It’s a beautiful day on the south coast of British Columbia. A strong northwesterly breeze is pushing wind driven swell down the Strait of Georgia onto the southwestern shore of Bowen Island. There is snow on the mountain tops, but down here at sea level, it’s 7 degrees. The sun is shining and everything points to a clear evening to watch the lunar eclipse.
The rest of North America is locked into a cold freeze, and next week I’ll be tasting a bit of it with a two week trip to New Brunswick, Ohio and Ontario. This is the time of year people on the west coast write to their friends and relatives in the east and show pictures of the daffodils coming up. It doesn’t feel like winter here anymore, and that’s not unusual for late January. Saying it’s winter until March 21 really has no bearing to what teh rest of the continent is going through. I’ve lived on this island for more than 17 years and I long ago decided that there needs to be a different way to talk about seasons here.
For various reason I identify much more with the Celtic calendar, which marks the year into six week blocks, like this:
- February 1 – Imbolc (“In the belly of the ewes”) which is the first day of spring and the new year.
- March 21 – Spring equinox
- May 1 – Bealtaine (“bright May Day”) marking the beginning of summer and the flourishing of life
- June 21 – Summer solstice and mid-summer day
- August 1 – Lughnasadh (“assembly to honour Lugh, the god of light”) which is the beginning of the fall harvest season
- September 21 – Fall equinox
- November 1 – Samhain (“the end of summer harvest”) which is really the beginning of winter and marked by commemorating ancestors and death.
- December 21 – Winter solstice and mid-winter day.
These markers line up much more with the feeling of seasons on Bowen Island. We mark some of these days locally, with a May Day festival, and a huge community celebration on Hallowe’en as well as its solstice celebrations. And it usually feels very much like winter is over by February 1.
Of course there is an ancient calendar in this part of the world, which from time immemorial has been known as Skwxwú7mesh temíxw. Today I spent time going through the amazing Squamish-English dictionary, reading and thinking about the seasons. The Squamish traditional calendar is focused on activities related to ceremonial and food gathering rhythms. It makes sense that the word for season is “tem” which means “the time of.” Instead of experiencing disconnection (like “it doesn’t feel like winter”), in Squamish the name of the season is based on what is happening on the land and sea, bound up in activities upon which the lives of human beings and communities depend. The season changes when life says it changes.
Traditionally Squamish seasonal names therefore aren’t generally tied to moons or the length of days. Looking at the names for seasons gives you an idea of where the attention of people is in any given time of year. The Squamish version of the European calendar uses names from seasons that roughly correspond to each month. Squamish new year begins in February, when the frogs start singing again, which signifies the end of winter. Of course this happens much earlier in the year on Bowen Island than it does up in the Cheakamus, Elaho and Squamish River valleys. Here on Bowen Island (Nexwlélexwm in Squamish), the frogs will usually start singing during late February.
The calendar is such a clumsy way of describing the rhythms in this territory. It creates arbitrary names and times for what is happening. That clumsiness is the result of the colonization that separated people from the rhythms of the lands and waters and, if you know the way things happen in the territory, you can tell reading through these names how clumsy the fit is between the Squamish times and the calendar months:
- February – tem welhxs (time of the last snow, or when the frogs come to life)
- March – tem slhawt’ (herring time)
- April – tem tsá7tskay (time when the salmonberry shoots are collected)
- May – tem yetwán (time when the salmonberries ripen)
- June – tem kw’eskw’ás (warm time, also used as a word for “summer”)
- July – tem ?w’élemexw (when the blackberries are ripe)
- August – tem t’aka7 (time when the salad berries are ripe)
- September – tem cháyilhen (salmon run time)
- October – tem p’i7tway (time when the deer mate)
- November – tem ekwáyanexw (fall time)
- December – etl’im lhkaych’ (short days month)
- January – mina lhkaych’ (small or child month)
So it makes sense to talk about seasons, especially on the south coast where lunar calendars are hard to use given how cloudy it is during much of the year. There are may other seasons that didn’t make the cut for translation to the calendar, during which the primary activity of the people is described:
- Tem mílha7 – “Winter dancing season,” when ceremonies take place in the longhouse.
- Tem t’ixw – “Winter,” meaning the time to go down, possibly from the idea that people would go down into pit houses in this time of year, or come down into the low parts of the land.
- Tem s7áynixw – “Time of the eulachon”, a small oily smelt that arrives in rivers in April, although these fish are almost completely extirpated from Squamish rivers now. This happens for a short time right after herring season in late March and early April.
- Tem kwu7s – “Spring salmon harvest time” which begins in early summer.
- Tem achcháwem – “Salmon spawning time,” from late August through to late November during which all the focus is on harvesting fish for the winter and spring. This is when the biggest runs of salmon come back to the territory, mainly chum and coho. This is also the time of the heaviest rains and storms on the coast, which fill the rivers, enabling the fish to find there way back to their home streams.
- Tem p’í7tway ta sxwi7shen – “Time when the deer are mating.”
- Tem kwáxnis – “Time when the chum salmon run.”
So living on Bowen Island in a community of settlers anchored in the rhythms of the land and sea, and the cultural traditions of newcomers, I’d say we could develop a calendar of sorts that relates to the way the we live here. We aren’t a big time ocean people, and are without a fishing fleet so our rhythms are much more dictated by what is happening in the forests around us. Inspired by the Squamish tradition of letting the frogs mark the new year, my first draft of such a calendar might look like this:
- Forest music time – in which the frogs wake up and the dawn chorus of songbirds starts to sing.
- New shoots time – when the skunk cabbage and salmon berry shoots begin to appear.
- Blossoms time – first flowers on the berry bushes and the cherry and plum trees around the island.
- Salmonberry time – Late May and into June, when the salmon berries ripen. Time to order firewood.
- Huckleberry time – Following the salmon berries, time of the first swims in the sea
- Salal berry time – the heart of summer when the salal berries are at their ripest.
- Blackberry time – August, when the blackberries are weighing down their bushes.
- Storm season – lasts about two and a half months, from the end of September to the middle of December and begins after the tourists have left and during which we hunker down and celebrate Hallowe’en, Remembrance Day, Light up the Cove and the traditional Christmas season. This time of year is dark and the predominant winds are the southeasterlies that bring rain and power outages.
- Winter – when the major wind storms are gone and we get snow at sea level and the Squamish winds are most dominant. This usually lasts from December to the end of January.
Sitting by my fire, I’m totally enchanted by the poetry of our place and time here on our little rocky island.
Note: the typeface on my blog does not render all the Skwxú7mesh characters correctly. In this post the underlined “k” and “x” characters are replaced with regular k and x’s. You can find the correct spellings for many of these words at this link.
For a number of years I have been studying and learning about evaluation. To be honest, working primarily in the non-profit world and working for social good and social change, evaluation always seemed to me to be the bugaboo that ruined the party. While we’re out there trying to create new things, innovate and respond to novel challenges, build relationships and community, and experiment and fail, evaluation loomed over us like a dark spectre, scolding us for being flakey or demanding that we be more grown up and more responsible.
More than that, I had many experiences of evaluation being used as a weapon of power to exert control over the way projects were unfolding. Controlling the money and controlling the standards under which it is spent is hugely powerful. That power can be used badly or by people who don’t want to let go of control over their agendas. And it’s costly and frustrating for people in small organizations to feel like your strategic vision is always subservient to the evaluation framework.
So my foray into evaluation began when I started learning about Developmental Evaluation, and from there, learning about all the cool things that evaluators are doing to try to help organizations and communities makes sense of action in complexity. It has led me into powerful learning relationships with colleagues like Trilby Smith from the Vancouver Foundation, with whom I have been learning through a long term Theory of Philanthropy project with that organizations. I’ve connected with Art of Hosting practitioners like Rita Fierro (with whom I’m developing a course) and Nancy Fritsche-Eagan who are really curious about how to do deep participatory facilitation work in the service of good evaluation. And I’ve developed the start of some really beautiful learning relationships with Jara Dean-Coffey who is spearheading the world of Equitable Evaluation and Kim Van der Woerd and Billie Joe Rogers from Reciprocal Consulting who use culturally responsive evaluation to decolonize learning and research.
All of this learning and relationship has made me a more conscious facilitator and strategist. It has turned me from someone who is afraid of evaluation to someone who embraces it as a beautiful way to deepen learning, innovation, and strategic work. And it has equipped to confront people who abuse evaluation practice by using it to hide bald faced power grabs and subtle colonization.
Yesterday I got to play with one of my new learning and working partners, Ciaran Camman and their podcasting pal Brian Hoessler as a guest on their EvalCafe Podcast where we explored the intersection of evaluation, facilitation and complexity. This February Carolyn, Trilby, Rita, and Jara will join me to run an online course exploring these topics with my buddies at Beehive Productions. I invite you to join us there for what will be a really amazing set of conversations intended to open up our practices and apply these tools to complex projects.
I’m excited by the fact that I’m doing work in which facilitation and evaluation meet and moosh together. It’s making me better at what I do.
Back in December I announced my intention to take a sabbatical from Facebook and see what would happen. There were a number of factors in that decision, and I’ll share what I learned and what I’m doing now.
I had a few reasons for wanting to take a break:
- Facebook was a huge time waster, and earlier last year I deleted the app from my phone (it and Messenger and Instagram track your life your life and serve you ads based on what you’ve been doing). As a result, I have spent a lot less time there, although I do spend a lot of time on twitter.
- Facebook in engaged in undermining democracy and articles I was reading in 2018 pointed to their intentional and unintentional aiding and abetting behaviour with respect to undermining elections and eroding democratic engagement. Here is a good Atlantic article on that.
- Facebook creates a deep gravity well for conversation. It tailors your news feed using algorithms to only serve you a very small slice of your friends’ activity. Much of what you see confirms what you know and it is designed to activate your brain in a way that causes you to share information and pass it on, deepening confirmation bias, and spreading rumours and lies.
- People communicate on Facebook in shallow and brief ways, meaning large and important conversations for local communities become pile ons, where people that have never made the effort to introduce themselves to others in real life nevertheless feel free to be mean spirited and even borderline libellous while hiding behind their virtual identities. This has major implications in a small community like mine, where big local issues result in people starting rumours, passing judgements and ostracizing and slandering others in a way they would never do if they had to write to the newspaper, or see these people at the General Store. Discussions of complex ideas have devolved into the equivalent of drive-by shootings, often deeply personal.
These were the reasons I took a break and these are the reasons I am not coming back in a meaningful way.
When I started blogging in 2001, the promise of the Web 2.0 was that it would usher in the era of the creator. Any one could now create work on line. Recording studios, radio stations, television and film productions, newspaper, and magazines and book publishing all used to be inaccessible for the common person or the beginner artist. Now anyone could use whatever form of medium they wanted to say what is important to them. Before social media, Web 2.0 was about content creation media. It took time and effort to do it, but you could build a life, connect with others, find community in far flung corners of the globe, and make a contribution.
When social media came about into widespread use, around 2007 in my case with Facebook, the blogging world almost completely disappeared. People whose blogs I followed moved into facebook where I followed them for a while until their well crafted posts were lost in the endless stream of mindless diarizing, half-baked opinions and, later, the endless copypasta of shared memes and viral content. I had a hard time finding my people, but I was enjoying wishing friends a happy birthday and connecting with people from school, 30 years ago.
Over the past ten or so years what has happened is that my time has disappeared into the suck hole of scrolling through useless content instead of producing some of my own. Yesterday, talking with my friend Julien Thomas, I remembered that somewhere I said that democracy depends on us being active participants and not consumers.
Social media has made us consumers of other people’s content. In the 2001-2007 era of blogging, someone would write a post and if it was meaningful to you, you would quote it with an annotation about why it mattered and what your take was on it. Conversation was more considered and content was savoured and appreciated and hardly ever simply passed on. We were all content creators, hyperlinked to other content creators. When commenting began, discussion started to remain in a limited number of places but it was all open in the public and available to anyone. Comment spam really killed open discussion on blogs and maintaining spam-free comments sections became time-consuming. (Luckily there are better tools now, which is why you need to wait for me to approve comments on my blog).
With the dawn of Facebook however, content creation became highly concentrated in only a relatively and proportionally small number of places. Most people on Facebook simply pass it on other people’s stuff, often without any credit or link back to the original creator, and discussion happens behind closed doors and isn’t archived or very easy to access.
These days we are consumers of other people’s content, and we generally pass on what we like and agree with, amplifying it’s impact without adding to it. A few people have complained that they miss me on facebook, that they miss my voice and the things I say. But what I notice is that they like those things mostly because they can pass them on, or because what I have to say validates their views. It makes me I wonder where THEIR voice is, why they haven’t been thinking about things and sharing original opinions. And I wonder half-heartedly why I never get stuff from in my news feed that challenges my biases and my ideas anymore.
I have recently created a sock puppet twitter account to engage with conservatives in Canada, including those who are nationalist, populist and extreme right-wing. I am curious and concerned about the rise of populism and nationalism in Canada and the global connections between far right leaders who are promoting anti-immigrant, anti-globalist politics and messages. Through my “fake” twitter account, I am meeting conservatives that are also opposed to these far right echo chambers, and I am having my own ideas challenged. I am getting into debates and conversations with people I vehemently disagree with. I am posing on twitter as a real person, but not as “Chris Corrigan.”
I’m not going to reveal the identity of that twitter account. It says something to me about the nature of the social media landscape that I feel deeply uncomfortable showing up as my own self in those conversations. Debating with Nazis is not a safe thing to do, especially when one is debating with people hiding behind anonymous identities. And so I show up as a real person but with a fake name. Interesting.
Social media has become a place where relationships have become commercialized transactions and where democratic engagement has devolved into a fact free festival of insulting the other and patting your friends and allies on the back while being served highly specific advertising messages from corporations and political influencers. All the while, someone other than you is getting rich every time you connect to a friend. While it is nice to “stay in touch” I have to say that most of what passes across my screens on facebook is of very little value to me.
I would encourage people to go back to, or start blogging, and I’d encourage you to do it in the spirit of 2001 blogging, not in the spirit of “blog as PR tool” that we see today: share things, speculate, use it as a platform for what I call “Open Source Learning.” Use it as a gift exchange, not as a digital business card. Embed links to other people and add to the gifts of knowledge you receive before passing them on. You can start with WordPress as a powerful, free and easy-to-get-started-with tool.
For me I’ll be using facebook in these ways going forward:
- I’ll be continuing to promote workshops and events there, and for limited times, participating in facebook groups where that is chosen by the group as a way of keeping in touch.
- I will occasionally scan my feed and if I see that you have a birthday, or have experienced a death in the family, and you are a person with whom I have a personal relationship, you may well get an email or a phone call from me.
- I will share blog posts on facebook, but encourage discussion to happen here on the blog, where the world can see it and anyone can participate.
I’ll be going off Instagram and What’s App entirely (both owned by Facebook) and continuing to use twitter (@chriscorrigan) as a place for spontaneous conversation and meeting new voices. You can find my photos on Flickr, which has recently become revitalized and awesome again. If you have a blog, let me know and I’ll add you to my RSS feed (I use Inoreader for that)
On the Art of Hosting email list last month, there was an inquiry posted by Monica Nissén asking about scaling the Art of Hosting as a leadership practice through levels of engagement. By “Art of Hosting” Monica means the four fold practice, which is the basic framework for leadership that gives our community a coherent centre of practice, around presence, participation, hosting others, and co-creation. Monica asked whether hoping these practices would just go viral in a networked way is enough, and I replied with the following, tracing a couple of long term projects I have been involved in that have supported systems change in child and family services in British Columbia.
It’s definitely deliberate and networked. For me, it’s about building capacity. Our biggest work the last 9 years has been providing the Leadership 2020 program to social service workers in British Columbia working with children, youth and families in agencies, indigenous communities and government.
(You can read a summary of our five year evaluation of this program here)
We continue to developmentally evaluate as we go, and as a result, each cohort is different, each curriculum is slightly changed and we find new and more relevant ways to introduce people to this practice.
The basis of that program is a leadership approach that is very similar and deeply informed by what we in the Art of Hosting community know as the four-fold practice: that great leadership is personal, practice-based, participatory and perceptive. The program is structured in cohorts made up of people that have to apply. We mix “legacy” leaders with experienced and emerging leaders to show that learning never ends. Each cohort participates in two 5 day residencies – which are basically extended Art of Hosting workshops – and a nine month program of learning in between, featuring webinars and coaching and peer support for the application of tools and methods.
Over the past eight years we have brought about 450 people through the program. While it’s about learning in participatory ways, the program has a kind of hidden agenda. We are very clear that, about every 20 years or so, the child welfare system in our province goes through a massive restructuring, often provoked by a crisis, but not always. We have always invited our participants to both practice their leadership on the issues that are immediately in front of them, but to do it in a way that builds their capacity to respond when that later transformation happens. We want them to be the first to run to the centre when the old system is dying, eager to use their capacity, relationships, and practice to create the new.
In these days, the system is now beginning that deeper transformation, and fortunately it hasn’t been preceded by a crises. Instead, the woman who founded the Leadership 2020 program, Jennifer Charlesworth, was appointed to a five-year term as the Representative for Children and Youth in British Columbia, a very powerful position that is independent of the government and that can make powerful recommendations about systems change, usually as a result of different issues or events. Jennifer is bringing a collaborative approach to her work and to be successful in that, she is partly relying on the 450 Leadership 2020 graduates that are spread all through the system. There is a built-in capacity that is being invited into its biggest calling, reaching across traditional divides of indigenous/non-indigenous and government/community. Jennifer’s appointment to the position was received with widespread enthusiasm and optimism. We are hoping to see that the system is able to evolve faster with this capacity embedded in a way that is less painful than a collapse and transformation.
Participatory practices have been used for a long time in the field of social work and child and family services. In 2003 I started working with David Stevenson to use Open Space, Cafe, Circle, and the four fold practice to begin to build an indigenous governance systems for child and family services in BC. Our colleagues Kris Archie and Kyla Mason, Pawa Hayupis and many other indigenous Art of Hosting practitioners came into and out of that work. Toke Moeller and Monica Nissen and Patricia Galaczy joined us to teach Art of Hosting to families and community members who were participating in that work: http://www.turtleisland.org/healing/healing-cousins.htm. Between 2003 and 2009 we did something important on Vancouver Island. We started something and then had to abandon it for a different form, because not every idea works. But David later took that work with him into his work in executive positions in government. Kris has now become the CEO of the Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada and Kyra has become an extraordinary executive director of Usma, a Nuu-Chah-Nulth agency on Vancouver Island. Pawa is currently doing her Masters of Arts in indigenous governance and she and David continue to offer Art of Hosting trainings locally, as do Caitlin and I. In each of these new settings capacity building for participatory leadership has been used.
Meanwhile, Jennifer and a small group of us began Leadership 2020 in 2011. It has taken 15 years of developing leadership at the grass roots level and seeing that leadership grow into positions of power that has allowed us to work with the system this way. There is capacity in BC now, hopefully enough to take the system through the changes that are now coming, the ones we have prepared for, the ones we are waiting for, the ones we are making, and the ones that will surprise us.
It takes courage, patience, time, power, stewardship, relationship, and community to do this work. It takes a common language and shared perspectives and it takes massive diversity and difference to build resourcefulness and resilience. It is costly, politically, emotionally and materially, and it is not easy work. It requires a fierce commitment to relationship and a willingness to be at the edge of safety, with one foot out into the dangerous world. You get uplifted, hurt, angry, and joyful. But it’s a long game and you cannot sacrifice the depth of the work for ease and comfort. And no one person or team can do it alone.
It is not enough to do some trainings and walk away. The viral network does not just magically appear. Beautiful workshop experiences are only useful for systems change if they are connected to power. It requires staying in.
I just realized a few weeks ago that, although I never intended to work in the field of child and family services, that this may indeed be my life’s work. It has been nearly 20 years since I first walked into Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services to take on a job organizing their negotiations to become a “delegated agency” able to make decisions for and with indigenous children and families instead of government doing it. I think in that time I’ve learned a bit about what it takes to create the capacity in a large system that gives us a chance. That’s all I can say we’ve done at the moment, but I’m an optimist, so I live with the hope and gratitude that the legacy of the work we have done will make the world better for the kids who suffer the most in it.
Many times when clients contact me they ask if I can help them come to consensus or alignment on their shared purpose or desired outcomes. They expect facilitation will help them to do this.
Sometimes this is a good idea. If we are working in a highly constrained project, like building a new building, getting everyone on the same page is important. But it’s also easy. All you have to do is bring in the experts, design a good implementation plan for a good solution and have project managers keep everyone on track, step by step. Most organizations are good at that, and if they aren’t they can easily learn the skills to do it.
Its not the linear project managers that are the problem. Its the problem that is the problem.
Conditioned to planning and implementing in this linear fashion, many organizations get flummoxed when they confront a problem with no obvious solution and no clear pathway forward. There may be multiple ways to think about the issues, multiple experiences of what is happening, and divergent and even contradictory desires around where we should be going. These kinds of wicked, seemingly intractable problems breed conflict, and the only recourse for leaders is to tolerate it for a while and then impose a solution with no guarantee that folks will be happy, or even that the solution is the best one possible.
These kinds of problems are complex: wicked, sticky, intractable, Volitile Uncertain Ccomplex and Ambiguous. Tough nuts to crack. There are lots of ways to describe them and lots of ways they drive frustration and conflict.
The common reactive response to these situations seems to be to first gather more information and try harder to find the obvious answer and try to get everyone on the same page. When I’m first working with clients experiencing these kinds of issues, I try to steer them away from certainty and alignment. I point out that in complex environments you don;t get to predict outcomes and you need to look for emergent practices and emergent solutions. Innovation never looks like something you’ve ever done before. Studying the present for the answer will not turn up the gold lying just out of eyesight under a rock. Complex solutions are for all practical purposes, infinitely unpredictable.
So what is the answer? Throw a bunch of ideas at teh wall and see what sticks?
Well, sometimes that can work, especially if you are truly out of ideas. But generally you have something to go on: a sense of direction, a sense that HERE isn’t where we want to be and that there is probably a better THERE that we should get to.
The issues is that, if we truly knew how to get from the undesirable HERE to the much coveted THERE, we probably would have done it by now. In complexity work, the first step here is admitting that trying to achieve pre-planned outcomes simply won’t work. Instead we need to go in a direction of travel towards a better place.
There are a couple of key ways to get started here. First, I always have groups spend time describing their current situation. We are looking for the patterns and dynamics that keep the system stuck in a place that isn’t working. Sometimes this can involve sophisticated research and narrative capture and other times it’s a simpler process of observation and pattern detection. Understanding the state of play helps us to discover an important secret, and that is, the inclination of the system to change.
Imagine an organization whose culture is fragmented and siloed with petty conflicts and turf wars over resources. Politics is rampant and some people seem to be at work only to stir the pot and not actually do the work. If you are a leader you might want to try to ay down the law and tell everyone to smarten up and focus on the organization’s mission. That never works. You can’t simply command a culture to change.
Instead you might convene a group of people to talk about what would be better. And people may say that they want a place that is more collaborative, more connected, and more fun to be at. What you have there is a group of people describing a preferred direction. It’s different from an outcome. It is instead a starting place, a place to orient their inquiry and their work to change things.
One thing you can do is begin by looking for places of positive deviency in the system. Bad as it is, there may well be people that are nevertheless already working in the preferred way, even in small ways. Those stories give you something to experiment with, and they reveal an inclination in the system that might lead to change. Conversely you may find that literally no one is working in this way and that the organization is truly mired in a pattern of deep dysfunction. In this case, the way forward is a radical breaking of the patterns that keep it in place.
Doing both of these things is a wise way to get started. INstead of requiring everyone to work together towards a common goal, you give space to people to work in small and diverse ways to discover how they might nudge the system towards a better THERE.
If you watch a river for a while you will notice that the river flows in both directions at once. Little obstacles in the river, like logs and rocks, create eddies that cause the current to turn back on itself. A living river is full of these back eddies and contradictory currents. Small creatures take refuge there, food and nutrients get trapped there and don’t all wash away to the sea. At the finest granularity of scale, it may even seem that the river is flowing backwards.
And yet the direction of the water i undeniable. It flows down, towards the sea and will always find the low point in its terrain.
That’s how strategic direction looks in complexity. Choose a direction, try multiple things that might work or might not. Contradict each other. Find the places where someone is working against the current and thriving in that little back eddy. Commit to a direction and see what can get you to go that way.
Rivers sit in a topography and changing the landscape is very hard. But changing the culture of a team or and organization can be easier if you work at the level of patterns. Find the patterns that hold behaviours in place and try small things to shift them . See what happens. In organizations you do get the shift the river banks.
It’s more work than making everyone sign your pledge of values, but it’s more meaningful, because the change you get is creative, co-owned and sustainable.