Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.
In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.

	July 23, 2008

The Politics of Conversation Four years ago I read and reviewed Keith Johnstone's book Impro, in which he explains how pervasive dominance and submission behaviours are in human interactions. He describes an example of physical dominance and submission (status displays) in our encounters with strangers: Imagine that two strangers are approaching each other along an empty street. It's straight, hundreds of yards long and with wide pavements. Both strangers are walking at an even pace, and at some point one of them will have to move aside in order to pass. You can see this decision being made 100 yards or more before it has to. In my view the two people scan each other for signs of status, and then the lower one moves aside. If they think they're equal, both move aside. If they both think they're dominant (or if one isn't paying attention) they end up doing the sideways dance and muttering apologies. But this doesn't happen if you meet a frail or half-blind person: You move aside for them. It's only when you think the other person is challenging that the dance occurs. I remember doing it once with a man in a shop doorway who took me by the forearms and gently moved me out of the way -- it still rankles. Old people tend to cling to the highest status they have had, and will deliberately 'not notice' others while clinging fiercely to the (often walled) inside of the walkway. A bustling crowd is constantly and unconsciously exchanging status signals and challenges, with the more submissive person stepping aside. Shortly thereafter I read and reviewed Peter Collett's The Book of Tells that teaches you to read status displays in body language, and specifically these six displays: Dominant/Threatening-Possessive (DT) signals -- "I'm the boss, do what I say or else" Dominant/Relaxed-Confident (DR) signals -- "I'm the boss, so I can let my guard down" Dominant/Controlling-Protecting (DC) signals -- "I'm the boss, and I make the decisions" Submissive/Deferring-Inviting (SD) signals -- "You're the boss, make your move" Submissive/Anxious-Shy (SA) signals -- "You're the boss, don't hurt me" Submissive/Helpless (SH) signals -- "You're the boss, what should I do" The picture above (selected randomly off the net), for example, includes several dominant displays (sitting very straight, turning away, arms raised or extended, sitting slouched back with legs extended, sitting at end of table) and several submissive displays (slouching forward attentively, sitting in middle of long side of table, sitting with legs drawn up beneath chair). Collett includes, in addition to body, hand, eye and face signals, some examples of spoken signals of dominance and submission: Dominant: talking first, talking most, interrupting, speaking loudly, speaking deeply Submissive: talking breathily, high-pitched speech, ending phrases with upturn in pitch, dropping names, ingratiating speech In my review of Impro, I lamented: "What disturbs me most is what this bodes for us idealists trying to establish non-hierarchical, leaderless political and economic structures -- communities of peers. Are such structures unnatural? Or do we simply need to learn to recognize the pecking order for what it is -- a primeval tool for minimizing conflict and deciding who will do the breeding -- and what it isn't -- a license to take an unfair share of wealth and power?" Since then I have been speaking about the importance of Love, Conversation and Community, and specifically the integration of the three: Facilitating non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer conversations among people in community (i.e. with shared passions, shared objectives, or shared problems) who care about each other and their community. Today I asked myself: Are these status displays, and our apparent unconscious need to make them, interfering with communication, and undermining the achievement of consensus, collaboration and non-hierarchical problem-solving? Since our bodies are always 'saying' much more than our words, even if we monitor and try to extinguish (as facilitators) more obvious dominance behaviours (bullying) and submissive behaviours (wallflowers), there is almost nothing we can do to reduce non-verbal signals. Yes, we can create circles and get rid of tables, but you will still see a ton of such displays, in posture, eye, face, hand signals and tone of voice.  The courses I have taken in facilitation don't teach you to recognize or try to alleviate such behaviours, perhaps because it would be an impossible task. I know I am prone to slouch back, legs extended, hands on head with elbows out like antlers, a multiple dominance display. It must be very confusing to others when I try consciously to speak in an inviting, questioning, open-minded way while making such an aggressive non-verbal display! Likewise I have witnessed people speak passionately and articulately about something, but leave the audience unimpressed because their body language betrays a lack of self-confidence in what they're saying. In particular I have watched a woman speak in a soft voice (raising her voice slightly at the end of each phrase) and be completely ignored and discounted, while a man a few minutes later, speaking in a soft, measured voice, said the same thing and was hailed as brilliant, everyone scribbling down what he said word for word. So what do you think: Are there things we can do, both as facilitators and as conversationalists, to suppress power displays and displays of submission, so that listeners focus on what is being said, not how it is said or by whom? Last Saturday I mentioned an article by Andrew Campbell that retrieves and elaborates on a fascinating model by Vincent Kenny on 'Dead Language' vs 'Live Language' and how power politics in conversation 'deadens' the language and dialogue and saps its power, creativity and usefulness. Language in conversation, the article explains, is sometimes wielded as a weapon, to stop thought and creativity and sharing and connection and everything else it is valuable for. This is a second, more explicit 'abuse of power' in conversation. You know how it works: There are amazingly effective conversation-killers that those uncomfortable with change can use to stomp it out in a way that is almost impossible to defend against. "We tried that last year and it was a disaster." "If we allowed people to do that, we'd have chaos on our hands, costs would soar and productivity would fall." "We'd need to get the authority to do that from x and for reason y that would be almost impossible to get." Andrew's article provides more examples. This raises a second question: Are there things we can do, both as facilitators and as listeners, to challenge and reject 'dead language' that stifles energy, innovation, courage and other collective qualities of a group necessary to bring about change? I am very good at imagining possibilities (and throwing them out for consideration) and for gently (and not so gently) provoking people to want to change (themselves), prodding them to intend to act. I think these capacities are helpful in conversations in community. Maybe I'm meant to do these things in conversations, rather than being a 'neutral' facilitator. But since my imagined possibilities and provocations often produce these hostile dominance displays and 'dead language' responses, if I really want my ideas to get traction, I think I need to learn how to deal with these behaviours. What's your experience? Category: Conversation 11:21:23 PM  trackback []  comment []

	July 22, 2008

Three Mini Book Reviews: The Back of the Napkin, Landscape & Memory, and Edible Forest Gardens The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam "Visual thinking means taking innate advantage of our ability to see, with our eyes and our mind's eye, in order to discover ideas, develop those ideas quickly and intuitively, and share those ideas with others in a way that they simply 'get'" This book is a brilliant elaboration on Bill Buxton's idea of sketching, with a catch. The brilliance is in the simplicity and elegance of the model: people understand things better, and find them accessible, when they're sketched, competently and articulately, one step at a time, by hand collect everything you can look at that's relevant, lay it all out, organize and orient it, and then do triage on it define the problem using the 6 questions in the chart above, and illustrate it with the 6 corresponding types of graphic explore the 5 dimensions of ways of looking at the problem: simple/elaborate, quality/quantity, vision/execution, individual/comparison, and change/as-is when presenting the results of your problem-solving, start looking aloud, keep seeing aloud, continue by imagining aloud, and close by showing aloud (i.e. recreate the process you used to solve the problem) and then ask the audience if they agree with what you've shown (show, don't tell, and this question answers itself) this works best for complex problems all good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but do need to be explainable This may seem a bit cryptic, but a single read through the book and this is all you need to use this powerful technique for both solving (or at least coming to grips with) problems, and getting buy-in for your solution. The catch? The drawings in the book are simple but beautiful. Doing this well takes lots of practice, both in conveying your meaning graphically (the expressions on your stick men, and their poses, are critical to the audience's appreciation and understanding), and in using this technique to solve seemingly intractable problems. I intend to try it, but I'm so poor at drawing that it will take me a long time to get my sketches right. Fortunately, I'm really good at imagining possibilities, so my only problem with the technique will be my artwork. Really recommended. Landscape & Memory, by Simon Schama This hugely ambitious work was recommended to me by three friends. The notes and bibliography of this book alone are longer than some books I've read. Schama attempts to show, through a rigorous and detailed study of history and human behaviour, that we are all innately naturalists, that our bond with Gaia has always been powerful and that our sense of 'apartness' from nature is illusory. He says, at the outset: If the entire history of landscape in the West is indeed just a mindless race toward a machine-driven universe, uncomplicated by myth, metaphor and allegory, where measurement not memory is the absolute arbiter of value,  where our ingenuity is our tragedy, then we are indeed trapped in the engine of our self-destruction. At the heart of this book is the stubborn belief that this is not, in fact, the whole story. Many of the stories he tells are rooted in his own ancestors' stories, and the book is intensely personal. He takes us through millennia of passion for nature and place, and our apparent fear and loathing of it. But right up to modern times this ambivalent relationship and "being-a-part ness" still resonates, he says: The designation of the suburban yard as the cure for the afflictions of city life marks the greensward as a remnant of the old pastoral dream, even though its goatherds and threshers have been replaced by tanks of pesticide and industrial strength mowing machines. I was not impressed by his arguments, which seem somewhat nostalgic to me, in this age of relentless and ruthless ecocide. But he is an amazing story-teller, and teller of the stories and lessons of history, and the book is compelling even when it is not persuasive. Even more compelling are the stunning artworks which run through the whole book, such as the one above, that argue much more powerfully than words the inseparability of human spirituality from our love of and roots in nature. The book is an armchair visit to a vast science and history museum, and its stories of human altruism, savagery and struggle to live within and without nature, rootless and yet inexorably drawn to place, to home, stay with you a long time.   Edible Forest Gardens (Books 1 & 2), by Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmeier What is most remarkable about this exhaustive and practical course in temperate climate (zones 4-7) permaculture is that only about 40 of its over 1000 pages are about the work of planting and maintaining an "edible forest garden" ("a perennial polyculture of multipurpose [native] plants"); the rest is understanding what to plant, when, and why. The whole idea of these gardens is to enable you to harvest an abundance of varied foodstuffs with almost no maintenance. The theory takes up the whole first volume and needs every page. The challenge, you see, is that even what we might perceive as 'wilderness' is in fact nothing of the sort. Humans, right back to First Nations thousands of years ago, have utterly altered the vegetation that now looks so wild and 'natural'. On top of that, climate change has, since the ice ages, been continuously changing what grows where. In order to allow nature to provide you, effortlessly year after year, a harvest of abundance, you first need to discover what naturally grew and what naturally will grow where you live. You need to study the botanical history of your home. Then, since it cannot be quickly 'restored' to natural, sustainable state (succession goes through many long intermediary stages and can take centuries to achieve equilibrium), you need to be smart enough to plan for a 20-30 year 'hurry-up succession' that will chivy the process along. You have to plant in stages, knowing that early stages are just preparing the soil, the ecosystem and the ground cover and canopy for later stages, and that some of the first things you plant won't be around at the end of the succession at all if you've done your job right. This takes serious knowledge and study, a lot of patience and relearning what our ancestors learned as a matter of course. It's in many ways a course in what Derrick Jensen has called "listening to the land". There probably isn't anything you could learn that would be more important, for your soul, for your community, for your resilience in the coming age of climate change and other disasters that will require us all to become much more self-sufficient than we are today. Start now, and when cascading economic, social and ecological catastrophes hit us in the 2030s and bring existing food production and other systems to their knees, you'll be ready to gather the fruits of your labour. Category: Activism: What You Can Do 11:41:23 PM  trackback []  comment []

	July 21, 2008

Memorandum to All Employees Delivered By Hand To all employees: Beginning August 1st, you will no longer be able to send an e-mail to another employee of our organization. After some study, we have concluded that such e-mails are almost never the most efficient or effective way to obtain, provide or exchange information. In fact, we estimate that as much as 20% of our employees' time is wasted reading, writing and answering e-mails, beyond the time that it would take to communicate the same information using more appropriate means. A face-to-face meeting, or, failing that, a telephone conversation, is almost always a more cost-effective way to convey or acquire information than e-mail. Our study suggests that in 95% of cases, a telephone call or impromptu meeting can communicate the needed information without the need for a formal appointment. Being available for such impromptu consultations is an essential part of every employee's work, and beginning this year our 360 degree performance reviews will include an assessment of/by all the people you work with, regardless of level in the organization, on their/your accessibility, which will factor highly into overall performance appraisal. Effective August 1, all employee Calendars will be visible to all other employees, and any employee will be able to book time in another employee's calendar, with the invitee having the option of rescheduling or proposing another means to converse or meet, but not rejecting the appointment outright. We trust all employees to use discretion in the use of others' time, and to use this Calendar booking option only when attempts to reach the invitee by a visit to their office or by phone have failed. To avoid excessive 'telephone tag' our voice-mail system will also, effective August 1, no longer accept messages between employees of our company. Please note that, in addition to face-to-face appointments, phone calls and Calendar bookings, there are a number of other technologies available for communications: For simple, unambiguous, straightforward requests for information, approval, appointments or instructions, and replies to such requests, you can use the company's Instant Messaging system. The system should not be used for more complicated matters -- if it takes a respondent more than one minute to reply, it is an inappropriate use of this technology. For conversations that cannot occur face-to-face and which require looking at documents together, you can use the company's Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system. This tool requires no pre-booking and can allow users to 'share' the contents of each other's screen while they converse. For 'FYI' type communications, the documents should be posted to the appropriate category of the company's E-Library, where those interested in the document who have subscribed to it by RSS will automatically receive notification about it. If you think someone should subscribe to a category they are not subscribed to, suggest this through an Instant Message. For surveys, where you are seeking consensus, in those rare cases where a face-to-face brainstorming is not a much more effective means of achieving it, you can use the company's Instant Survey tool. For group training or sending of instructions to a large number of people, you can use the company's E-Learning tool for asynchronous training, or, if interactivity is expected, the company's Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system for real-time events. Because e-mail and voice-mail have been used for so many things for so long, it will take some practice to wean ourselves off these sub-optimal technologies, and they will continue to be available for communications with those outside the company. You may be surprised to learn that e-mail has only been the principal medium for business communications for ten years. You will, we believe, find it liberating to be able to go home each day, and come in each day, with nothing in your inbox. Let us know (drop by or phone us) how we can help you cope with any lingering e-mail addiction. Enjoy the freedom! Respectfully yours, The Management (well, we can dream anyway) Category: Communications Technology 8:12:00 PM  trackback []  comment []

	July 19, 2008

Saturday Links for the Week: July 19, 2008 Photo from birdstar.org, one of the amazing shots from the Bond brothers of SW Ontario. Disparity, Poverty and Environmental Health: I'm reading Hervé Kempf's How the Rich are Destroying the Earth (review next week). His message, from France, is essentially the same as Ian Welsh's in his new article There Was a Class War. The Rich Won. The message, and the messages that naturally flow from it, are: For the last 30 years, everywhere in the world, income and net wealth for the poorest 95% of the population has been, in real terms declining, even as income and net wealth for the richest 5% has doubled and redoubled. Disparity of income and wealth has never been higher. The top 1% in the US alone now receive almost 25% of its total national income. This economic improvement for 1-5% has come at an astronomical environmental cost, a massive increase in pollution and waste, the desolation of much of the Earth, surpassing the climate change tipping point, increasing global indebtedness to staggering proportions, pushing us over the edge to the End of Oil and Water, ruining ecosystems in much of the world and accelerating ten-fold the biodiversity loss that heralds the sixth Great Extinction in the planet's recorded history. There are no economic 'market' or technology fixes for either the economic disparity or the environmental devastation that continue to accelerate every day. What is left is belief in violent political revolution, belief in a collective new social consciousness that will drive a spontaneous plunge in global consumption and a massive redistribution of wealth, belief in the Rapture, or belief that our civilization is inevitably in its last century. You know which I believe. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link. A Plague of Economic Locusts: Andrew Leonard at HTWW adds up the factors that have caused me recently to liquidate most of my investments. Favourite quote: "Faith-based economics seems like an unsound management philosophy, for those of us without the power to part the Red Sea and make a getaway from a falling dollar, rising oil prices, and insolvent banks". A Symbol for Gaia: When I write about a better way to live, or about wilderness, or the need to connect with all-life-on-Earth, I've been using a photo of a temperate rainforest in the US Pacific Northwest Olympic range to "illustrate" the article. This is because there doesn't seem to be a symbol or logo for Gaia, for living in balance with nature. When I did a search I found the old 1960s environmental symbol (a take on the Greek letter omega). I also found the symbol at right, developed by gaia.com member (and author of the Gaia Girls book series published by Chelsea Green) Lee Welles. I really like the logo, since it taps into the aboriginal importance of quartets (four elements, four seasons, four directions etc.) and is based on a circle. During the search, Barbara Dieu pointed me to flickrcc, which shows you a collage of photos on any subject you key in. Birds in flight, forests and waterfalls prevail for photos tagged 'Gaia'. To me this is a fascinating way to capture "the wisdom of crowds" about a subject visually. Booking Time for Real-Time Chat: Google now allows you to put a badge, like the one below, on your blog to indicate if you're available for an IM/VoIP chat via GMail/GTalk. You don't even have to have a GMail account to ping me. Problem is, I'm not available for such chats very often. So before I put the badge on my sidebar, I need to add to it a Google Calendar showing my 'conversation office hours', the times when I will be available. Ideally, it would be interactive, allowing readers to say what they want to chat about, so I can invite others to join in. May take awhile for me to set up. Imagine, blogs as a medium for real-time conversations! Thanks to Theresa Purcell for the link. Manipulative Language, and the Abuse of Power in Conversation: Andrew Campbell retrieves and elaborates on a fascinating model by Vincent Kenny on Dead Language vs Live Language and how power politics in conversation 'deadens' the language and dialogue and saps its power, creativity and usefulness. I'm learning how to listen more attentively to conversations, their nuances, what is said and implied and unspoken, unconsciously conveyed. Now I'm discovering I must also learn to observe the way in which language in conversation is sometimes wielded as a weapon, to stop thought and creativity and sharing and connection and everything else it is valuable for. The Wrenching Photography of Amy Stein: The photo above is an example of Amy Stein's disturbing and ominous photographs. Her full collection entitled 'domesticated' is here, and if you're not faint of heart it's worth a look. Don't say I didn't warn you. Thanks to Emily & Daisy at Our Descent for the link. Why Is It Called a "Retreat"?: Evelyn Rodriguez writes about the need to turn off the noise from external sources, and to withdraw to our true selves, to rediscover them, to find our true bearings, our centre, before reconnecting with others, in order not to become too much Everybody-Else. Geoff Brown Sketches the Civilization Bubble: A fascinating Nancy White style drawing by Geoff (above) shows us within Gaia, as a bubble, and the ways in which nature is pushing back against our unsustainable 'inflation' are depicted as pins, each threatening to burst the bubble if it expands any further. Brilliant. Games for Change: If we're going to spend time playing video games, why not make them informative and get that energy directed at ways that can make the world a better place? Thanks to Graham Clark (who also supplied the quote in the thought for the week below) for the link. This is the World Now: Another delightful miniature in words and images by Pohangina Pete. The world now does not make sense. Thought for the Week: variously ascribed to Al Rogers or Eric Hoffer: In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. 11:39:13 PM  trackback []  comment []

	July 18, 2008

Join Me September 28-October 1 in BC Bowen Island by Richard Smith I'm going to be on Bowen Island, near Vancouver BC, September 28 through October 1, for an Art of Hosting event. The program teaches several interactive meeting and facilitation technique skills -- World Café, Circle, Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry -- and it would be great to have the chance to meet with as many of you as possible while learning something new and useful (and inexpensively!) together at the same time. Please look at the invitation, and if you decide to go, let Chris and me know ASAP -- it's not a large venue, though it is astonishingly beautiful. Hope to see you there! PS: If you can't make that, I'll be in San Jose September 23-25 for KMWorld & Intranets, Quebec City August 8, Montreal September 18 and Vancouver September 26-27. Let me know if you're available for a meetup! 4:03:33 PM  trackback []  comment []

Friday Flashback: Twelve Ways to Think Differently In May 2005 I wrote this post that, after it was picked up months later on Digg and other popularity lists of web articles, turned out to be my most-visited article ever: Our minds are like our bodies -- fail to exercise them and they atrophy and break down. We live in an age of specialization, where we are encouraged to narrow our interests and our activities, to focus and limit ourselves to doing things at which we are very competent. So parts of our brain get a lot of exercise and other parts very little. What's worse, this can actually narrow our comfort zone, the range of things we enjoy doing or thinking about and are competent in. Many of our cultural activities and artefacts: political debates, win/lose competitions, hierarchies, laws, religions, 'best practices', systematization, uniforms, and monolithic architecture and design -- all tend to reinforce 'one right answer' thinking that discourages and ultimately excludes and prevents us from thinking differently. Even the mental exercises we do as we get older are designed to stem the loss of analytical skills and memory rather than broadening our thinking or our thinking ability. We live in a world of stultifying sameness and uniformity: physically, ideologically, intellectually. There is little motivation, little day-to-day need, to exercise the parts and processes of our brain that rarely get a workout. Read the Twelve Ways 4:01:41 PM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2008 Dave Pollard. Last update: 23/07/2008; 11:21:49 PM.