The road trip continues with visits this week to two teachers in Peterborough who have deeply influenced my life: John Muir and David Newhouse.
John Muir was one of the founders of Trent Radio in Peterborough, and is the current general manager. He has been a fixture in Peterborough for 25 years or more and is an inspiriing teacher in many ways. First, he is all about making technology accessible. He was a great teacher of Caitlin’s when she was introduced to the medium of radio and Tuesday he worked patiently with our kids as they recorded promos for Trent Radio.
Second, John has created a unique institution in Trent Radio, and one which has influenced my thinking about community ever since I was a programmer and Board member there in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Trent Radio is an organization that supports and then stays out of the way of the self-expression of programmers and producers. When I was a producer there, the station management made a big deal about the fact that there was no “brand” to Trent Radio. The call letters, CFFF, were really hard to say on the fly. No easy to remember acronym, no name for the station. When you produced a program at Trent Radio the station was yours, and you were the producer, prgrammer and host. It was a profound example of passion bounded by responsibility, self-expression within the boundaires of a community definition of standards. If you programmed something completely irresponsible, the station might lose its license and everyone would suffer. So people took great care to both push the boundaries and preserve the viability of the station.
Third, John’s thinking about the nature of community radio – and you could spend a week with him and it would never be enough – contributed to how I think about various media like blogging. Many people have used the frame of publishing to understand blogging, but I am perhaps more heavily influenced by community radio. Blogs are like channels and the small audience that would follow your work often deeply engage with your thoughts. Community radio is both peer-to-peer and one-to-many. It’s no surprise perhaps that the ‘zine scene in North America was closely aligned with campus/community radio. Anyone could pick up your ‘zine, but it was intended for a small audience, who formed a community around the ideas, the scene, or the story. Same with the shows I hosted on Trent Radio, dealing with jazz, blues and improvisational music. Interesting.
For John – and for me – the advent of podcasting was a beautiful marriage of two media that, far from being opposites, are actually mates occupying a spectrum of expression. It is no surprise then that some of us, including Rob Paterson, consider John something of a godfather of podcasting, a notion that dates back to a conference called Zap your PRAM hosted by Peter Rukavina (another Trent Radio alumn) on Prince Edward Island during which Dave Winer and John had a conversation about John’s ideas on radio, the internet, audience and community.
John continues to be an inspiration for the way he holds space in community. He recently formed a consortium to buy some Saldier House, a wonderful old building that Trent University liquidated when it closed my old college, Peter Robinson. The non-profit that bought the building uses it to support arts and culture events in a space that can host performances, workshops, studios and other cultural infrastructure. My experience of John’s role in the ever changing community of Peterborough is to quietly hold principles and values that serve a culture of invitation, flow, and connection and in this sense, having grown up in many ways within the communities John formed, I see myself very much as a grateful product of his work.
[tags]John Muir, Trent Radio, podcasting, Peterborough, Peter Rukavina[/tags]
The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further that seems possible. It keeps surprising us. In this regard, the Wikipedia truly is exhibit A, impure as it is, because it is something that is impossible in theory, and only possible in practice. It proves the dumb thing is smarter than we think. At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.
That is such a lovely and concise description of the benefits of bottom up organization combined with the benefits of top down. In some ways you could see this polarity as inside versus outside as well. For example, in chaordic organizational design, you see this manifest with the principles that are developed for action which are the collective expression that comes “top down” in a sense to guide the bottom up action of the individuals. There may be a group of people that cares for these principles and, by agreement of the rest of the group, maintains them in order to creatively constrain action. In that sense the organization is top down that allows for and opens space for bottom up agency.
To see this as inner and outer, it seems clear that from the outside, the rules for action come, but they exist to support and encourage the expression of individual volition, so that individuals, acting on their own drives and passions can connect with others to take responsibility for bringing things to life.
We have a real life example of this in the community that has collected around our learning centre here on Bowen Island. Just finishing its third year, the learning centre is a place for homeschooling families to connect with others, use the expertise of hired teachers and for the kids to supplement their homelearning with up to 2.5 days a week of work with others in a class room and resource rich setting. Each family is responsible for the learning of their own children and so we have a number of approaches being used in the community. Our family unschools, and other families use curriculum to various degrees. We are involved in a variety of activities outside of the learning centre but we also come together to work with and support each other.
The learning centre program is supported by a group of parents called the planning council who make top-down decisions about how things run at the centre. They hire the teachers, and look after the finances and also set and maintain the principles of the program. One of the principles is family participation, and so the organization runs as a bit of an Open Space. If you want something to happen, make it happen. If you need help, ask for help. Connect passion and responsibility within the principled parameters of the program and we can do stuff. If what you want doesn’t fit the program, find some other parents and offer it on your own. In this way we support 20 homelearning families, all with different styles, in a common set of activities. It works really well, and is actually surprisingly little work for the planning council. I think their biggest stress is not time per se but wrestling with the edges of the principles to maintain the integrity of the intention of the program. And that, it seems to me, is what top-down should do, while bottom up is taking care of the quality of the offerings and the details. It is, in the words of our Open Space practices, holding and supporting connection, to keep the space open for creative learning and offerings to occur.
[tags]Kevin Kelly, chaordic[/tags]
It’s around this time of year when people all over North America are graduating from school and starting their new lives. If I were to offer one piece of advice it would come straight from this post about learning in networks.
We are still about control, not sharing. We are still about distribution, not aggregation. We are still about closed content rather than open. We are static, not fluid. The idea that each of our students can play a relevant, meaningful, important role in the context of these networks is still so foreign to the people who run schools. And yet, more and more, they are creating their own networks, sharing, aggregating, evolving to the disdain of the traditional model of schooling that is becoming more and more irrelevant.
The biggest problem is how few of our educators still cannot relate to this description. They are neither networks unto themselves or nodes of a larger system, and they understand little about what it means to be either in a world that is more globally interconnected. And our students are not only left without models of what it means to be networked, they also get relatively little content that is contextualized through the network. So network literacy, the functions of working in a distributed, collaborative environment…is an important aspect of learning and education that precious few of our students get a chance to practice. And it is only by practicing these skills, whether teachers or students, that they can truly be learned.
My advice would go something like this: forget everything school has taught you about what it means to learn. From now on you will grow and learn and acquire new skills and knowledge from the most unlikely places. Don’t look at the people at the front of the room for the answers, look at the four people sitting around you and engage them in a deep conversation. The answer lies there. Or if not the answer, the next question, and it is finding the next question that is going to keep you going for the next 70 years.
And never forget those four people. You will see them again. This is because contrary to what school tells you about questions and answers, the truth is that the world is an oracle waiting to be consulted. You must take time to frame the good questions and then pose them to the world and then you must wait to see what result you have made with those questions.
And for those of you who are starting to think about sending your kids to school, I have two pieces of advice. First, if you can help it, don’t. Unschool them instead. Second, if you can’t do that, ban homework from your house and give your kids opportunities to use that free time to learn in networks, pursuing whatever interests them in what ever way they can and don’t, I repeat, DON’T mark them on it. That is the literacy – channelling their passions into finding the teachers that can bring richness and purpose to their lives with no one worried about performance measures or how good they are. They will need this skill set and they aren’t going to get it anywhere else.
[tags]unschooling[/tags]
I have been working lately with friends and fellows Brenda Chaddock, Tennson Wolf and Teresa Posakony to co-create another Art of Hosting training. We will be gathering on Bowen Island here in British Columbia from September 24-28 in a practice retreat to deeply investigate these questions:
- What could my leadership also be?
- What if I would practice using collective intelligence and learning in my organisation and network?
- What could strategic conversations also be if I host them with wisdom and courage?
- How do I create authentic involvement that leads to real implementation?
The practice retreat is structured along the following principles:
- Our learning will grow out of participant contributions and presence – we will support each other as co-learners
- We will learn by observation, experience and practice, using interactive processes to build a safe and inspiring learning environment – we will explore Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry, Circle Council, reflective practices, World Cafe, and other participatory methodologies
- Taking a chance to explore – and experiment with – applying these tools to your own projects-in-progress will help you to apply your skills, as well as develop and continue a new practice that will last well beyond this training
And through a variety of processes and conversations, we will investigate:
- Hosting conversations as a core leadership practice and competence for leading change
- How the Art of Hosting is an organising pattern/culture that invites new ways of living and working
- The conditions needed to create space for meaningful conversations
- Specific interactive processes through which learning and creation can emerge
- Sensing and shaping the conditions and timing for using particular methods and tools
- How the practice of hosting can be applied to key strategic change projects in our lives and work
This is a powerful training, and we invite you to join us. For more information, or to register, visit the Art of Hosting page or contact me by email.
[tags]facilitation+training, art+of+hosting[/tags]
For those of you that read in newsfeeders you won’t have noticed that I changed the template of the blog again. I think it’s now a little easier to read, but let me know.
At any rate, light blogging this month. I have been involved in some incredibly draining work of late, the most recent of which required me to be substantially bigger than I normally have been. I was holding space for a day long circle dialogue on Aboriginal child welfare in British Columbia. It was a full day with many important people from throughout the system who came together to look at how we might work at changing the deepest assumptions about the child welfare system to focus on interdependence. A very rewarding day, and a few reports are forthcoming, but I found myself deeply tired after this event. On reflection, I think it was largely a result of holding myself in solid purpose, and deeply committed to facilitating a process that took a conversation to a place none of us could have guessed. It was, in the words of Donald Rothberg, committed action with nonnattachment to outcome. And it’s a very draining thing to do.
When I say that the day required me to “be bigger” I mean, metaphorically speaking, that process work like this requires us to be both big enough to contain the energy and the edges of the circle, and small enough that we don’t get in the way of what is emerging. It is to be both committed to the action and invisible enough that the outcome arises collectively, without personal baggage attached. And there was another level at work here too, in which I needed to embody the values that were being articulated by the group. They were saying for example, that the Aboriginal child welfare system needs to be based on the assumption that no one person can make a decision for a child. For a facilitator hearing that who is willing to embody this deep change in real time, I was required to be in a present moment of reflective practice: “How can I embody this emerging value and validate the group’s sense that we need to base process on this value? Right now, even?” Very tiring to do that and still hold the container open.
I mention Buddhist teacher Donald Rothberg because today I was listening to this podcast where he speaks of this kind of work. Towards the end of this talk, he mentions characteristics of committed action with nonattachment to outcomes:
- Appreciating the journey. If results are not everything, then we can have a greater appreciation for the journey we are on, and we are better able to live in the present moment and be of best use there.
- Recognizing that there is no failure. This is not to absolve oneself of responsibility. It is rather to adopt the mindset that every experience contains the seeds of great teaching. We can learn from everything that happens if we view “results” as simply another point in time at which we reflect, and that we undertake that reflection with no judgement. Rather we seek to evaluate based on what we can learn in the present in order to adjust our future actions. Developing these reflective capacities is a central practice of good facilitation, good leadership and good action.
- Long term view. Accepting the fact that failure is really just an approach to results means that we are freer to see the impact of our work over the long term. Rothberg mentions the founder of Sarvodaya, Dr. AT Ariyaratne who says that the peace plan for the civil war in Sri Lanka must be a 500 year plan because the roots of the conflict extend back that far. There is no way we can measure results if there is a 500 year view, but if there is to be true, deep and sustainable peace in Sri Lanka, the solution must come from the true, deep and sustainable foundation. Nonattachment to outcomes allows us to see deeper causes and longer term sustainable solutions. We work then on a vector, in a direction and not towards an end in itself.
- Resting in the mystery of how things happen. I can think of dozens of small decisions in my life that have resulted in huge life changes. Deciding one afternoon to visit a friend who offered me a job which set my career in motion. Waking up one morning and deciding it was worth it to brave a autumn sleet storm to see a live CBC radio broadcast, and meeting my life partner that morning as a result. Everyone has these experiences. The fact is that nonattachment to outcomes admits the possibilities that the smallest things might actually have the biggect impact. You may spend the next year at work toughing it out to bring a project to life, working late hours and always being the last one to leave the office. The project may be a success or not, but what if the relationship you develop with the evening security guard, the simple greetings and the occaisional short chat were enough to bring him from a state of despondant isolation to appreciating life again? Sometimes people can be brought back from the brink of isolation and suicide by people reaching out to them. That may be the most important result of your year long project.
It’s a serious practice, this idea of being fully committed and nonattached to outcomes, but recently it has helped me get through some heavy work. I wonder where it shows up in your life and practice?