Category: Edited

Last week Teresa Posakony, Lina Cramer, Kevin Johnson and I worked Christine Ageton, Alissa Barron and others from the BALLE Network (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies). BALLE is an inspiring and rapidly growing network that represents a strong commitment to restoring community through local businesses. They’ve recently launched their new website with particular branding around connecting leaders, spreading solutions, and sharing helpful resources in the localist movement.

One of the things I love about BALLE is that they are offering solutions and critical connections in a rather complex environment. There is a kind of hunger, heartfulness, and simplicity that I appreciate and saw in the people I met. Their actions are anchored in the simple, an invitation for each person to do what they are doing and a bit more. Yet, their vision is appropriately massive: “Within a generation, we envision a global system of human-scale, interconnected local economies that function in harmony with local ecosystems to meet the basic needs of all people, support just and democratic societies, and foster joyful community life.”

It was an inspiring couple of days spent together in the beauty of Chicago’s Berger Park, on the shore of Lake Michigan. Using the Art of Hosting pattern for learning, we gave attention to several key questions like those named here:

What are we each going to have to lose or release so that the next phase of local can be born?

How do we feed our cities sustainably?

How do we heal the effects of conflict and difference to create healthy, authentic dialogue that reaches across difference?

How do we get local business at the center of the conversation to solve our toughest problems?

What is community resilience?

How does gift culture come to life as we build local living economies?

A few other bits of harvest are here:
–Photos of People
–Photos of Flipcharts
–Blog post from Teresa Posakony on the Andersonville Chamber of Commerce story

Last week, I worked again with Franciscan Sisters. Myself and Teresa Posakony are working with a planning committee of 16 to prepare for, design, and facilitate the 2013 General Assembly for their order, the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration.

The theme of this upcoming assembly is Risk Boldly the Future. Yes, it is inspiring. The theme, and them. A group of women, vowed sisters and affiliates that are asking key questions of themselves, one another, and their broad community. Questions that touch the core of who they are. Questions that challenge and invite exploration of what community really means. Questions that welcome the edge of dreams and possibilities that they want to imagine together unique to this time.

A few of those questions are going out to their regions and clusters well in advance of the assembly. So as to juice up the energy for them now, and so as to encourage a thoughtfulness of continuous learning and engagement with one another.

1. How will Sisters and Affiliates work together to carry out Franciscan mission, given declining numbers of vowed members and increased need for care among them and in their communities?
2. As we witness positions and tensions between local community and institutional church, how are we called to stand?
3. From our essence, how do we live boldly with the challenges we face and dreams we hold?

What I appreciate in these is that they are all questions that invite getting to the essence of who they are. Getting to the authenticity that is not only their individual voices, but that is at the center of them as a group. Just that, I find, is a beautiful expression of boldness, and oh so needed in many communities.

Teresa and I recommended some additional attention this time to the process methodology of circle. These are women that are not unfamiliar to varied forms of convening in circle. The tradition we have been sharing comes from our teachers, Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea of PeerSpirit. I offered simple metaphor to help that land and to help clarify the circle discipline of directing all (and receiving all) to/from the center. I’ve always thought of the center of a circle as a bit pot of soup. A big kettle with room for many additions. It has broth in it. The conversation and inquiry among the group as a whole is that broth. You could say the purpose is the broth. I think of the individual words, experiences, and stories that we share as spices. We each have opportunity to add spice. And some of us have opportunity to simply stir with the wooden spoon and taste how it is coming along. Like soup, there is value in our conversations slow cooking, giving chance for the individual spices to flavor and cook the full pot. To blend.

At this gathering we invited 4-5 person circles to share stories and experiences of risk. So as to become more open and clear with our own varied relationships to risk. I loved the invitation to express first, associations of what we think of with the word risk. Everything from scary, frustrated, intimidated, and yikes to an excitement, a dream, a possibility of movement. I also loved the way that through sharing our deeper stories, principles and learnings about risk became apparent. Though the stories are private, the principles are really good to share. Simple maxims, yet when noticed from the experience of circle, are as lasting and tasty. From the circle I participated in, I harvested these:

• I knew it was time to shift my life.
• Must live from your center.
• I can step into the unknown, even alone.
• It is empowering to come through the other side.
• Listen to the inner feelings; listen to friends.
• Full authenticity creates freedom.
• Step into the challenge; leaning into the fear may not make it go away, but it changes our relationship to it.
• When you say yes, life organizes around that.

These principles and learnings become super valued friends in what is our evolving relationship to fear. It is my experience that they release the default hold that risk, or fear of risk, can conjure up in us. They remind us that we already know a lot and have journeyed quite far in our lives. They inform us and help center the journey ahead. Powerful. And as several commented, in a surprisingly short time. Not just chairs in a circle with obligatory ice-breaking. But deep human connection that clears the path for the future.

One further point I appreciated with this group. Teresa recommended early that we use Mark Nepo’s book, Exquisite Risk, for inspiration. My recommendation is just to get this book. A great resource for if you are hosting work around risk and authenticity. It’s poetic. It’s thoughtful. In this case, a really good entry point to helping this group / us open into our inner resourcefulness about risk. Make some room on your shelf; it’s the kind of book you pick up and read a paragraph or a couple of pages at a time.

Some brilliant and thoughtful words here on the OST listserve from OST practitioner Lisa Heft. I love the emphasis she is offering on the OST format for holding the space for a group to do its work. I also love the distinction of what is the group’s work and what is the facilitator’s relationship to conflict and resolve. Great stuff here for any practitioner deepening his / her ability for the complex environments in which we use OST and other participative methodologies.

My observation is that many individuals – which therefore includes facilitators – are conflict-averse. We see something we name as conflict, and we either want to avoid it or solve it away. We are not very good at sitting with it; breathing through it. I am talking about those conflicts where your life is not immediately in danger but instead where voices are raised and people are angry and upset.

And for some of our cultures – what one culture sees as conflict (raising of voices, dramatic gestures, angry faces) – another culture sees as passion or simply as expression and communication. So all those cultural filters are at work (us, our groups, our personal / cultural style, our family-of-origin / relationship history – oh so many things).

So to me – as a facilitator – my job is to know:
– what is the group’s work (and what is my own internal work)
– to breathe (and to breathe as a way to hold space for others)
– to do thoughtful work (including the pre-work and analysis for / selection of best-fit dialogue process)
– and to care for self and others (in specific ways like making sure I am hydrated, rested and fed, and holding in my heart and mind that their work is their own and that I think they are amazing).

Conflict without violence is to me – passion. Someone struggling to name their own truth – which while not perhaps true for others, is true for them, at that moment.

Harrison I disagree with you – I don’t think conflict is something that can often be resolved in a single meeting. By a single intervention. Resolution is not what I seek by offering Open Space as one of the possible tools for a certain meeting. The ability to breathe through conflict – to witness rage without blows – to be able to walk away (and walk back in) – to hear another person’s story (without trying to solve or change it) – these are all the things that an Open Space (of two days, ideally) can offer. Resolution? Take any human behavior – there are so many things that inform and change and hold in place certain behaviors. The meeting is just one part of someone’s life, life history, life after the meeting, real life ‘on Monday’, social norms, support for change and so on. But what the meeting can do as the ‘massage’ so the human can witness their own inner dialogue, feel witnessed, notice and wonder, try to articulate, stumble through, step back and step back in? Amazing. 

I say two days ideally because in any process – including Open Space – on Day 1 people are often naming their grief and loss. Day 2 does not magically change that but with the overnight, with eating together, with feeling witnessed as they tell their story again and again on Day 1 – seems like enough people shift a bit on Day 2 to not lose their own story but walk forward into imagining a slightly different story, together. 

As you say, Harrison, ‘…given the time / space to do it.”

It is what happens before the meeting and afterward that also count. Which is why I think of Open Space or any other facilitated process as one in a chain of steps of change and shift as part of a greater whole.

This is a poem by the Irish poet, David Whyte. It is one that I have liked for a long time. And lately, it has been coming back to me often. There are a few key lines in it that have felt helpful as I’ve worked with colleagues, clients, and my inner stirrings. “…the world was made to be free in….” This is one of those lines that inspires such a beautiful and needed invitation — what if we were to follow our freedom (in the evolution of a project, team, plan)? What if we human beings were to welcome with more compassion for ourselves and others a full range of experience and freedom to be in our brilliance? Want brilliance; invite freedom. Want sustainable commitment; invite freedom. This goes against what many of us were taught in management schools. Yet, it is perhaps a significant part of the evolution of how we transform the way we do leadership.

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

 is too small for you.

Thank you David Whyte.