Bedlam 2020

For those of you who have been following this blog for a while, since 2010 I've gotten in the habit of posting a tongue-in-cheek summary and analysis based on where I slept the previous year. As an itinerant process consultant and community networker, that generally turns out to be a fair number of places.

I've chosen the header Bedlam, both because my meanderings are somewhat chaotic, and as an acronym: Bed—Laird's Actual Mattress. OK, it's a bit strained, but you get the point.

In this year of quarantine, I thought about taking a break from this report (what do I have to say?), but then I changed my mind. Although my general pattern of being on the road once or twice a month to visit client groups abruptly came to a halt March 12, I have reflections on my adaptations, and the uncertainties (bedlam?) surrounding them. Let me walk you through the progression…

I. At first, everything was on hold. Two facilitation trainings were halted midstream (one was interrupted with two of eight sessions completed in person; the other had gotten through three). Work lined up with clients was postponed or canceled. It was not at all clear how long the hiatus would last, but my oncologist made it clear that I was at high risk of dying if I contracted Covid, so I hunkered down at home, wore a mask when out (which wasn't much), and we went through gobs of alcohol wipes when anything new came into the house.

This initial phase was characterized by uncertainty. I, as well as everyone else, was in uncharted water, and it was hard to see through the fog. 

II. Next it occurred to me how lucky I was. I was safe, we were financially secure, and I had a loving partner—we were not alone.

The level of disruption that Susan and I were facing was small potatoes compared with many others: think primary care workers, wait staff in restaurants and bars; staff in stores that sell non-essential goods; beauticians, tourist industry employees, people who work in food packing plants, etc. I was shocked to understand how many at the lower end of the economic food chain (which disproportionately means BIPOC—Black, Indigenous, People of Color) were a single paycheck away from having to choose between food, rent, childcare, or medicine, none of which are luxuries.

The economic pandemic was falling most heavily of those least able to cushion themselves from its impact—a problem poignantly exacerbated by the double whammy that Covid is killing BIPOCs at higher rates than whites. (Take a moment to digest that stock indexes today are higher than they were before the pandemic. Shed no tears for the rich.)

In March, Breonna Taylor was killed by white police officers in a no-knock drug raid on her house, even though the suspect the police was looking for had already been apprehended. In May, George Floyd was choked to death by a white police officer on the streets of Minneapolis. These atrocities (and too many others) helped the nation focus on the issues of police brutality and systemic racism. 

The convergence of police violence and how the pandemic has exposed inequalities in employment and health care among BIPOC, has helped place and keep systemic racism in the spotlight. In the spring I was inspired to join a weekly discussion group that meets via Zoom for one hour weekly to explore white privilege and the work we need to do to no longer be complicit in maintaining the status quo. It's been humbling to discover what I wasn't looking at, wasn't educating myself about, and wasn't objecting to around me.

III. I went through a phase of impatience. I have an incurable cancer (multiple myeloma) that I've been successfully managing since its discovery five years ago, but there's no telling how much time I have left, and I chafed having to forego special trips with Susan, visiting family, and work with clients (if I'm not on this Earth to help others why am I here?) I resented losing precious opportunities to do what I love and which means the most.

IV. Then I started experimenting with Zoom (along with almost everyone else). Gradually I discovered I was able to deliver solid work, even on complex topics, over a virtual platform. Previously I was highly skeptical of this outcome, but experiments have proved me wrong. To be sure, there are complications and I still think in-person work is richer and superior, but in these times when groups are suffering and in-person isn't an option, Zoom has turned out to be surprisingly robust. The acid test for me is working with conflict, which requires my paying close attention to energy and nonverbal clues. While it's not clear how much of that is supported by the medium, and how much I am able to rely on patterns that I can accurately identify with fewer cues to go by, it's nonetheless working, and that's the bottom line. 

Gradually, I was back in business. It's not as if groups have stopped struggling. In fact, the pandemic has led to increased pressure on many communities and the need for assistance has risen—especially for someone like myself who specializes in defusing tension.

V. Over the summer, my facilitation training partners and I started offering free Zoom sessions with our students that were part check-in and part instruction, These typically ran for two-three hours every 4-6 weeks. These went well, and ultimately led to an experiment with conducting a full-blown three-day training weekend via Zoom. Amazingly that went well also, so we've restarted both groups where we left off, the pandemic be damned.

Further, we're excited enough about what we can deliver to offer an entirely Zoom-based two-year facilitation training to new students. Not only does this keep the ball rolling, but it frees us up from needing a concentration of students in a given area to support a class, and obviates the need for host groups to feed and house the class for three days. With Zoom students can be anywhere, so long as they have motivation and high-speed internet. (If this opportunity interests you, let me know and I'll send you information about it: laird@ic.org).

VI. With the arrival of effective vaccines, it appears likely that I'll get my turn for a couple of arm pokes sometime in the first quarter (given my age and immunocompromised status, I'm in line right after primary care workers and people in nursing homes). Once it's been determined that enough of the population has been vaccinated to provide herd immunity, I expect to resume travel, and that has buoyed my spirits. Among other hardships, I haven't seen my kids or grandkids (or granddogs for that matter) since November of last year. To be sure electronic connections have been a lifeline and that has helped, but it's not the same as a hug.

VII. I've been a process consultant since 1987. Over the years I've learned I could regularly count on slow times in the year: the three weeks from mid-December through Epiphany, and the summer doldrums (mid-June through August), when too many people are on vacation to justify bringing in a consultant. Now that's out the window. I have never been busier than I am this holiday season. In addition to prep work for my two training classes (and promoting the new one), I am juggling active work with 10 client groups at present (today, for example, I have three interviews scheduled). My cup overfloweth. While I'm keeping up, and enjoy the work, I'm wondering what happened to slowing down for the holidays. I lay awake at night not thinking of sugar plums; I'm thinking about what to say to clients in distress who don't think they're part of the problem.

Talk about chaos at the end of the year! This is a lesson in being careful what you ask for (see point III above). Regardless of whether we want it, we definitely live in interesting times.

In any event, happy New Year to all! I'm an inveterate optimist, and believe good things are ahead in 2021, despite the bedlam.

Failing to Pick Up on the Need to Defund Consumption

I was shocked to hear on the radio today that the top three selling vehicle models in the US are all pickups.

Think about that. 

I lived on a farm for 40 years and there is definitely a place for pickups as part of a vehicle fleet in rural life. At Sandhill Farm (where I did the bulk of my community living) we always had a pickup. There were times when we needed to haul heavy or bulky things and that's what a pickup is good for (by extension you can make a reasonable argument that pickups are darn near essential at industrial job sites as well). That said, we only used our pickup about 10% as much as we used our regular vehicles—because even on a working farm, the overwhelming majority of the time you simply use vehicles to move one or two people, and pickups are grossly inefficient.

What do I mean by "grossly"? The gas mileage for this year's pickup models is in the 15-20 mpg range. The mileage for this year's sedans is typically 30 mpg and up. The US Dept of Transportation figures that the average American drives 13,500 miles annually. If you do that in a pickup that gets 16 mpg, you'll buy 843 gallons of gas. If you do it in sedan that gets 32 mpg, you'll need only half of that, or 421 gallons (not to mention hundreds of hours in better seats). If gas costs around $2.50/gallon that's roughly $1000 difference in what you'll pay for gas.

When you take in the sales data, it's obvious that most of those hot-selling pickups are not being bought by farmers worrying about schlepping hay bales to cows in the back 40, or by oil drillers running extra pipe to a wellhead. So what's going on? As near as I can tell, owning and driving a pickup has become a status symbol. Think about how ridiculous that is—all the more so in light of folks complaining about economic strain right now. (I know, it may not be the bottom third of the economic pyramid who is buying his and hers F-150s, but you get my point.)

We're living in a world that desperately needs to reduce its carbon footprint, and with spectacular inequalities in how resources are distributed among the nations of the world. As a developed country that uses way more than its share of the world's resources, how do we sleep at night buying all those pickups? With the brick wall of limited resources right in front of us, in what reality does it make sense to increase consumption to make a fashion statement? This is developing conspicuous consumption into an art form—on the order of sport killing buffalos from moving train and letting the meat rot (yeah, we did that, too).

Instead of focusing on car pooling, we're focused on car fooling—as in fooling ourselves that we're taking the consequences of over population into account. Instead of car sharing, we're indulging in car foreswearing—in favor of gas-guzzling trucks. 

Surely we can do better.

Navigating the Emotional Minefield

One of the defining indicators of the health of cooperative groups is how they respond when strong feelings emerge among members.

Most of us were raised in a mainstream culture that did not develop our capacity to know our feelings or understand what constructive responses would be when they erupt in others, and few groups select for members who have that orientation. (To be clear I'm not talking how to handle unbridled joy. I'm talking about rage, paralyzing fear, deep sadness, overwhelm, and even grief—you know, the hard ones.)

If the group does not explicitly discuss how it wants to engage with feelings, mostly they don't, and the results of that neglect and chaos are not pretty. A good portion of my work as a consultant to cooperative groups revolves around trying to help them understand why they need to develop an ability to work with feelings, and how to do it.

The interesting case is when one or more members attempt to traverse an emotional minefield (by which I mean a stretch of territory where it is suspected that strong feelings may reside below the surface) and someone explodes—perhaps by intentionally triggering someone known to be sensitive in a particular way, or perhaps inadvertently, but an explosion nonetheless. Now what? I want to examine three possible responses:

I. Cordoning off the Entire Area

If the group reacts with anxiety, and fears an escalation that may result in severe damage to relationships, they may call an immediate halt, clear everyone out of the field, and declare return visits off limits. That topic (that minefield) is now taboo. In general, this comes from most (all?) members having no experience of examining feelings as a safe exercise. Many have personal memories of such sharing having no boundaries, with the result that people come away feeling abused, exhausted, and no better informed. So why allow it?

While this response has the benefit of limiting the potential damage that can result from attacks that accompany outbursts, it also has the unintended consequence of teaching people that they can control what is discussed through expressing distress, and the louder the better. Not good.

2. Designating the Explosion Site Off Limits

This, obviously, is a more measured response, but it's still a rejection of opening up to emotional expression. In this case, it's evaluating such incidents on a case-by-case basis rather than with a blanket prohibition. Maybe the next explosion won't be so overwhelming. 

In this response the group is willing to leave the door cracked, hoping to develop some capacity to work with feelings, while at the same time protecting against potential aggression, by reserving the right to clamp down on it if it feels too dangerous. This can be received as a mixed signal. When the light is yellow instead of red, those who go into reaction may feeling authorized to express themselves (assuming they have sufficient control to choose), while those most leery of being exposed to raw feelings may feel they were being given protection that may not be there in their moment of need. This can go sideways quickly.

3. Bringing in a Medic

Reactivity happens. As all humans are emotional beings (as well as rational) let's first make sure that aggression is limited, and there's no arterial bleeding, and the let's find out what it means. In my experience, the group will ultimately be far better off if stays with the reaction long enough to be sure it understands both the reaction and the trigger, as well as what meaning that has for the person (if you project meaning onto the incident without checking it out, you are subject to all manner of mischief). This is data. If the distress surfaces in the context of the group wrestling with an issue, this data may be highly relevant to what the group is working on. 

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the upset person gets to control the outcome or the narrative—you are only getting their story, yet it's something to take into account. It is a matter of discernment what weight to give it, just like any data. I am only trying to make the case that knowledge comes in a variety of packages and emotional knowledge is no less inherently valuable than rational knowing. Groups are thus well advised to develop the capacity to speak in both tongues.

If you don't, the person in distress is likely to be isolated and pathologized ("we expect members to control themselves in meetings and outbursts are not welcome; we will not dignify it by giving it attention"). The massage to everyone else is: don't try this yourself; translate your feelings to thoughts if you want them to be respected, or shut up. This effectively cuts off people in distress from being seen as useful members in problem solving, and people in reaction may be tied in knots trying desperately (in silence) to figure out what they will be allowed say, meanwhile missing what others are saying. It's expensive.

• • •

Having said all that, it's understandable why groups don't necessarily start with an understanding of why they need to develop the ability to work emotionally. If everyone is a fish swimming in the waters of rationality, why contemplate what it might be like to fin through a sea of feelings? The reason, of course, is that humans bring their emotional selves into the room every time there's a meeting, and no amount of cultural disapprobation will prevent all expression of strong feelings. It's just not how humans are wired, no matter how hard you try to squelch it. Pretending otherwise is a barrier that gets in the way of the group doing the deeper, richer work of which it is capable.

So you need to have an agreement or two about how you'll handle that. And if you decide to engage (which I strongly recommend) then you'll need to agree on how, on what license you'll give facilitators to go there, on how you'll adjust agenda setting to allow for it, and on how you'll skill up your community to do it well (do not under any circumstances promise that you'll create safety for exploring strong feelings when you don't have a clue what you're doing). All of this is worth the effort, but it's a package and it's an investment.

When people move into intentional communities they are purposefully choosing to live in greater proximity to others, and agreeing to share decision-making more than is done in traditional households. This invariably leads to friction. There is a naive projection that many first-timers carry with them into community living—hoping that shared values and a commitment to cooperation will mean less friction. Sorry. It doesn't work that way. We all bring our quirky personalities and competitive conditioning with us and when we disagree about nontrivial matters, the gloves come off and strong feelings are alive and well.

The measure of a group's health is not how much conflict it has; it's how it navigates the minefield.

Aunt Hennie's Fruit Cake

This morning I laid down the fruit cakes.

Let me explain…

Most all of us have family traditions with roots back to our childhood. Sure, they can be quirky and idiosyncratic, but cherished nonetheless. One of the ones that bubbled up for me recently was homemade fruit cake—far better than store-bought—which was deemed an essential contribution to the Schaub family Christmas hoopla. lovingly assembled by my Mom's older sister, Aunt Hennie.

As it happens, Hennie and I share a birthday (a sure omen of astral connection). She was born in a two-story frame house built on the open prairie 20 miles west of Chicago in 1899 and lived a homesteading life growing up. Over the years, of course, the inexorable march of the suburbs gradually overtook her and today the house—which still stands—is located smack in the middle of an established residential neighborhood in Elmhurst Il. 

As the acorn that wandered furthest from my suburban upbringing, I helped start Sandhill Farm  a homesteading community in northeast Missouri when I was just a callow youth of 24. One serendipitous result of that was that I was the beneficiary of much homesteading equipment that had been languishing in Hennie's basement, looking for a good home. I'm talking about a major league cabbage shredder (think sauerkraut in quantity), a bunch of ceramic crocks, a start of hard-to-find black currant cuttings, and a massive wooden butcher block contributed by my mother. 

In any event, Hennie got along in years (it's a trend, I've noticed) and at some point she was no longer able to deliver the fruit cakes. I believe that ended in the 80s, but the memory persists and she passed along the recipe. Once or twice my sister Tracey had a go at it, and another time my daughter Jo did a batch. This fall, in the Year of Quarantine, I decided it was my turn in the barrel and I took advantage of my weekly trips to Mayo Clinic (in Sept and Oct) to lay in a supply of dried fruit and nuts.

Not finding a ready source of dried orange and lemon peel, I made my own (isn't that what homesteaders do?). I chopped and combined all the fruit, nuts, and spices in late October and the sticky conglomeration all went into an airtight container where it marinated in a sacred concoction of brandy and whiskey. This got carefully stirred and replenished from time to time until yesterday, when it the baking happened!

This entailed creaming sugar and butter until my arm cramped, adding the fruit, and finally some. flour before pouring it all into tins (think banana bread size) and slowly baking for a couple hours.

They turned out beautifully and I'm now in the finally stage. This morning I took the cooled down cakes (there are four) and wrapped them in brandy-soaked cotton cloth (did you notice the alcohol theme?) and then in tin foil to retard evaporation of the precious liquor. They now rest on the basement floor in an airtight container for two weeks of seasoning. They'll be ready Dec 17—just in time to be mailed to my kids for a renewed under-the-tree tradition.

What could be a more loving gift?

Today, on this day of thanks, I'm reflecting on the joy I derive in mental agility. The delight I take in whimsy. While my overall constitution has been diminished by my five-year battle with multiple myeloma, my mental acumen has remained surprisingly untouched, and for that I am unalterably grateful.

So let me take you on a little journey I've been dwelling on…

The Joy of J

This past week I have had occasion to reflect on the power of simple words, comprised only of the consonant J and vowels (it's not a long list):

Jo

This, of course, is my daughter. Born Josefa, she has long preferred to be called Jo. On Monday she reached a particular geeky milestone (which likely would have gone unnoticed if I didn't call it to her attention): she turned exactly one-third of a century old: 33 years and four months. It seemed worth celebrating to me. Who has too much joy in their lives these days? I admonished her to go out and celebrate by thirds (not by half) and I'm confidant that she did.

Ja

While I'm basically a human mongrel (if you pay heed to the analysis 23 and Me) I'm more German than anything else, and have always had an affinity for German culture. I took three years of Deutsch in high school, but never lived there and never became fluent. Nonetheless, everyone knows that "Ja" is yes, and I've tried to live a life of affirmation (where it behooves one to try to say to "yes" as often as possible—life just works better for everyone that way). The life of ja.

Juju

Years ago, I lived at Sandhill (1988-95) with Julia Reed (from Big Lake MN). She was a dear friend and one-time intimate partner during that stretch. While our lives drifted apart when she left the community in the mid-90s, we reconnected when I landed in Duluth, while she's been living in St Paul. She found out about my cancer and visited me in the spring of 2016 during the annual Smelt Festival in Duluth (full of puppetry, parade, and goofball costumes). It's held in May and loosely corresponds to the annual smelt run on nearby rivers (where you can scoop up the little darlings in pots). For a northern culture that's desperate for a change in the seasons, it's often the first day that Duluthians come out of hibernation in numbers, and spirits abound (in both senses).

She and her partner Shari have been regular visitors to Duluth ever since (I think they'd come even if I didn't live here) but they always stop by for a visit, which I cherish. Based on a childhood appellation, she went by the moniker Juju at Sandhill, and I still call her that today.

Jeju

Years ago (2008) I conducted a facilitation training in Atlanta and when my partner (Mayana) and I lingered an extra day we used most of it to visit a Korean day spa called Jeju, and enjoyed a magical recuperative time. I have never been to anything like it before or since. For one fee, you can enjoy up to 24 hours on the premises, choosing from among saunas, hot tubs, massages (for an extra fee), light Asian cuisine offered on site al a carte, or meditation in salt domes. What a mix!

Although I don't have that many occasions to visit Atlanta, a return to Jeju, and another day of pampered relaxation, is still on my radar.

• • •

So those are the oddities that have drawn the lottery number in my brain for receiving special attention for thanks this week. I knew you'd want to know.

Qualities You Want in Community Members

Today I want to tell the story of someone I've become acquainted with in the context of doing work with her community over the past year. As I work with groups on the average of one or two per month and have been doing this for a third of a century, you can appreciate that a lot of hot water has flowed across my tea bag and I've met a lot of folks—many of whom are amazing. It's one of the cherished perks of my profession.

In any event, I'm taking the opportunity today to celebrate the qualities I've observed in one particular new friend that has touched my heart in a profound way (so much that I arose at 5 am last Thursday to compose this email to her, slightly edited to redact identifying descriptors):

We didn’t get off to a great start when I first arrived on the scene this summer and you were still in high distress following the precipitating incident, and you weren’t sure you could trust me. (On my end I have no trouble with your caution—it made perfect sense to me. You had been burned badly and didn’t want to expose yourself to more hurt. You were a wounded momma bear, and I was poking at the wounds.)

As you might imagine, it was not the first time that someone hasn’t responded well to me right out of the box. It goes with the territory. I’m brought in because of problems and it’s my job to go there. I never try to be mean, but I’m also direct, and that can be painful.

In any event, it was clear from your participation in the first community meeting (I try to track discontents pretty closely) that you were shifting in how you related to me based on what you saw—to the point where you volunteered to be in the circle with me for a clearing if someone wanted to do it with you, and that was not where you had started. I was impressed.

In my business there is a lot of easy talk about taking in information and adjusting one’s views, but I don’t see it nearly as often as people claim they are capable of it. You have been the real deal, and I’m taking time to honor you for it. You have been a delight to work with. Not because you agree with me all the time, but because you state where you are (I don’t have to guess), you listen to what I have say, and you sometimes change your mind. Not only that but you go through your internal process pretty quickly.

These are the qualities I’m trying to highlight:

a) You are committed to self awareness, and understand that this has to start with your emotional response, if that’s a component. That means knowing what your feelings are, and looking at how those responses are serving you or not, so that you can make a considered choice about which feelings to feed and which to shift. (This is not so hard to write, but there aren’t nearly enough folks capable of that discernment.)

b) You are willing to own your shit. Mind you, everyone is bringing some, so the nuance here is not that you have any, but that you are doing the work to recognize it and admit it publicly. That’s gold. It's a terrific model for those you live with. We all have feet of clay, but not everyone can own it. (You need look no further than Trump to see a spectacular example of someone who can’t do it. What an awful role model.)

c) After doing your due diligence with self care and self analysis, you consider the impact on the whole—what’s best for the group, without betraying yourself or your family. Boy do we need that. To be fair, there are plenty of others in the community who bring that capacity to the table as well (thank the goddess), but right now I’m highlighting that in you.

This is an awesome mix, and I love it when I see it. It’s what gives me hope that we can build a better world after all, despite all our human frailties.

So much for the molasses; now the sulphur. Here’s where I want you to stretch, where I think you can do more: learning to see difficult dynamics through the eyes of the people who irritate you. That’s where the money is. While people do stupid and ill-conceived shit all the time, they rarely intend to be shitty. They’re just doing the best they can with what makes sense to them in the moment, and if you can see that possibility (good intent coupled with sloppy delivery) it can help enormously to not stay stuck in a story about how they’re the antichrist. 

I'm talking about the difference between containing or limiting your reactivity, and actually seeing irritating people as good-hearted, just not as able. Notice how I immediately worked to find Dale [a pseudonym] a soft landing when she spoke provocatively at the last meeting. That’s what I’m talking about. I defanged the poison right away by first acknowledging her good intent and then getting her to admit that it was in her interest to learn to be less provocative, which she freely did. (I can’t guarantee that that will happen every time, or course, but it’s worth the attempt.)

This is the response I received later in the day:

I will say honestly that I still don’t understand your method in how you go about establishing relationships with people in a group at the beginning, and freely admit I did not trust you at all after our initial conversations, but I remained open to the possibility and hope that we would eventually understand each other better. I can truly say I have felt safe and confident with you in every minute of every meeting. I don’t really need to understand that discord, I just accept it. I have enormous respect and gratitude for the work you’ve done and continue to do with our group. I have learned an enormous amount about active listening just by watching you do it.

You really understand my strengths and my weaknesses and it means a lot that you took the time to reflect that back to me. I am frequently the one in the group asking that we begin by assuming good intentions of each other, and I am perfectly willing to admit that is probably because that is where I struggle the most myself—maybe not in theory, but in practice. Can I objectively stand back and recite the reasons behind someone's actions that have nothing to do with her being a bad person? Yes, as I did at the last meeting. But I see that I lose my grasp on that when it comes to practical application in instances like this—when I felt angry enough to think that shutting her out of meetings was the answer. (For the record I don’t believe she is inherently bad, but neither do I believe she is a safe person for my family to be in relationship with.) Detached from my feelings, I have no trouble agreeing with you that they have good intentions and want good and reasonable things—the same things I want. Emotional safety for themselves and their families and visitors in our community. Trust in their neighbors.

Sometimes (historically often) my frustration and impatience with others get the better of me and that shows, and isn’t productive.

My therapist has also pointed this out and the big work I am doing in therapy right now can be summed up in the one word—acceptance. The more I am learning to accept what IS (rather than being stuck in anger/sadness/frustration that what I WISH WERE is currently NOT) the more patient I become. Because when I’m stuck emotionally in resistance—like I was this summer—it has a hold on me every minute of every day. When circumstances beyond my control have much *less* of a hold on me in my daily life, patience becomes much easier!

I had a big shift moment when my therapist asked me “Do you think your community will ever be 100% healthy?” And I said “well no, of course not,” and she said “Can you accept that?” It was the exact right moment to ask that question (after months of my life being far too attached to neighbors’ needs, feelings and actions). 

I’m always trying to grow. I like what Brené Brown says so much—“I’m here to get it right, not to be right.” Being wrong doesn’t threaten my sense of self and that is the greatest freedom of all.

Wouldn't you like to live with people like her? Don't you feel that by teaming up with allies with those qualities we could actually build a world that could work for everyone? I do.

Virtual Surprises

We're now about eight months into the guarded physical and emotional reality forced upon us by Covid 19. I came home from a road trip March 12 and haven't left my state of home quarantining since. What's more, it could easily be another eight months before an effective vaccine is widely available. I'm thankful that my Amtrak travel credits don't expire with temporary inactivity.

While the pandemic has resulted in all manner of strains on individuals and households, I want to focus today on some of the impacts I've observed among cooperative groups—some of which are not very surprising, but some of which are.

1. The Tension Between Individual Rights and Group Safety

Interpersonal friction among groups didn't cease just because meetings in the same room came to an abrupt end. If anything, the cracks that existed before are likely to open up under the strain of travel bans, and social distancing. It can be particularly cruel on folks living alone, who were likely drawn to community for its social benefits and are now proscribed from enjoying them face to face.

On the one hand, communities are almost certainly doing a better job of checking on each other and supporting one another as they can, within the context of health limitations. On the other, a number of communities (especially the ones meant to be senior-oriented from the get-go, but also those who have grown their own senior class merely be being successful) have a significant segment of their population in the high-risk category and thus need to be on their toes (just not on anyone else's).

While no one build their communities or developed their social norms with a pandemic in mind, here we are, and the adjustments have not all been characterized by laminar flow. In particular, there has been strain in many places that mirrors what we've seen at the national level between those who: a) feel it's a fundamental individual decision to determine what constitutes risk management and they are loath to have their rights trimmed by the anxieties of their neighbors; and b) those who are horrified with the concept of trusting their neighbor to determine, without a conversation mind you, what behaviors should be acceptable to them. They want a collective conversation about safety in the time of Covid, and struggle to understand what they see as unconscionable selfishness by those who don't want to talk about it. It can get ugly.

What constitutes an appropriate level of home quarantining for an entire community? What can be expected (required?) in the way of testing for community members? These are not simple questions.

To be fair, my sense is that communities are working through this stuff, but the road has been bumpy and the collateral damage has not all been addressed or repaired. There is clean up work here.

2. The Potency of Zoom Facilitation

Over the course of my 30+ years as a professional facilitator and process consultant, I've held the view that there was no substitute for being in the same room, where you can feel the energy and track nonverbal clues. While I've always maintained a lively email correspondence and steady phone traffic, these were invariably meant to augment my working with groups in place… until the last eight months, when the only place that existed for a consultant has been virtual.

Forced by Covid to adapt to a changed world, I have experimented with facilitating from afar, via Zoom, and have been surprised to find how effective it can be—even with groups I've never met before. This was a happy discovery—and one I didn't expect. Unless the group is larger than 24 (I can get a 5x5 array of boxes displayed on my laptop screen—numbers above that result in multiple pages of participants, which are much harder to visually track) I've been impressed at how well it can go. 

I've thought a good deal about why that might be, given there is necessarily a loss of granularity with Zoom—that is, there is clearly less information available to work with. My best guess is that I have developed a certain amount of refinement in my skills over the years and redundancy in the ways I take in input, even at the cellular and intuitive levels, such that the loss or constriction of some channels still provides enough bandwidth to do my work, even when the dynamics are messy and complex (which is probably redundant).

Given that messy and complex is more or less my specialty, it's a damn good thing that I can still deliver. I experimented cautiously at first (not wanting to overpromise), but now I have enough Zoom experiences under my belt to feel confident in what I can deliver. I'm even resuming the delivery of three-day facilitation trainings, entirely by Zoom. It's a brave new world.

3. The Courage of Zoom Participation

Finally, I want to make a surprising observation about doing emotional work via Zoom. As you know, our wider culture is not known for its forthright acceptance and facility for meeting one another on the emotional plane, and it's my firm belief that we have to develop that capacity in order to realize the potential of community living. Without it, our interpersonal relationships—the heart blood of community—are stultified and incapable of fully blooming.

What I've discovered, while endeavoring to work sensitively with feelings using Zoom, is that many people feel less trapped in the spotlight when unpacking emotional distress from the comfort of their own home. Neither are they as prone to indulge in rants as they are via email. It's a double blessing. On the one hand there is more accountability when addressing one's neighbors through the visual pane of a laptop. On the other, I suspect people may feel safer than when working these dynamics in the same enclosed room. It's an unexpected sweet spot.

To be clear, I'm not reporting a sea change. Distress still exists and groups still struggle with how to respond. I'm only reporting a certain subtle shift in there being somewhat less reactivity via Zoom—an unexpected yet nonetheless welcome deescalation in work that can be often be highly volatile. In any event, I'll take it.

Tuesdays with Mayo

No, I'm not referring to a new sandwich option at Ruby Tuesday's—I'm talking about my current treatment protocol in my ongoing dance with multiple myeloma.

The Back Story

I started experiencing serous back pain in late 2013, which eventually led to my getting tests done at my local hospital in Memphis MO in December 2014 (you may be wondering what took me so long, but I have a reasonable tolerance for pain, and I've always been able to heal myself by "riding it out," so that's what I was attempting). In any event, I had a CT scan done which was interpreted as negative for cancer, but highly suggestive of early onset arthritis. No fun, but not so bad.

So I soldiered on, with the help of serious doses of ibuprofen. Except I didn't get better. After being bed ridden for the first month of 2016 (and in excruciating pain), it was time to try the hospital again. This time the CT scan told a different story. The back pain was associated with three collapsed vertebrae at the top of my lumbar section, caused by calcium leaching associated with multiple myeloma. The headline: I had cancer.

While I was pretty far down the rabbit hole by the time this got discovered, I was able to rally, get the cancer under control, and undergo a bone marrow transplant (aka stem cell transplant) that summer at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. That gave me a fresh set of downs to work with. 

{Here's how that works. Multiple myeloma is centered in the bone marrow. When you undergo a transplant, you are given a poison that kills everything in your bone marrow—cancer and all—after which your bone marrow is repopulated with your own stem cells, that have been carefully harvested right before you're given the poison. This sets the cancer back for about a year.). 

While there is no cure for multiple myeloma, there is a growing panoply of treatments available to manage it, and the strategy was to milk each of those as far as possible, essentially hoping that new treatments would come online faster than I would go through them.

It's a fascinating dance.

Where I Am Today

Now fast forward four years—an entire presidential cycle. When I came back from Mayo Clinic in August 2016, the prospects were bright for our electing the first woman President. Remember back then? My how things have changed. The prospects for my health have improved greatly, while the prospects for the country, sadly, have gone in the other direction.

In less than a week we'll be spinning the election wheel again, and we'll see what we get this time.

After completing the stem cell transplant at Mayo, my ongoing care and treatment were overseen locally, at St Luke's Hospital in Duluth. That went relatively smoothly for four years, as I worked through a progression of treatment protocols. First Kyprolis, then Ninlaro, followed by Daratumumab (I knew you'd want to know). When the effectiveness of Dara waned this past summer, I'd run out of FDA-approved options and needed to reach out into the quirky world of medical trials—where drugs being tested for FDA-approval are put through their paces. While expenses are 100% covered by the sponsoring pharmaceutical company, effectiveness is more iffy, and you can encounter some science fiction side effects. 

Still, it's better than dying, and being near Mayo ("near" being a relative term—it's a 3.5-hour drive one way from Duluth, if the roads are clear) means I have access to the latest trials. At the recommendation of my hematologist at Mayo (Dr Buadi) I opted into a trial for MEDI2228 (drugs aren't christened with their exotic names until they pass FDA muster), which I started Sept 1.

Although I only receive doses of the drug every six weeks (via intravenous infusion) I am required to travel to Rochester every Tuesday for data collection (mainly a blood draw and an eye test). Typically, Susan and I are driving seven hours round trip for about 30 minutes worth of medical work. It's a schlepp. (The silver lining is that there's a Trader Joe's in Rochester, and there isn't one in Duluth.)

—Fall Colors on Parade

One delight has been watching the autumnal foliage advance, week by week. We even got a decent look at the progress of the fall harvest. (Corn and beans both looked exceptionally good in the southeastern corner of the state.)

—Photosensitivity

I was cautioned at the outset that some users of MEDI2228 experience a marked sensitivity to bright light and increased susceptibility to sunburn. While none of that showed up at first, it gradually did, to the point where it was unsafe for me to drive after six weeks. Ugh. I squint so much that Susan refers to me as Mr Magoo. While it's semi-amusing that I wear a bill cap indoors (to deflect light from overhead lamps and bright sunshine), it's meant that Susan has had to handle the full load of seven hours behind the wheel every Tuesday.

When we had to negotiate an early snowstorm Oct 20, the return drive from Rochester took a grueling six hours (instead of three-and-a-half) and she was a wreck (though not the car) by the time we finally pulled into our driveway. Welcome to winter.

—Navigating the Warrens

Mayo is one of the largest medical facilities in the world, and it's the largest employer in the state of Minnesota. Over the years it's grown into an incredibly complex complex, with everything connected via tunnels, elevators, and overhead skyways, so that patients don't have to brave uncertain outdoor conditions going between buildings. It's easy to get lost—but you're never that far from an information kiosk, where friendly faces can point you in the right direction. 

After being in the maze every week for the last 10. I'm starting to navigate it like a veteran (and Susan knows her way around even better than I do). I can even find the Starbucks through the subway system, and know when to look up to see the awesome Chihuly blown glass sculpture suspended above the atrium of the Gonda Building.

As a former nonprofit administrator, I have an appreciation for administrative competency, and Mayo has it in spades. There are patients and medical personnel converging on their facility every day from all over the world, and yet, they know where everyone is supposed to be at all times. Appointments are sequenced to allow for the vagaries of doctor schedules and travel time between facilities, so that you never need to hurry, nor are you asked to wait that long. I am in awe of how they keep it all straight.

—Election Day

As it happens, my next trip to Mayo is on Election Day. As we should be finished there by 2 pm, we should be home by 6 pm—in plenty of time not to miss any of the Trump death watch, and the chain reaction down ballot Republican catastrophe. (When you weld your wagon tongue onto the back of a manure spreader, you shouldn't be surprised that you come out smelling like shit.)

The Road Ahead

Even as things get sorted out on the national level, it's not clear whether MEDI2228 will be effective in containing my cancer. If the marker for my disease (lambda light chain) does not decrease in the next couple weeks it will be time to look for another trial (hopefully one that's like Susan—easy on the eyes).

The good news is that all of my other vital signs are solid (heart, kidneys, and ambient pain level) so, while the doctors are closely tracking my progress, they are not alarmed. Thus, while I have no idea what's next, I'm confident that I'll be given the best chance possible. 

And my adventure continues.

The Racial Divide

I've been spending a lot of time this summer thinking about how to have conversations with other white folks about systemic racism. Increasingly it seems people either get it, or think it's a non-issue.

I recently spent an entire day getting tests done in a hospital. Knowing that there'd be some wait time I brought a book with me: David Blight's 2018 biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In the course of the day two different health care practitioners (both white women under 40) noticed the book and asked about it.

One was impressed that I was trying to educate myself about the impact of white privilege, and the pain of how the federal government turned its back on the promise of Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation in the decades that followed the Civil War—allowing white supremacy to reassert itself during Reconstruction. We had a solid connection about the need of whites to educate themselves about the dimensions of systemic racism.

The second conversation went differently. When I offered a sketch of the horrific injustices that occurred regularly in the South that was the primary focus of Douglass' orations during his final two decades, this person opined, "Well, life was probably hard for everyone after the war"—as if the hardscrabble conditions that Southern whites faced at the end of the 19th Century somehow excused or justified the lynchings, voter intimation, and unequal access to property and wages that characterized Black lives. (Was she serious? Did she really think that?)

When I persisted, making clear that I thought the reality for whites, however poor, was nowhere near as desperate or unsafe as what Blacks experienced, she backed down. While this exchange was brief, and ended without rancor or harsh words, neither did I think I'd altered her perspective, and I've been brooding about that ever since.

What might I have done differently that may have led this second person to reconsider the story she tells herself about systemic racism? I'm not sure. While I'm glad I didn't just let the moment slide by (as I might have six months ago), I also feel I need a more effective response in such moments—which will undoubtedly keep occurring.

There is a great deal for us whites to do to dismantle systemic racism, and it starts with acknowledging its existence. While I'm clear about that, and the work I need to do, I'm not clear about the best strategy for penetrating white defensiveness—which is incredibly strong in many pockets. I doubt I'll succeed by getting righteous and pounding on the gates.

One Piece of the Puzzle

Just last week I read JD Vance's bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, chronicling the lives and culture of three generations of Appalachian whites, which goes a long way to explaining why poor whites from Scots/Irish rootstock are demoralized about their prospects in the world and feel that Trump voices their anger. Vance describes a lifestyle and world view that was totally foreign to me. While the author had the loving support of strong grandparents that encouraged him to achieve the escape velocity necessary to avoid the downward spiral of Appalachian nihilism, most of his peers have not been so fortunate. Vance paints a grim picture of dead-end jobs, opioid and/or alcohol addiction, out-of-control birth rates, terrible diets, broken families, and high violence and abuse.

As a segment of the population, there is a higher percentage of poor whites who report that they don't expect to earn as much as their parents did (42%) than any other segment. This is the segment that most strongly feels that the American dream has failed them.

While poor whites are by no means the only portion of the population resistant to the concept of systemic racism (Appalachian whites think that they are being discriminated against; that Blacks are being favored), they are part of the issue, and Vance poses a reasonable challenge: what do politicians and more privileged whites (such as myself) have to say to poor whites that can make a difference—not in the way they vote, but in their prospects for a life that works? That allows us to pull together to end systemic racism?

While it's discouraging how big the hole is that we're trying to climb out of, at least I feel like we're moving in the right direction. Finally.

Key Facilitative Skills: Sequencing Work Productively

As a professional facilitator for more than three decades, I've had ample opportunity to observe which skills make the most difference. As a facilitation trainer since 2003, I've also collected plenty of data about which lessons are the most challenging for students to digest. Taken all together, I've assembled a series of blog posts on the facilitation skills I consider to be both the hardest to master and the most potent for producing productive meetings. They will all bear the header Key Facilitative Skills and will be a distillation of where the heavy lifting is done.

Here are the headlines of what I'll cover in this series:

I. Riding Two Horses: Content and Energy

II. Working Constructively with Emotions

III. Managing the Obstreperous

IV. Developing Range: Holding the Reins Only as Tightly as the Horses Require

V. Semipermeable Membranes: Welcoming Passion While Limiting Aggression

VI. Creating Durable Containers for Hard Conversations

VII. Walking the Feedback Talk

VIII. Sis Boom Bang

IX. Projecting Curiosity in the Presence of Disagreement

X. Distinguishing Weird (But Benign) from Seductive (Yet Dangerous)

XI. Eliciting Proposals that Sing

XII. Becoming Multi-tongued

XIII. Not Leaving Product on the Table

XIV. Sequencing Work Productively

XV. Trusting the Force

                                        • • •

Sequencing Work Productively

Plenary time is precious. It's expensive getting everyone together and the time should be used wisely. 

On the front end that means agenda suggestions should be carefully screened to make sure that they are appropriate for whole group consideration, are sufficiently mature for prime time, and have a high enough priority relative to other work that clears the first two hurdles (don't try to put a 20 lb meeting in a 10 lb sack).

But that's not the hard part. What I want to drill down on in this blog is how to tackle an issue effectively once it's made it to the plenary floor. Here's the sequence I propose:

1. Presentation of the Issue 

What are we talking about? What needs to be decided at the plenary level? What are the relevant group agreements bearing on this topic (if any)? If there has been recent prior work done on this topic, what was accomplished and where did that leave off (no need to re-plow old ground).

This is typically handled by a presenter who is not the facilitator. It's OK for the presenter to be a stakeholder and to have preferences about the outcome; it is not OK for facilitators to be stakeholders—they need to be neutral.

Caution: It is relatively common for strong presenters to slip into the role of facilitator by calling on people with questions or comments, and engaging in dialog with them. Don't let this happen to you! As soon as the presentation is over, thank the presenter, and ask them to sit down. (You're flirting with danger whenever you allow a non-neutral person to run the meeting.)

2. Questions 

Did everyone understand the Presentation? This is not what do we want to do about it—that's later. The point here is getting everyone on the same bus before it pulls out of the station. The better the Presentation, the fewer the questions.

2a. Clearing the Air

If there is non-trivial unresolved tension associated with the issue, it's an excellent idea to deal with that before anything else. If you attempt to plow ahead without dealing with this (perhaps you weren't aware of the tension; perhaps you were afraid of it; perhaps there's resistance on the part of the group or the protagonists to opening that door) it will often bite you in the butt. Tension is associated with distortion and distraction, making it difficult to steer clear of reactivity or to hear accurately what everyone is saying. Rather than trying to cope with distortion on the fly, it's almost always better to deal with it directly and separately first.

Note 1: In order to do this, there needs to be agreement that the group will work with emotions; facilitators need to be authorized to engage with feelings, and they need to have the ability to do so with skill and compassion. That's a lot of ifs.

Note 2: If there are no significant tensions associated with the issue, this step can be skipped.

3. Identification of Factors

Which group values are in play? Do some considerations trump others, or are they all of equal weight?

It generally works much better if the group articulates how it will assess the suitability of potential solutions (or action steps) before considering what those solutions will be. This is an expansive phase. If people hold strong opinions about what should be taken into account, it is in this segment that they can be given time on the soap box to make their pitch.

4. Proposal Generating

Now, finally, we get to solutions. What do people think is the best response, given all that we're trying to take into account (the output of the preceding step)?

Distinct from the previous step, this one is contractive. It's time to set aside the advocacy that characterized step 3, and focus on bridging.

—Pitfall #1: Starting with proposals

Groups frequently require that the presentation of an issue be accompanied by a proposed solution, in the hope that that will speed up the consideration. Groups do this for two reasons: first, as a safeguard against an issue not being well defined. If the presenter is required to offer a response, s/he is that much more likely to have a clear handle on the problem. Second, if the group is lucky, the offered solution may be a winner and allow the group to skip over a potential slog in plenary, saving who knows how much time and grief.

The downside of this is that the presenter is required to invest in a solution before the whole group has had a chance to identify what needs to be taken into account, and if the initiator has a significant hole in their thinking about what needs to be addressed, that dog won't hunt—and all the effort devoted to problem solving may be down the drain, which doesn't help morale a lick.

It doesn't take many experiences of that before there is a significant drop in enthusiasm for serving on committees—which appear to be an assignment to serve as so much cannon fodder for plenary scrutiny. It's much better to not start on solutions until the plenary has signed off on what needs to be taken into account.

—Pitfall #2: Commingling steps 3 & 4

Most groups wrestle with an issue in one big conversation (or multiple big conversations), which can often devolve into a melees or swamp draining assignments if the issue is difficult. While it's no small challenge in and of itself working through topics where the outcome is consequential and there are strongly held divergent opinions, the water is unnecessarily muddied further by attempting to identify what needs to be taken into account at the same time that you're developing solutions.

As was pointed out above, the first step is expansive and the second is contractive. When groups try to breathe in and out at the same time, it gets confusing. People get lost about what kinds of comments are appropriate and it can be hard to follow the bouncing ball. Someone expresses a concern, and the next speaker offers a solution while a third person is waiting their turn to express a different concern. It can be hard discerning whether you're coming or going.

5. Decision

Once the group is satisfied that it's done what it can to sensitively manifest the best solution it can, you're ready to make a decision—unless you believe it's prudent to let the proposal incubate for a time, to give those who missed the meeting a chance to weigh in, and for those in attendance to process any residual reservations.

Note that there can be a fine line between dithering and reflecting. I am not advocating for weak knees; I'm suggesting that if there is no urgency about the issue, then waiting for another meeting cycle to allow for reflected input can result in better grounded decisions.

—Pitfall #3: Getting Bogged Down in Late Concerns

If you decide to postpone a decision until the meeting after you've completed proposal generation, there is a danger of inviting monkey business from members who skipped prior meetings but arrive at the final one to throw sand in the gears by expressing concerns about the proposal—something that should have happened back in Step 3. While it's possible that their last-minute concern is something missed in the prior considerations and the group will be smart to stop and go back, you are not obliged to do so if you have adopted this sequence as the official way you do business. A member's right to have their views taken into account is tied at the hip to their responsibility to make their views known in a timely way.

6. Implementation

The last step is all about dotting i's and crossing t's. What are the action steps, who will cary them out, what's the budget (if one is needed), what are the reporting expectations, and what are the deadlines? In general, implementation details are straight forward, yet groups sometimes neglect to pin them down in the rush to be done and move onto the next topic (or to adjourn). It's a shame to squander otherwise solid work by getting sloppy at the end. Don't let that happen to you. 

Key Facilitative Skills: Not Leaving Product on the Table

As a professional facilitator for more than three decades, I've had ample opportunity to observe which skills make the most difference. As a facilitation trainer the past 17 years, I've also collected plenty of data about which lessons are the most challenging for students to digest. Taken all together, I've assembled a series of blog posts on the facilitation skills I consider to be both the hardest to master  and the most potent for producing productive meetings. They will all bear the header Key Facilitative Skills and it's a distillation of where the heavy lifting is done.

Here are the headlines of what I'll cover in this series:

I. Riding Two Horses: Content and Energy
II. Working Constructively with Emotions
III. Managing the Obstreperous
IV. Developing Range: Holding the Reins Only as Tightly as the Horses Require
V. Semipermeable Membranes: Welcoming Passion While Limiting Aggression
VI. Creating Durable Containers for Hard Conversations
VII. Walking the Feedback Talk
VIII. Sis Boom Bang
IX. Projecting Curiosity in the Presence of Disagreement
X. Distinguishing Weird (But Benign) from Seductive (Yet Dangerous)
XI. Eliciting Proposals that Sing
XII. Becoming Multi-tongued
XIII. Not Leaving Product on the Table
XIV. Sequencing Issues Productively
XV. Trusting the Force

• • •

Not Leaving Product on the Table
In this monograph I'm going to focus on the last 10 minutes of a meeting. In my experience groups often squander opportunities by not understanding what's possible in those moments.

In a meeting where the topic has been well explored, everyone has had a decent chance to express their views and concerns, and the energy is fluid—pay attention to these caveats; they're important—it is often possible to bring the group to a reasonable agreement, or at least a partial agreement, that will likely evaporate if not captured right then and there. It's use it or lose it.

The interesting case is not when you're testing a specific proposal for buy-in—that's relatively easy—but when you're in a dynamic conversation and not clear where you'll end up. Leaving aside for the moment whether the facilitator can create and hold the group in a listening, non-combative place (no small thing when the stakes are high), a good facilitator should be able feel into the possibilities about what agreement could hold the whole.

Here are the elements needed to put yourself in a position to harvest something valuable in the last 10 minutes—to bring the train into the station on time with as full a load as possible.

—Seeing the Glass Half Full
What ungirds this skill is understanding the power of being agreement oriented (seeing the glass half full). While this may seem a minor matter, it isn't. We come out of a wider culture that emphasizes individuality, to the point where we have been deeply conditioned to be aware at all times about how we are distinct from others—not how we are aligned with others. Thus, we have learned from an early age to identify and focus on how we disagree with others, because that's how we know we're unique. Developing the skill of seeing the potential connections among disparate viewpoints requires unlearning our default response to differences.

I experienced a dramatic example of this last winter when I was facilitating a community meeting where the group was discussing cat policy. One couple held a strong position about limiting the range of cats outdoors because of their predation of songbirds. While the cat owners in the group weren't willing to accept an outright ban on cats being allowed outdoors (excepting on a leash—which no cat owner thought was workable) there was considerable sympathy with the couple's concern about songbirds, and a number of suggestions emerged about what could be done to support songbirds short of banning outdoor cats. Where I saw a a lot of common ground among the suggestions, the couple only saw failure because they weren't getting buy-in with their proposed ban. For the couple, if they weren't getting everything, they were getting nothing. Where I saw possibility; they experienced rejection.

Another way this shows up is in the summary of the meeting. Left to their own inclinations, participants will often dwell on what didn't accomplish, rather than on what did. While both may be true, there is a completely different energy around a summary that points out how differences got narrowed, partial agreements were reached (perhaps pinning down subtopics), and people were assigned to research unclear points. All of that is movement and has a completely different feel to it than a simple statement such as, "We didn't complete the topic today and will have to return to it at the next meeting."

Often, skilled facilitators will be able to read what's possible better than anyone else in the room—not because they're magicians (adept at sleight of hand), but because they have trained themselves to see connections and possibilities ahead of differences and obstacles. They should also be able to deftly read the energy in the room and tell the extent to which it's gelling, rather than getting brittle.

—Allowing Time to Breathe
In the interest of efficiency, a number of groups shoot themselves in the foot by scheduling plenaries too tightly, not allowing sufficient time to explore issues in depth. In general, groups would be better off delegating more and giving greater time to the remaining topics—the ones that should be handled by the plenary. If a topic is worthy of full-group attention, then give it enough time to be explored in depth. To be sure, considerations should be well-focused and not repetitive, yet neither should they be raced through or cursory. When you ask groups to swallow food that has been insufficiently chewed, you should not be surprised that the result is indigestion.

—Establishing and Maintaining the Right Energy for Problem Solving

Good facilitators know how to manage energy. Not by strong-arming participants but by establishing the right tone for the right kind of consideration. If at all possible, you want to confine advocacy to an earlier phase of the consideration—when you are identifying what should be taken into account in evaluating proposals. Essentially, this earlier phase is getting clear about what common values are in play and their relative priority. 

It is much easier to hear how strongly someone feels about environmental impact, then it is to hear how strongly they support a particular solution (we must release capital reserve funds to finance solar panels on the roof of the common house). If you assiduously separate identification of factors from problem solving, then you can restrict advocacy to the earlier phase, which is expansive, while insisting that the latter phase be characterized by bridging and coalescence (how do we best connect the dots, since we're all in this together). When done well, problem solving is not characterized by tug-of-war energy. There should be a soft, creative feel to it, in which the seed of solutions can sprout in the fertility of the final minutes.

—Working the Edges

When a topic elicits non-trivial differences (hint: most of the interesting ones do), it's often worthwhile to pay special attention to the edges of the conversation, making sure that outliers have been able to fully express their concerns and at the same time understand that they have not been particularly persuasive in drawing others toward them.

If you've been careful to establish that outliers have been heard, you are in a much stronger position to ask them to move toward the middle, where agreement tends to dwells.

Turnip Day and Bickled Peets

On the 25th of July
Sow your turnips, wet or dry

I imagine that for most folks, last Saturday slid by unnoticed. But for those of us who are grounded in in the arcane folklore of Missouri agriculture, it was Turnip Day—once brought briefly into the national spotlight by native son Harry Truman in 1948, when he called for a special summer session of Congress in an effort to light a fire under Republicans who controlled both chambers of Congress but produced little legislation.

Truman's call for a Turnip Day Session came July 15, at 1:45 am, in the context of giving his acceptance speech as the Democratic candidate for President. It was the start of his dramatic climb back into contention against the heavily favored Thomas Dewey, who he nipped at the wire in the November election. 

While Truman's gamble occurred 72 years ago, it occurred to me that here we are with Republicans diddling again, this time bumping along downstream without a rudder (Trump has plenty of rudeness, just no direction) in the fast water of a pandemic. It's incredible watching this train wreck unfold. Every single day, Trump loads up a shotgun… and discharges it into his foot by nightfall. (I appreciate that there were a lot of metaphors in that paragraph, but I imagine the meaning was clear nonetheless.)

While it's not obvious what we'll get with Biden, it's damn clear what we get with Trump and people are fed up and weary of the divisiveness, the venality, and the dysfunction. There's a bumpersticker on our block that encapsulates it all: "Any Functioning Adult in 2020."

• • •

Beyond politics and Show Me folklore, last weekend was notable because I was able to indulge in one of my favorites pastimes, condiment making. I lived for four decades at Sandhill Farm, where we had a foundational commitment to growing and preserving our own organic food. Over my years there I developed a niche for processing acidified foods (think tomatoes, fruits, and pickles), and I miss it today.

Happy as I am to be living in Duluth (as I type, it's 79 degrees with 44% humidity beneath a sky filled with cotton ball clouds—eat your heart out), I long for the rhythms of farm life. While Susan and I enjoy putzing around in our 100 sq ft backyard garden, I hit the jackpot last Friday when I was running Susan out to the car dealer's and we passed someone peddling fresh vegetables out the back of a pickup in a bank parking lot.

Thinking to pick up a half dozen ears of fresh corn (to accompany our grilled salmon fillet for dinner)
I pulled over on my way home and stumbled onto some nice wax beans and good looking beets. For reasons that escape me, it's hard finding beets at a decent price, so I knew a good deal when I found one, and I jumped on it, buying a half bushel. Sunday I turned those into 16 pints of pickled beets. Yeehah! (Susan made a double batch of moussaka earlier in the day, so our kitchen was redolent with the aromas of love.)

In addition to the odd experiment with a new recipe (last year it was chow chow pickle; this year I have a batch of red cabbage sauerkraut going), my baseline condiments (the things I never want to run out of) are: corn relish, dilly beans, pickled beets, and tomatillo salsa. Because we're just a household of two, and you can only expect your children to eat so much, I've disciplined myself to only making a batch of each of these every three years. Otherwise we'd need to devote an entire wall in the basement to canned goods storage.

Beets are an especially evocative food for me. In addition to something Susan and I both enjoy, it was one of my mother's favorites (though she only cooked them when Dad was on a business trip). When labeling the beets yesterday, I was reminded fondly of Ann Shrader, with whom I started Sandhill. (She and I share a son and a full deck of memories: 52 years worth.) Annie has a penchant for spoonerisms and enjoyed referring to what I had just created as "bickled peets," so that's what we'll call them here in Duluth. A new tradition.

Now if I can only find a bulk source of ripe tomatillos…

13 Angry Men

One of the silver linings about home quarantining is the opportunity to catch up on well-regarded films that I missed along the way. Last month I looked at a couple of 100 Best All-Time Movies lists (there are a gob of them—you know what they say, opinions are like bellybuttons: everybody has one), noting which I'd seen and which I'd missed.

Through the miracle of Netflix, I am simply working down the list and adding to my queue all the films I haven't seen (or didn't recall having seen, which amounts to the same thing). Last week I got a CD in the mail of the 1957 classic, Twelve Angry Men.

The entire movie is the jury room deliberation following a murder trial. The film opens with a bored judge giving instructions to the jury. The trial has ended and viewers have no idea what has occurred. A young man (early 20s?) is on trial and if the jury finds him guilty there is a mandatory death sentence. The decision must be unanimous. None of the jurors know each other ahead of time, or have any relationship to the defendant, the judge, or the lawyers.

The defendant is an immigrant and lives in low-cost tenement housing.

(The cast is terrific, including Henry Fonda, Lee J Cobb, E G Marshall, and Jack Klugman.)

This movie was released 63 years ago and times have changed—though not enough when it comes to prejudice and racism. The first thing that caught my attention is that all of the jurors are white and all of them are male. 

We are told that the defendant was represented by a court-appointed attorney who was less than zealous in his efforts to protect his client's rights, which illuminates the issue of how much justice is available to folks who cannot afford high-priced legal help. In the movie, the character played by Henry Fonda takes up asking the questions that the defense lawyer never did—not because he's convinced of the defendant's innocence, but because he's not convinced of his guilt. Slowly, over the course of several hours, he's able to cast enough doubt on the veracity of eyewitness testimony and how to interpret the "facts," that the jury swings all the way from 11 siding with the prosecution to a unanimous decision to acquit. It's fascinating to watch the progression.

What stood out most for me about Fonda's character was his ability to withstand a steady diet of pressure from others ("we could have gone home two hours ago if you'd voted guilty at the outset") without losing his core concern for "reasonable doubt," and his steadfast ability to resist responding in kind when being railed at by others. It was rare courage.

• One juror is impatient to reach a guilty verdict so as not to miss a baseball game that he has tickets to that evening. 

• Another juror is afraid of the responsibility. He frequently makes jokes in an awkward attempt to lighten the mood, and simply votes with the majority.

• The oldest member of the jury offers important insight into why the retired man who claimed to have seen the murder might have made up his testimony—for a final chance to be taken seriously in a culture that warehouses its seniors, and pushes them to the side.

• The juror portrayed by E G Marshall is a paragon of rationality who is invariably contained and grim. He insists that the defendant must be found guilty because a woman testified that she saw him commit the murder from the window of her bedroom 60 feet away—until it's pointed out that she wears glasses and claimed to have seen the murder after being awakened from a sound sleep. As the juror also wears glasses, he realizes the improbability of the woman having her glasses on for her observation, and he changes his vote to not guilty.

• The juror played by Lee J Cobb is the last holdout, until he admits that his upset with the defendant is a misplaced projection of his estranged relationship with his son—who is the same age as the defendant. Breaking down in tears, he agrees to acquit.

• The juror who serves as foreman is constantly trying to figure out how the group wants to proceed (should we talk or vote; should votes by open or secret ballot?) and is regularly disrespected by the others. (When process is unclear it can be a thankless job to be responsible for it.)

The movie is full of racist innuendo (everybody knows that dirty immigrants can't be trusted), and mass confusion about what to do with strong feelings, which, not surprisingly, abound in a murder trial.

On the one hand, it's inspiring to realize how far we've come since 1957. There would certainly be women on the jury today, and (hopefully) a racial and ethnic mix as well. Yet it's also sobering to see how little we've advanced when it comes to clear communication, and how much the defendant's fate depended on that chance that someone as skilled and resolute as Henry Fonda's character was on the jury.

In general, I strongly question whether people of color are receiving any more justice today than they were 63 years ago, and that realization effectively makes me the 13th angry man.

The Calculus of Suicide

This past week an older friend of mine (let's call her Adrian) reached me by phone when she was in a depressed mood. Her life wasn't working well (and hadn't been for quite a while). Near tears she asked me for a date to help her walk through whether or not to commit suicide. Oh boy. I agreed to be there for her (how would it have landed if I'd turned her down?), yet I was shaken and unsure how to proceed.

My emotions and thoughts were all over the place:

—I was sad that Adrian has had such an unhappy life.

—I was immediately touched by a sense of loss (pre-grieving?). I didn't want to lose my friend.

—I felt guilty that I hadn't initiated more contact with her the last few months.

—I was flattered that Adrian felt I could handle such a sensitive and weighty assignment. She knew I didn't have a moral judgment about suicide, and she knew that I wouldn't freak out. She knew I'd take her seriously and help her explore her options dispassionately (isn't that what good friends do?).

—I was intrigued. It's a powerful topic, though one I'd never focused on before, beyond the moral and existential questions. How would one make this decision? It turns out I have a number of thoughts about it, and I was glad to have time to prepare.

—In addition to all of the above, Adrian's situation offers an insight into what it's like to be on the gray side of 70 in these days of Covid. For anyone in that age range, there are much higher odds that you'll die from a Covid infection than for younger population segments—the death rate is 8% for those in their 70s; 14% for those 80+; and only 0.4% for those under 50. Of course, those are just averages. If you're immunocompromised (as Adrian and I are) the odds are significantly worse.

[Digesting these statistics helps explain some of the tension we're witnessing between younger people who are impatient to resume normal life and seniors who are more cautious—those two age brackets are looking at different odds. What fascinates me the most is the fierce determination among some in the lower-risk age range who insist on their right to decide for themselves how safe it will be for others. I don't have any problem with individuals making choices for themselves, but that's not the world we live in—especially when a quarter or more of those infected with Covid are asymptomatic.

When people defy the advice of health care professionals by not wearing masks or maintaining social distancing, they are essentially saying that they get to be the sole arbiters of what's acceptable risk for everyone around them. In consequence, those who feel that more cautious public behavior is called for need to be mindful of the presence of those who don't care to take their concerns into account.

Thus people who believe themselves to be at risk need to be extra cautious about being out in public, because they cannot rely on others being mindful of their situation. How did we get to be so uncaring?]

In any event, Adrian and I are both in the better-wait-for-a-vaccine-before-going-to-a-restaurant category, which reinforces isolation for our age cohort—and this is on top of the struggles that seniors ordinarily experience trying get enough human contact to sustain health. Our culture is youth oriented and we tend to warehouse or otherwise set aside our seniors—not because we no longer care about them or they can no longer contribute, but because younger folks don't want to be burdened by elder care, are impatient for their time in the sun, and prefer to learn through doing it themselves than by being mentored. When you add into the mix the mobility of contemporary society, to the point where adult children often live at some distance from their parents, it's tough on seniors.

All of which is to say it can be lonely growing old, especially for those without a partner, and the pandemic has made it worse. Susan and I are highly fortunate to have each other, as well as the surrounding neighborhood, where Susan has gradually built a wealth of caring relationships over the course of four decades. We are not at all as isolated as Adrian.

Our next door neighbor—in her 80s—had been living alone for some time and recently fell and broke her hip. On top of that she has been suffering memory loss (onset dementia?), and her four adult children collectively decided that it's time for mom to move to an assisted living facility. On the one hand this makes total sense. On the other, it's hard on our neighbor to make the adjustment, losing the anchoring familiarity of her home of 50 years. It's a sad time.

Although Adrian has retained her independent living, she is in a housing complex of 400 where no one really knows her. While everyone needs caring relationships in their life, not everyone has it. And that's brutal.

Against this backdrop, I want to share my thinking about Adrian's choice about whether to stay or go. First I turned my attention to what I know about her situation:

Factors
• She has been in poor health for many years.
• Adrian has weight and mobility issues which make it hard for her to get around (even if it were safe to do so).
• She lives in a large housing complex in an urban setting and has no friends in that location. 
• She has a car and still drives (though she's nervous about going out because of the pandemic).
• She can hire support for cleaning and shopping, but it doesn't provide companionship.
• It's been hard for her to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the chaos and disorganization in her life, and then she falls into a pattern of self-deprecation at the end of the day if she hasn't accomplished much. She finds it difficult to make a plan and to stick to it.
• One of the most depressing things for Adrian is that she doesn't feel that she's being much use to anyone these days—there is no demand for what she has to offer.
• She has one sibling, with whom she has a complicated relationship. Her sister lives in a different time zone and doesn't provide much emotional support. She has no other living family—though she does have a wealth of friends sprinkled across the continent.
• Because she has an extensive background in community living, the lack of social contact in her life today is all the more glaring.
• Electronic connections are helpful (phone, email, social media), but are not the same as being in the same room.

Next I elucidated the questions I would use to explore the possibilities.

Questions
1. How do you assess the balance of joy and satisfaction relative to pain and misery in your life right now? (While I can't imagine this will look good—else why be thinking about suicide—how bad is it? Let's lay it out.)

2. What are your prospects for turning this around? Can you reasonably expect things to get better? Are there things you can do that will make a difference? What help do you need, if any, to move things in a positive direction? Be specific. 

3. Is there work (or projects) that would inspire you to stay alive to do?

4. Is there a role for me to play in reinforcing the positive answers to the prior two questions?

5. If you decide in favor of suicide, walk me through how you'd do it. Do you have the will to carry this out?

6. If you decide on suicide, what do you need to complete or get in order first (for example, are there estate decisions to make)? Walk me through the timeline. Is there a role I can play in this?

7. Who do you want to say goodbye to?

• • •

While I was expecting to get into these questions over the weekend, it didn't happen. Adrian was in a better mood when we talked (for about an hour) and my instinct was to let her direct the flow of what we talked about. In turned out that she had stepped back from the brink, at least for now. 

Meanwhile, I am mindful that I can support my friend (and contradict the story that no one cares) by the simple act of initiating phone calls once every fortnight or so. And if the impetus to discuss suicide surfaces again, I'll be ready.