we were talking. These aren’t the be-all and end-all of good practice, but they are things that roll off the tongue and are basic heuristics for how I structure and facilitate public engagement sessions.
- Ask constructive questions. One of my pet peeves is when folks want to structure a public engagement with a presentation of a half- or well-formed policy proposal and ask “What are we missing?” In most cases once a piece of legislation or a plan reaches the consultation stage, the decision is already made that we are going in THIS basic direction. The “What is missing?” can imply that there is room to throw the whole thing out, or it invites ideological contributions that can derail the conversation. Instead, share material and then ask “what would make this stronger?” or “What would make this fail if we didn’t’t address it now?”
- Foster participant ownership: Real transparency can demand of us that we ask participants to share information with us in their own words, in their own handwriting, and in their own voice. As much as possible, have your participants shape their own input, and make sense of it together. The extent to which you are coding data, making summaries, and writing reports and responses alone and outside of the group’s work, is the extent to which they are being left out of the process. So think very consciously about that.
- Ask authentically curious and open-ended questions: in North American culture we have a pre-disposition to asking yes/no questions. We can often appear very curious in doing so, but a question that leaves only two or three possible answers doesn’t actually allow a person to fill it with their wisdom. A simple example is something like “Do you think this proposal will work?” questions that start with verbs and ending question marks usually logically invite a yes or no answer. So practice crafting a question that allows for thoughtful reflection, and provides answers that you cannot yet see such as “how can you see this proposal working?” or “what is your reaction to what we just shared?” Also, avoid questions like “do you think we should go with this proposal or something different?” which still invites a binary choice even though people may choose to answer it with more detail. If you require a follow up question to make a person’s answer more clear, then ask that question in the first place.
- Clarify how responses are to be used: There is nothing worse than being invited to a public consultation meeting only to have your ideas dismissed or ignored. Perhaps the only thing worse is being invited to a process where you believe you are helping to make a decision when in reality the decision is being made elsewhere. I call this “engagement washing.” It’s so important to frame public meetings so that participants are clear about what is happening and what is not happening so that they can make an informed choice to participate and how to participate.
- Facilitate difference, not consensus: Most public engagements are not decision-making processes. Many times in my career I have had to hold decision-makers accountable for making decisions and not outsourcing them by saying “the community needs to agree on this before we implement it.” The role of the community is to be a difficult, diverse, conflicted, heterogeneous, mass of opinions and ideas. Decision makers are elected to make decisions in that context. When facilitating public engagement, I tell my clients that our job will be surfacing differences and not arriving at consensus. Illuminating differences helps decision-maker make good strategic choices and helps them to understand the costs and impact of their decisions.
- PAvoid the tyranny of inclusion. Many engagement processes suffer from what I call the tyranny of inclusion. This operates when we believe we need to respond to every single comment and piece of advice equally. Practically speaking, that requires us to respond to a focus group or expert panel in the same way as we might respond to an anonymous troll who left a comment in passing on a survey form or in a social media thread. When structuring engagement processes, I usually shape circles of engagement that make it clear that the more responsibility you have for the outcome. The tighter the feedback loop for your advice. This principal goes hand-in-hand with design principles of equity of voice and inclusion of different lived expertise in engagement and decision-making, and there is no perfect balance.
- Engagement practice can sustain or undermine democracy: in the courses I teach on engagement I stress this point constantly: how we engage affects people’s feelings and trust of democratic processes. Engagement processes that are restrained, restrictive, or opaque signal and unwillingness to engage with the messy realities of community and citizen. Open, validating and meaningful engagement that can help shape public policy. Decisions helps build, and strengthen democratic participation. This should go without saying, but seeking efficiencies in engagement processes can have the effect of smoothing over all the tricky bits that make democracy and participatory life rich, creative, and co-owned. So be conscious about the choices you make when structuring engagement.
So those are a few. There are many more besides these, not to mention rigorous thinking about power. But these are among the most important ones to begin with for me.
The set up for the weekly staff meeting at the Alaska Humanities Forum offices in Anchorage.
We spent the day yesterday with our colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum (AKHF) preparing for the Art of Hosting that begins this morning. AKHF is an organization that has long embraced the Art of Hosting as a way of operating both their internal organizational functions and their relationship and gatherings with their partners and programs. All over the world there are organizations like this, not always obvious or seen by the global Art of Hosting community, because they labour away on their own work. But until the pandemic every staff member of this organization was sent south for an Art of Hosting once they were hired on. It has been six years since that happened so we are here to partly fulfill that need and to work with several of their partners.
What’s great about this is Kameron Perez-Verdia is on our team. As President and CEO of the organization, he is embodies the practices of participatory leadership which he first learned at a Shambala Institute Authentic Leadership in Action workshop back in 2008 with Toke, Monica and myself. Kameron was raised in the whaling village of Utqiagvik, which is the most northerly point in Alaska. We talked a lot yesterday about the kinds of community gatherings that take place there when the whale hunting crews bring in humpbacks for the community. We talked about the importance of presences and check ins in meetings and how that grounded start to important work is a critical aspect of every part of day to day life, from whaling to a staff meeting in Anchorage.
Kameron and I were talking about the balance between chaos and order yesterday as we were exploring how we could teach the four-fold practice together and he shared with me a term that Yupik elders had taught him about dynamic balance: Yuluni pitallkeqtuglluni, which translates roughly as “just enough to live a good life.” It refers to the amount of connection that we need in a gathering or community, or the amount of structure in a meeting or a process to bring about a feeling of family (tuglluni means family) but allows for agency. We talked about “balance” which in the Yupik world is not a stable equilibrium between two competing forces, but a dynamic, constantly sensed state that is reposnsive to the context.
Perhaps this will be come a theme of our work in the next three days, but it’s a helpful way to contextualize the practices of the Art of Hosting: presence, participation, hosting and co-creating. Each of these are context dependant, which is why they are practices. Bringing just enough to live a good life is the art that implicit in the name of the practice “Art of Hosting.” While many folks seek a stable, always applicable tool or way of doing things, the art of hosting or participatory leadership is about the application of a world of practice to an ever changing context. In being sensitive to what is needed, and how to do it depending on conditions, we constantly create the right balancing moment between too much and not enough, just enough to live a good life.
We start in 2 hours.