My friend Holger Nauheimer is busy working on The Human-AI Facilitation Manifesto (LinkedIn link). Here is his most recent draft:
- Perception is plural. Humans sense emotions and atmosphere. Al sees patterns and structure. Together, they reveal deeper coherence.
- Meaning emerges in relationship. Al offers structure, but humans bring the stories that make sense of the structure.
- Belonging is human. Al can stabilize language – but trust grows only between people.
- Depth matters more than speed. Al adds value not by optimizing, but by making visible what is hard to say.
- Neutral clarity is a gift. Al can name tensions without judgment — offering safety without shying away from truth.
- Courage is shared. Humans bring vulnerability. Al brings steadiness. Together, they hold the uncomfortable without collapse.
- This is not a tool upgrade. It is a shift in attention. Hybrid facilitation expands what can be seen, said, and sensed.
- Clarity is not authority. Al can hold patterns, but humans must hold responsibility. Hybrid facilitation works best when projection is named and agency stays human.
Here are some thoughts I have on this, simple thoughts, thoughts off the top of my head. Starting points.
First of all, I’m not loving the “AI does this, humans do this” construction of this manifesto. I think we shouldn’t put humans and AI on the same footing. If we want a manifesto to talk about how AI can be an aid to facilitation and sensemaking, we should talk about what it can do, and what it currently cannot do. I think there is always a place for human beings to talk about facilitation and also what OUR role is in it, because honestly, some forms of what passes for facilitation (especially the wrong processes used in the wrong contexts) can be more damaging than just letting AI ask you a bunch of questions and leaving your group to talk about them.
So given that…thoughts on these points.
Perception is plural. I don’t think AI “perceives.” At least not the AI that most of us are using in 2025. It analyses, and uses algorithms and probability tables to auto complete thoughts. It can be trained to be agreeable or be contrarian or be a nazi or whatever. But it doesn’t “see”. It offers material that becomes one more part of the information load that humans take in. But how humans perceive AI output matters a great deal. Some might dismiss it. Some might give it a kind of divine appreciation. I’m already seeing lots of blog posts starting with “I asked ChatGPT, and this is what it said…” as if ChatGPT is somehow more perceptive, or smarter or has access to better facts than anyone in particular. Perception is something human beings do. We do it individually, and we do it together in groups. Computers don’t perceive. And computers don’t understand depth. See below.
Meaning emerges in relationship. Yes. 100% yes. AI offers structure the way a banana offers structure, or a photograph, or a stray feather. AI does not offer the kind of relational meaning making that humans experience together because it does not have the same cognition that humans do. Human beings can take any object and use it to craft a ritual and stimulate new thoughts and experiences. This can be very helpful, in that it can introduce oblique stimuli into an environment and help us find new thoughts and ideas through association, metaphor, interpretation, cultural norming or culture breaking. We use tools like Visual Explorer or poetry and art for this in group work, and AI is an excellent source of obliquity and ambiguity precisely because it is capable of NOT being in relationship. We are capable of actionable insight that triggers a particular process in our brains that not only makes meaning, but does something to the relationship and the relational field as a result. Builds community, friendship, love. Or hate, and despair and panic. AI isn’t doing that.
Belonging is human. Which follows from the above. AI has no role in belonging. A person belongs when they are claimed by others. if you find yourself being “claimed” by AI, be careful. You are being manipulated.
Depth matters more than speed. Sometimes. Sometimes not. It depends. To AI, everything is speed. Has anyone asked AI to take its time and let its thought process really deepen? To go for a walk and let its brain tense and relax in ways that open new pathways? Nope. AI delivers things fast. I’m not sure it is capable of what we mean by “depth.” We perceive depth as a vertical axis of meaning. We order thoughts and experiences by whether they are shallow or deep. It has nothing to do with speed. AI, I suspect, uses flat semantic structures. It is associative. It would not understand depth the way you understand depth, as perceiving something being more meaningful in this moment to you and your context than not. If you say the word “John” right now it might mean nothing to you. But that was my father’s name and as I type it I look up at the picture I have of him I drinking our last whiskey together, a dram of Ladaig 10 year old malt, chosen because it was the distillery closest to Iona where I finished a pilgrimage in 2018, and because we were talking that evening about spirituality and remembering the drams we shared together on our trip through Ireland in 2012. But to ChatGPT 5, what does “John” mean? ““John” feels like an everyman name. A placeholder for the ordinary person — anyone and no one in particular” (emphasis the robot’s, not mine). Oof.
Neutral clarity is a gift. It is very hard for a human being to offer neutral, clear feedback to another person. But AI will not spare your feelings. My favourite use of LLMs is to critique my writing and ideas, tell me where I am wrong, where others will disagree with me. Tell me where I am about to make a fool of myself.. This is a helpful function.
Courage is shared. I feel like relying on AI to give me courage is foolish. I feel like I need courage NOT to rely on it. For example, this blog post. I’m writing it and dashing it off so Holger and others can reflect on it, and so OI can thinking out loud on these issues. And I’m not going to give it to ChatGPT for feedback. I am noticing that THAT requires more courage than hiding behind something that might polish it up. If I was publishing in a journal, I’d want that (and a good editor). But right now I’m wanting to write a fully human post in my own voice, so YOU all can weigh in and tell me what YOU think too, without using your LLM to critique it.
This is not a tool upgrade. Indeed. It’s just another tool. Not THE tool. Not a phase shift in how we do facilitation. I have seen facilitators discover a new tool like Open Space Technology and evangelize the hell out of it, saying that it should be used everywhere all the time and in exactly the same way for everything. Humans can be very good at creating and using tools, but we have also evolved practices of apprenticeship and mentorship in using and then making tools. AI doesn’t replace that. We need good mentors to apprentice to as facilitators. And then we can think about how to use our tools well.
Clarity is not authority. I don’t think AI offers any special clarity, and I do not think it has a lock on seeing patterns. Humans are exceptional at spotting patterns. Our brains are possibly the most complex things we know of in the universe (although as Steven Wright once said, you have to think about who is telling you that!). We are built to spot patterns. And we are full of filters and biases and inattentional blindness. We are prone to enacted cognition. We are neurodiverse and cognitively gifted in different ways. And so working with others helps us spot patterns and validate useful ones. If AI is part of your pattern spotting family, so be it. Just realize that it lacks all the tools we have to make sense of patterns in complexity. It can only work with what it has got. Its processes of insight are reducible. Ours are not. They are emergent.
That’s me. What do you think?
Some thoughts on why we need to write with our real voices.
This is what our inlet looks like these days. Grey, wet, cold, and lovely.
Fridays are for me. Since I turned 55 a couple of years ago, I’ve set aside Fridays for – whatever. Since my ADHD diagnosis last year, I’ve called Friday my ADHD day where I can just let my mind carry me into an unplanned day. Sometimes that means reading, sometimes it means spending the day outside, doing errands, seeing friends, playing music…lots of options. And it’s important to give myself permission to do whatever and not feel guilty for not being “productive.”
So today, the cloud is starting to build as a 2800km long atmospheric river is set to deliver up to 90 mm of rain over the next 36 hours, then tapering off to a steady 2-4 mm of rain every day for the early part of the week. It is a good day to hang out at home, drink some lovely Guatemalan coffee from Moja and read through some interesting articles from my feed reader. Here’s a bunch of links for you to enjoy:
Last night I spent a couple of hours playing euchre up at the Bowen Island Legion where every Thursday night is games night. Euchre is not typically a BC game, but it’s played extensively in Ontario, Michigan and Alabama. Becasue our local euchre players mostly bring their variations of the rules from other places, we have to agree on the rules before playing. As a folk tradition, the evolution of card games in fascinating, and conversation last night sent me to checking out euchre’s history today on Wikipedia.
There is a cost to a lifetime of coerced performance, whether it is due to insecurity, the need to code switch or deeper concerns for safety and protection. And the good news is as you get older, you really have fewer fucks to give which, to my mind, makes you a more interesting person. Travelling through my mid-fifties, I stand in awe as many my peers find this freedom and just let the venneer slip. They become true, real and authentic. Sometimes that means they take off and find new purposes and friends and people that get them, and sometimes I get to be one of those friends and the more I see of them the more I fall for who they are.
Time for a little magic. I came across Dani DaOrtiz’s craft today for the first time and I’m impressed by how he so thoroughly and delightfully wow’d Penn and Teller. I’m less impressed by how he blew away Donny Osmond, as that seemed to be like hunting fish in a barrel.
My favourite Canadian band, Rheostatics, released a new album today called The Great Lakes Suite. It’s a meandering ode to the Canadian view of the Great Lakes, reminiscent of their album of Music Inspired by the Group of Seven. It’s like a soundtrack for static things. This album includes poetry (Anne Carson, Liz Howard, Chief Stacy Laforme), guest musicians (Tanya Tagaq, Gord Downie, Laurie Anderson) and audio snippets. I can’t help feel that somewhere deep behind this band’s approach to these uniquely Canadian icons was inspired originally by Glen Gould’s experimental sound composition, The Idea of North. Rheos are having an album launch party in Toronto tonight with Alex Lifeson accompanying them.
It’s one thing to look north and another to look west. The CCPA publishes a useful summary of the resource projects that our provincial government is pursuing in their “Look West” strategy. Some of these are potentially catastrophic, including the idea that we can ship oil by tanker across the north coast of BC, or the idea that exporting natural gas is a good thing to do in a world that is dying from fossil fuel consumption. And what about jobs? Marc Less covers that as well, as these kinds of projects tend to hire large numbers of workers from elsewhere to build them and rely on as few as possible to run them. And these companies just aren’t great neighbours, as our local LNG terminal owner is demonstrating against the Town of Squamish.
Resource development in BC has effects on salmon, which is one of our charsmatic fauna in this region. Salmon are very sensitive fish and their story is the story of the attitudes and effects that humans have on our environment, even when we can’t see it. Salmon make things visible to us. Getting a handle on the story of salmon and the story of humans and salmon is important for getting a handle on how we manage to screw things up by segmenting the management of our environment.
Segmenting our approach to things is a things we humans do. And then we develop tools that, in the words of Nicholas Carr, create “dissimilarity cascades.” this is good interview to watch or read.
I think I will go outside today in the rain to see if there are any transient orcas about. A pod was hunting seals off the west side of our island earlier this week. They might still be around. This time of year, going outside means thinking carefully about how you dress, and this podcast episode on cold weather layering is the absolutely best discussion of dressing oneself for the weather that I have ever come across. I’m a bit obsessed about this topic, and it’s both important, and hard, to get it right.
And when I come home? I’ll make myself some dinner and settle down to watch the Vancouver Goldeneyes begin their history as Vancouver’s new Professional Women’s Hockey League team. Led by Canadian hockey legend Sarah Nurse, is it possible that this team will bring another pro women’s sports championship to Vancouver this year? Let’s see!
I publish posts like this a few times a week, but I don’t send them out to my email subscribers. Every few months I send out posts like this to everyone so you can see what else has captured my attention. Every post on my blog always gets cross posted to Bluesky and Mastodon and sometimes LInkedIn, but the best way to get notified is with an RSS reader. With an RSS reader like NetNewsWire, you can subscribe to anyone who publishes an RSS feed through their blog, Substack, Medium, or other publishing platform. Facebook and LinkedIn don’t publish RSS feeds, so if your good writing is happening there, the rest of the world won’t see it and there’s not much point in folks outside those sites sharing. Several times I have seen things go through my LinkedIn feed that looked interesting and then the app refreshes and lost the content. It sucks. Also it’s algorithmically influenced meaning that these sites feed me what they want me to read and not the other way around. Imagine sitting down to read a newspaper and someone puts People Magazine in your hands. If you are writing there, I strongly encourage you to also publish on a blog somewhere. Use a free service like WordPress so that the whole world can read and share what you are offering. And when Meta or LinkedIn finally go dark, you will have a record of your thoughts, contributions and development for all time and we all will have benefitted from them.
Stay dry!
We all won.
It was amazing to watch the Vancouver Rise win the NSL Playoff Championship last night and be crowned the first ever champions of professional women’s soccer in Canada. The Cup Final was an incredible occasion. AFC Toronto, the league champions, came into the match as favourites, having relatively cruised their way through the semi final against Montreal and with a winning record over Vancouver. The Rise have had an up and down season, but finished third in a tight field and made the semi finals with a couple of weeks to spare. They worked hard to beat Ottawa, winning 2-1 in the first leg of the semi final before going to Ottawa and needing penalties to settle the match. Yesterday’s match in Toronto was an occasion in so many ways. A lightning delay around 38th minute stopped play for a half an hour. Toronto dominated the first half and a goal from their 17 year old talisman Kaylee Hunter set them up with a 1-0 scoreline that looked like it would hold. But Vancouver found another gear, tightened up their defence and got a flukey goal to level the match before their own talisman, Holly Ward scored a beauty to take the lead 2-1. Vancouver needed to hold on for another 25 minutes though, which they did and toppled Toronto for the win.
There is so much that is amazing about this event, not the least of which is that there were 4 former TSS Rovers players involved in the match. For Toronto, Emma Regan and Ashley Cathro started and Kae Hansen was an unused sub. These players appeared for our club in 2018 when we had a team in the Women’s Premier Soccer League. For the Rise our former supporters’ player of the year Kirstin Tynan, who was our keeper and captain in 2023 and 2024, was the back up keeper behind goaltender of the year and Finals MVP Morgan McAslan. That’s Kirstin pictured above, losing her mind after the match!
Having watched these players develop, especially in the nearly invisible world of lower level women’s football, it was incredibly moving to see them on this stage, afforded this opportunity and doing it brilliantly. This whole season has been deeply meaningful for thousands of people and especially the women who played the game for so long at the highest levels without ever getting a chance to play professionally at home. You saw it in Amy Walsh’s sign off from the broadcast yesterday. She was one of Canada’s bad asses in her day, and has been a tireless champion of this league. You see what it means to her.
And on the other side of the country, our 2025 player of the year, Sofia Faremo (and 2025 TSS Rovers player Elyse Beaudry) won their Conference title for Simon Fraser University, so it was a day of championships for women’s soccer involving Rovers.
Support people to dream, learn, grow and build something and they will exceed expectations.
Poles and buildings at the Haida Heritage Centre at Kay ‘Llnagaay
In the midst of alarm and manufactured paranoia about the recent Cowichan Tribes case confirming their Aboriginal title to some lands in Richmond, I offer two things to help folks see this decision in it’s historical context and it’s promise for the future.
The first is this: the CBC published a useful background article on the history of these lands and the Cowichan’s relationship to them and it’s worth reading this to understand that this is neither a new issue or a particularly novel issue. The Crown obligated itself to negotiate in good faith with First Nations back in 1763 and in 1998 Aboriginal title was confirmed as existing in law in Canada. The current state of affairs is just one more stage in the long road towards reconciling the reality that both the Crown and First Nations have interests in land that are accommodated in the Constitution. We just need to work them out together.
And to that end, I came across this quote from Squamish chief Joe Mathias from back in 1987. He was attending the First Ministers conferences that followed the partition of Canada’s Constitution in 1981. The federal government committed to a series of conferences with Indigenous leaders and provincial and territorial premiers to figure out what section 35 of the new constitution was really about. That section confirmed that “The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.”
There was a fantastic pair of documentaries made about these conferences that are available at the National Film Board of Canada, called “Dancing Around the Table.” In one of those, Joe Mathias says this:
“What’s going to happen if they reach an agreement with the Aboriginal people, is we put something in the earth that’s never been there before: a relationship. Between a Nation of Indian people and European people. That’s the whole point of creation – a planting of the seed. Putting something on the earth that wasn’t there before. so that in modern contemporary Canada, we have put something on the earth that was not there before.”
Back when Joe Mathias said that, in about 1987 or so, I was in the first year of my undergraduate degree in Native Studies at Trent University. This was the kind of thing we heard all the time about the relationship that was being shaped in the Federal-Provincial First Ministers Conferences on Aboriginal Constitutional Matters (link is to one set of proceedings) and the desires that Indigenous peoples and Nations held for the future of Canada when something new, novel, just and creative could happen here. The documentary shows the intransigence, disrespect and outright hostility that many of the federal and provincial leaders held for First Nations, Inuit and Metis people, but that was nothing new for the Indigenous leaders in the room. Since the very beginning of relations between newcomers and Indigenous populations these were the kinds of people and attitudes that they encountered. Every effort to reach agreements was predicated, from the Indigenous side, on this idea of relationally, co-creation and opportunity. And it seems from the government side of the treaty (and often unilaterally) table the idea was to dispose of Indigenous interests quickly, conveniently and forever.
This is the reason why First Nations keep going to court on these issues and the reason why the keep winning. And even when folks like the Cowichan Tribes or the Haida Nations say “WE ARE NOT INTERESTED IN PRIVATE LAND HELD BY INDIVIDUALS” many people choose not to hear that. I think that comes from a deep shadow of colonization. The folks stirring up the hate see these relationships as a zero-sum game, becasue that is what the colonial mindset has been: “It is either our land or it’s their land.” But that has never been the case on the Indigenous side of the table, except perhaps were things were so framed by a zero-sum game that people had to find to keep what is theirs before inviting a future relationship. Private land title sits on top of provincial land and federal land. This is why you cannot do whatever you want on your own private land. You need permits to cut trees or store toxic waste. You have to abide by local by-laws about septic fields and water runoff. You cannot take your land out of Canada and give it to the United States or Denmark or Kenya. Land title and jurisdiction is not “either this or that.” Aboriginal title is NOT the same as fee simple or provincial or federal title. They can all co-exist.
So with all of the rhetoric (much of which is just plain incorrect legal interpretation bordering on deliberate misinformation) I encourage us all to understand what reconciliation has always been. It has ALWAYS been about planting a new seed together, of using the potential of relationship in Canada to do something remarkable and world-leading and showing humanity what will happen when we place what Joe Mathias would have known as “chenchénstway” – lifting each other up – at the centre of possibility, collaboration, development and relationship. This is the untapped potential of pursuing pathways towards reconciliation. It is hard work but it is SO beautifully rewarding for everyone. I plead with my fellow settler Canadians to deeply understand what reconciliation really means, to hold the potential for a world which no one can see alone, and to approach the conversations and deliberations around this work with the same generosity of spirit and vision that Joe Mathias and hundreds of other Indigenous leaders have always had. It’s an invitation. Let’s say yes.