The blog posts dried up because my evenings were taken in celebration, but here’s day four.
There is a deliberate pattern that unfolds over the week of the Shambhala Institute. Monday is a day of arrival and orientation to one’s personal intention and the building of a collective field of learning. Tuesday and Wednesday, we enter the learning journey that brings us all to challenge and to the very edges of the internal questions we are living with. Thursday and Friday are about celebration and re-entry into the world.
Thursday saw a plenary session that was startling for its content and its process. Adam Kahane, Meg Wheatley and Jim Gimmian presented a keynote plenary about strategy at the edge, and the edge they tried to cultivate was one where everything we believed in might not be true. We began in small groups discussing the question of what we believed at our deep core. A sample of these beliefs were harvested from the the audience and these beliefs were taken to be representative of the general sense of the community. Such values as inclusion and the power of relationships to transform systems and the beliefs around presence and intention were the sorts of things that were harvested.
When these beliefs were harvested, Meg then asked the question “What if these were all false?” There then began a kind of heady conversation on stage between these three rather large presences about hope and hopelessness and the clarity of living without beliefs at all. Adam invited the audience to pull their chairs around the stage in a tight mob, a claustrophobic crowd all facing the three. It was deliberately provocative and controversial and it seemed to have the effect of leaving people either shocked and confused nd in grief, or elated and detached. I was certainly in the latter group.
I was elated, because I guess I just am. My first reaction to Meg’s question was similar to my friend David Stevenson’s reaction: we were surprised that Meg had adopted the assumption that we believe these things are even true at all. We both know that they are simply beliefs. They could just as easily be true as not, and the question “What if these beliefs were false?” was simply pointing at another belief as well. It felt as if we were playing an odd shell game, shifting around emotional centre from one thing to another until people were finally felt either manipulated or above it all. There was a huge mix of reactions to the plenary along a wide spectrum of emotions.
I think the point of the exercise was to help us find freedom from our beliefs and not be addicted to communities and situations that feed unhelpful views of the world. I’ve seen Byron Katie doing similar work and imagine her hosting that plenary, inviting people not only to question their beliefs but also introduce a practice for how we could continue to question them and in so doing find more and more clarity as we design strategies from the edge where our selves meet reality.
At any rate, I had a shimmering moment of clarity about my own sort of permanent state of optimism. It’s obvious that we cannot know the future, even though many of us are certain that some things will surely come to pass or never change. But in the context of doom versus hope it seems clear to me that optimism may actually be the only useful stance. If things are not doomed, but merely hard, then it would seem that optimism would be a useful place from which to work. But if things are truly doomed and we are all about to face imminent death, then we have a choice: optimism or pessimism will have an equally useless effect. So why not learn from those we have seen die beautifully among us, and choose an optimistic and peaceful death. Making peace with our death, indeed, is really the last act that we will ever get a chance to perform, and it may be that this is what our lives are all about.
It seems clear to me now that pessimism (including the “I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist” stance) is simply a statement of fear that one is not yet friends with. And if one is not friends with fear, then one may actually not be resourceful enough to be of much use in a crisis, or in a moment of chaos and uncertainty.
In my own life I faced one such moment in in 1995 in a mountaineering accident. A group of us were traversing an avalanche slide on the slopes of Mount Seymour in North Vancouver when one of our party slipped and fell 300 feet off a cliff. In the moment that she disappeared, I found myself extraordinarily calm. Three of our party were rather more panicky and were unable to be of much help until we got them to safety, The two of us who remained calm were really living in a state of extreme optimism . The only thing to do was be peaceful and resourceful and get help as quickly as we could. It turned out that our friend survived and in fact the rescue effort was a text book example. I was struck during and afterwards that my adrenal state was actually calm. Of course there have been plenty of times when I have been frightened and useless, but in that deep crisis, my body somehow adopted calm presence as a response. I was fearless and unworried. My friend had gone over a cliff and six of us remained with an overwhelming need to find safety before we could do anything about her. But without that calm, we were in extreme danger.
It seems to me that a pessimistic stance is more about the individual’s fear of inadequacy. If you feel overwhelmed, you give up. But two people in exactly the same situation may react in totally different ways, meaning that there are no givens about any situation or any result.
I sometimes use a juggling metaphor to describe what I think of as my stance that “I’m not an optimist, I’m a realist.” When you juggle you are working with the reality of gravity. Gravity ensures that every ball that drops will hit the ground. That is reality. But juggling is not so much cheating gravity as it is entering a partnership with it – the reliability of balls dropping at constant rate is actually what makes juggling possible.
When I teach people to juggle they generally come in one of two attitudes. A pessimist might generally watch me juggle and say “I could never do that.” Even as they gradually learn to work with one ball and then two and then three, they will deny the possibility that they could ever juggle. Usually what they are speaking is their fear of inadequacy or embarrassment at failing. Perfectionists are often pessimists because the reality never lives up to their ideal. Pessimists often give up on themselves and me, and they never learn the deceptively simple act of juggling three balls.
Optimists on the other hand approach the situation with curiosity and are usually interested in the aesthetic experience of juggling as well. Optimists learn fast because they recognize immediately that the balls always drop, so there is no problem, and their challenge is to gain more and more mastery, producing more and more beauty and living into more and more amazement at what they can do. Once they learn one trick, they hunger for more, they take satisfaction in what they can do and seek to improve and do it better. They are fearless about their learning and this resourcefulness produces results that continue to surprise them. I have taught people with very little perceived natural ability to juggle within three minutes. I have also taught people who don’t believe in them selves as much, but who take so much longer because we have to break through the belief that dropping the ball is wrong.
The truth is that the balls always fall to to the ground. The beauty of juggling is simply the ongoing possibility that the balls might not drop.
When we partner with reality it doesn’t matter what beliefs we carry. They are all false. And so, taking the advice of my mentor and hero and partner Caitlin Frost who is a deep practitioner of Byron Katie’s work, we need only question the beliefs that cause us suffering and not worry about the ones that don’t. If we can think of a peaceful reason for keeping a thought, we should do so. If not, work to shed the thought and make friends with reality. I can see this work now as terrifying optimism, a fierce sharpening of our own edges where we meet the world with resourcefulness, power and care.
This week I was reaffirmed in my belief that my work is to continue to be in the world living and working at every turn with the possibility that today the whole thing just might not fall apart.
So it’s been more than thirty days that I have been on my 30 day learning journey, but here is a harvest from some significant conversations. Consider this the tender early sproing greens. There is more to follow.
I began this learning journey leaning into thinking about what role I can play in taking change to scale. My reasons for this inquiry have to do with the fact that I am increasingly working with systems, beyond organizations and beyond groups. Also, some of us in the Art of Hosting community and the Berkana Institute are deep in this inquiry as well, wondering how we extend to influencing systems.
Two major insights have come to me this past month. First, working with my deep friends Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Phil Cass and Tim Merry on the Food and Society conference in Phoenix back in April we found ourselves very much playing at various levels of scale. This was a gathering of the Good Food Movement, and our intention as designers and process artists was to create a container in which the movement could experience itself as a movement, as a learning community working towards shifting a large food system. We were brought in not just to work with the conference as facilitators, but to help build a field among the hosting team and the organizations involved to do this work of having the movement expereince itself. For a number of years, Kellogg has had an intention to shift the percentage of healthy, fair, affordable and green food from 2% to 10% of the total amount of food in the American system. It is the Good Food Movement, such as it is, that is doing this work.
Moving from pioneers to systems of influence.
On the final day of the conference we had Debbie Frieze and Tom Hurley share the Berkana perspective on taking change to scale. Debbie and Meg Wheatley cracked a very simple model, called the “Lifecycle of Emergence” of doing this that names four phases in evolving a system of influence. First, pioneers in an emerging system give themselves a NAME which makes it much easier to find one another. Before the local food movement started to take hold there was no name for the people that were running farmers markets, creating community shared agriculture, and promoting local menus. Through the 1990s, a movement sprang up, which we now know as the local food movement (and some people are becoming increasingly “locavores,” promoting 100 mile diets and such). Once a network of practitioners is named it can find itself and begin to CONNECT.
Humberto Maturana is quoted as saying that the way to make a system more healthy is to connect it to more of itself. In this model of emergent scale, connecting is how the network emerges. Think of all the networks that have propagated through web technology since blogging began a new practice of naming, which Google helps along by making it easy to find one another. Networks themselves are useful, but it is only when they deepen to communities of practice, do they begin to exert influence. Community of practice form when people NOURISH networks, by offering to a shared centre for example. A network is relationship neutral, a community has a quality of relationship that takes it to another level. At this level we are able to do work together, support each other and create opportunities for new things to happen, born in the social space of collaboration.
As communities of practice do more and more, and they tell their stories and ILLUMINATE their work, they become systems of influence. A system of influence is able to do more than a community of practice, and it strikes me that it is less intentional. There are however, a set of practices that are useful for journeying through this ever scaling world. Tom Hurley spoke to those at the Food and Society conference, and Toke, Monica and I have been thinking about them from the perspective of what Hosting practice has to offer.
The journey of the practitioner at increasing levels of scale
As people move from facilitation to organizational development and beyond, I think there are five kind of archetypal levels on which facilitators or hosting practitioners work. There is a strong correlation between our own learning journey and through the ways in which works moves to scale. Of course there are many ways that people come to the work of large sclae change, through management, activism, advocacy, spiritual tradition and systemic analytics. he journey I am describing here is the one I am on and seems widely shared by people who learn about organizations and systems by first working with groups.
So this journey can be summarized by five basic archetypal fields. in short these are individual, one on one, group, organization, system.
In many Art of Hosting retreats we talk about hosting oneself. This basically means being in active inquiry with oneself. A thirty day learning journey is one way of hosting oneself, as is Byron Katie’s work, Otto Scharmer’s Presencing and Angeles Arrien’s Four Fold Way. These are all ways of conversing with oneself, staying open and in inquiry and noticing what is alive.
When we bring ourselves from this space into conversational space, we show up present and open and able to see new things emerging, even in small one on one conversations. We enter these conversations as open listeners, which is what Adam Kahane’s work has been about. To enter a social space as a listener is to attend to what could be born in the possibility of open social space. This is the beginning of a journey that takes us to a different place than if we show up talking.
The next level, the level of hosting the group, is the first experience we have of letting go. If we host as listeners, we begin to cultivate the practice of holding space, which is fundamentally different from showing up in a group as a directive, authoritarian presence. The host – the one who can hold space – practices a form of leadership that is able to attend to the emergent, exactly the capacity that is needed to see how work can scale. As we move through these levels we begin to let go more and more into these social spaces, while staying very rooted and present to our own self.
Once we have worked with groups, a consciousness emerges that asks the question about whether what we know about groups can apply to organizations. Harrison Owen made this leap with his Inspired Organization, seeing the scaling up from one Open Space meeting to a way of working together. Michael Herman did the same with the Inviting Organization. The Appreciative Inquiry world seeks to apply this worldview to asset-based community development and positive organizational scholarship. We start seeing that the things we know about self-organization, emergence and collaborative creativity can actually be encoded into organizational structures. Chaordic design becomes possible.
Finally there comes a time when we begin to ask if large systems can operate this way, and of course many do. Harrison points to the work of Stuart Kaufman who has studied self-organization for decades as evidence that Open Space is the operating system of the universe. Juanita Brown and David Isaacs and the World Cafe community are exploring the implications for conversational leadership and “the world as cafe.” Systems CAN and DO operate according to these principles, but at the level of the practitioner, we fall further and further away from controlling outcomes.
Instead, what we need to learn to do is to give up entirely to “the field.” My friend Monica has been saying “only a field can hold a field” and this is our experience from the Food and Society conference. We are still holding space for the emergent results of the Food and Society gathering, and we are finding it impossible to do this except in a field of practitioners. No one person is capable of this work alone.
And so our journey comes to this: host oneself into inquiry, listen with others, host conversations that matter, co-create organizations together, and participate in the field that can host the field, doing work that is greater than any one person can do. This is how we can show up in initiatives that begin to scale quickly to the level of systems of influence. Control will act as a brake on the acceleration of scale, letting go propels it forward.
There is a saying in the Tao te Ching: know the male, but keep to the female. In other words, know power and creativity, and keep to the receptive and open. Know creation, be open to emergence. This small phrase sums up everything I have been learning about how to practice to create shift. If you want to change the world you have to be able to disappear into the field that is doing the work without losing your capabilities, your contributions and your gifts and without being tied to your personal vision for what the shift will be.
I had a lovely conversation the other day with Rob Paterson and Johnnie Moore as we discussed three videos that are lovely examples of living systems in action. It was all recorded and uploaded at The Phoric, and I encourage you to go there and have a look and listen to our conversation.
Thanks to Rob and Johnnie for the invitation. What fun!
From a conversation with Tenneson this morning, we were playing with a pattern of shifting systems that flows from skilfully hosted conversations. A simple pattern emerged, which is about bringing people together, shifting power and developing and hosting emerging beauty. In a linear form it goes like this:
- Gather people together from wholeness, including inviting the deeply personal into the work.
- Understand and work with a willingness to shift power.
- Cultivate curiosity: what could we really do together?
- Harvest what our Navajo friends call “the beauty way” a way forward that serves life and keeps people engaged in their pursuit for change to the better.
Simple eh? Right. The shifting power one is especially interesting to me. Working with leaders to move control and power to their people is the most challenging aspect of working systemic change. Without this shift, only constrained action is possible and sustainability is difficult. With a shift, many things can unfold and the people themselves can take responsibility for the results.
Where this really hits the ground, it seems to me, is in the process of invitation and calling. Leaders who are callers must be willing to let go of power and control if new levels of work and being are to emerge. They also have to shift the culture of the organization or community from an answer-based one to a curiosity-based one, where inquiry and co-sensing becomes a normal way of working. Communicating this in an invitation to a gathering is difficult and not adequate. We look at many more ways to invite that builds a field of inquiry, an appetite for curiosity so that when people meet together it is simeply one phase in an ongoing project to change the way things are done.
So what are your experiences in shifting power and generating curiosity, especially in large groups?
Two good friends of mine, Roq Gareau who works for the Canadian Border Services Agency and Orlando Pioche who works for the Indian Health Service in Shiprock, NM. Men doing serious work who work together as deep friends.
From Wendel Berry:
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health.
It heals with grace.It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no ear hears it except in fragments.
Sent out to all my friends, especially Steven, Kathryn, Tenneson and Beverley, with whom I did some good work this week. And to those good friends I will be working with this coming week in Phoenix at the Good Food Gathering – Toke, Monica, Tim, Phil and Tuesday.
Working with friends is perhaps the wisest thing one can do in pursuing larcge scale change. Only with the ears and hearts of friends tuned to one another’s needs can we hear more of the wholeness of the music that only comes to us in fragments.
I’m in some big work these days, whether it is in the child and family services system here in British Columbia, or hosting a 500 person World Cafe and Open Space at the Good Food Gathering to help the good food movement find it’s way with renewed leadership and vigour. None of this is remotley possible alone. I am working with close friends.
While it may be true that one person can make a difference in the world, I believe that the difference one person makes is choosing to work with others. We have long since exited the age of heros, and I wonder if we were ever in that age.
I once sat with Tenneson Woolf on a beach on my home island and we gazed across the Strait of Georgia. We talked about how huge everything is, how small we are in relation to the vast world. And we asked this question: if we are born of this world, knowing deeply the scale in which we live in relation to everything else, why do we feel like we can make an impact? What put that impulse there? We are the only creatures that entertain the delusion that we can shift things, and yet, we persist. AND, it’s true, to the extent that we can even shift the climate of our home world. There is almost a drive to do it.
There is nothing around you right now that is not the result of a group of people working together. No structure, no machine, no community, no idea exists because one person thought of it. Everything is born in relationship, and to the extent that our relationships are filled with quality, the work we do will be filled with quality. I choose first of all to work with friends, and from there to find the work that we can do together. When we attend to this quality of relationship, everything else becomes possible. Nothing around you has ever emerged otherwise.
So thank you to my friends who make it possible for me to satisfy my personal version of the human drive to make an impact. Together, as we tune to one another and reach into possibility, we can find the holy chords of that fragmented music, and sing.