Beyond Cancer

I went into the hospital with chronic, debilitating back ache Jan 31 and promptly discovered that I have cancer: multiple myeloma. Not surprisingly, that has been the centerpiece of my reality ever since.

Now though, more than two months into chemotherapy, I'm starting to stabilize and am going through a relatively quiet phase of therapy, where I try to build strength in anticipation of a stem-cell transplant that I'm expecting to undergo this summer at the Mayo Clinic.

Though I was knocked flat on my keister by the initial barrage of medications, I've steadily been regaining functionality, stamina, and lucidity ever since, the upshot of which is that I'm able to tread water with email, and engage in life beyond cancer. For the first time in two months I want to write about something other than knocking on the door of my mortality.

As I sit with the increasing possibility that I'll be able to get my process oar back in the water, the obvious next question is what do I want to do with that? Where do I want to go? That question morphs easily into, "Where do I think I can have the most positive impact?" or "What can I bring to the table that isn't easily found elsewhere?" The truth is, I'm not sure. But I have ideas.

My best arena is cooperative groups—where the members have made a purposeful commitment to operate cooperatively (as opposed to competitively). That cuts down the field quit a bit. Even though interest in cooperative alternatives is rising, there are not that many groups that have taken the plunge, and fewer still that have actually thought through what it means to learn to respond to differences with curiosity rather than combativeness.

Over the past three decades I have concentrated my group work with intentional communities, both because it's more accurate to assume a core commitment to cooperation in that setting, and because living together requires that members deal with at least a baseline level of issues (cleanliness, child rearing, pets, ecological impact, and diet to name a few). To be sure, some intentional communities have proven to be sufficiently clever that they've been largely able to duck functioning cooperatively even when their noses have been rubbed in it, but there are also many who have taken the bit in their mouth and are purposefully trying to pull in rhythm.

Those last are my best clients. They know they're doing something radical, they know it isn't easy, and they're willing to ask for help.

Having said that, the world of intentional communities is relatively small and obscure. Yes, it's growing and its relevance to the wider culture is becoming more easily recognized all the time, yet many people simply dismiss lessons gleaned from community living as a sideshow oddity—it's too far beyond the pale to be applicable to mainstream issues (such as how to solve problems without resorting to threats of war).

I have tossed in this last parenthetical example as an incendiary. How could anyone not be interested in exploring and developing more effective, less belligerent ways to solve problems? And yet the golden nuggets painstakingly mined from cooperative living that bear on this challenge are blithely ignored almost everywhere I turn. It's discouraging.

Thus, one reason to pause before returning to work in the trenches of intentional community, is to weigh whether my efforts there will be seen and available to inspire others.

Going the other way, intentional communities are concentrated cooperative groups, rich in complexity and complications—just the kind of environment where learning can be sustained at an accelerated rate. It is also where I have my best connections and am most likely to find meaningful work quickly. While I know that the application of my work is far broader than the micro-world of intentional communities, I may have to leave it to others to make that case, narrowing my focus to identifying the lessons, rather than disseminating them.

It's an interesting fork in the road. In the end, it comes down, for me, to which path appears more attractive: would I rather do the field work (panning for the ore) or the promotion (packaging the refined products)? Put that way, I'll choose the field: working to identify and access cooperative options in a dynamic; learning better how to see competitive traps before we fall into them; increasing my capacity to work with the whole person—all of us, after all, are rational, emotional, intuitive, and kinesthetic beings all rolled into one.

Presented with all these delicious options, you can see why I'm in no hurry to depart this veil of tears.

Making Things Better

I recently had this exchange with my partner, Susan:

When I visited property outside of Savannah, I couldn't help but think of the slaves that had lived there when it was a plantation. There are a few preserved slave cabins in the area and I vacillated between thinking how beautiful the thick woods were and how impossible it would have been to escape from them. I'd like to think I would have been like the Grimke sisters [Angelina and Sarah, who spoke against slavery in the 1830s, after having witnessed its horrors first hand growing up in South Carolina] and disturbed by slavery, but is it more likely I'd have been a product of the times and an obedient little girl?

While it’s almost impossible not to speculate, it’s also an impossible question to answer: essentially, how would you respond in a challenging situation that you’ve never faced? Of course, we get glimpses of our courage and our moral strength from time to time, when we are faced with tough moments. But it’s hard to accurately extrapolate from what happened in one moment to how you’d respond in another.
 
Guess instead of thinking on that, I should concentrate on what I can do today to make things better.

I believe there’s ore to be mined in imagining yourself in such a circumstance (in the Deep South in the first half of the 19th Century), as a thought experiment, knowing you’d be voicing a highly unpopular idea (questioning slavery). Yet even then I imagine there would be a way to initiate conversations where you could try to connect with all the players: both slaves and owners, if you could be genuinely curious about how they were handling the dynamic. While I think it would be hard to get a salve to trust a white girl and be forthcoming, I don’t think it would be impossible. Easier, perhaps, would be asking your family members and neighbors how it felt to own another human being. I’m suggesting this because I could imagine you doing that, introducing questions of morality and anguish, where perhaps the topic was being avoided—rather than pronouncing judgment or fomenting a slave rebellion.

I imagine this could have led to more decent conditions for the slaves and humane treatment (which must have happened in some cases). I appreciate that this is far short of eliminating slavery, but it would have been a positive step.

All of that said, I also resonate with “what I can do today to make things better.” I think one of the prime challenges in life is how to be a happy, joyous person, while at the same time aware of the incredible depth of misery, suffering, and inequity in the world. It’s overwhelming. Yet going around in a depressed state in recognition of that helps no one. 

This is why it’s a compelling question for me, “What is my social change work?” Essentially, how am I trying to make a positive difference? My community networking, consulting, teaching, and writing are all geared toward that. I’ll never know how much impact I’m actually having, but at least I have my paddle in the water. 

I’m also determined to live from my passion, so I only do work I love, and I am committed to being a loving person. So loving you is part of my social change work. Not just frosting on the cake; it is a core element of living a full life. I am a better person because I love you, you love me, and we don’t take that for granted. We work the garden of our relationship and we eat from it regularly. I intend to be ruthlessly happy with you, and all of the other things I do will be positively nurtured by that robust love.

• • •

Today there is increasing attention given to the question, "What's sustainable?" This applies on the personal level every bit as much as on the neighborhood or national level. While it's not quite the same thing as how to make life better for everyone, it's close. People are concerned with how to make a life that does not depend on consuming more resources per person than would allow everyone to have enough. (Or, put another way, how good can a model be if it means some people cannot have it.)

My dialog with Susan points up that it is not simply a question of having a good model. You also need the courage to move the needle off center. When my grandmother first learned that I was quitting my job as a junior bureaucrat in Washington DC to start a commune in Missouri, she cautioned me about the folly of throwing my life away on a pipe dream. If I stepped off the treadmill for a few years I might never be able to get back on. I remember thinking at the time, "Who wants to be on a treadmill?" 

Now it's 41 years later and I'm still chasing the pipe dream of community (and I still don't understand why anyone would want to be on a treadmill). Only now it's much more than a dream. It's my way of life.

To be sure, I was lucky. I stumbled onto what would become my life's work when I was 24—even if it took a few decades to sort out how to use that as platform for social change work. I don't recall thinking of myself as courageous at the time. It just seemed like an interesting experiment, and almost certainly more personally rewarding than a career as a Washington bureaucrat.

When facing a choice about rocking the boat (whether objecting to slavery in the Deep South in the 1830s or extolling the benefits of community living in the 21st Century) you have to weigh the downside (becoming a social pariah, or an object of derision and ridicule) against the peace that comes from acting on your principles (being able to sleep at night, and the possibility that you've made the world a better place). This equation is complicated by considerable uncertainty. Often, going in, you won't have a complete picture of the costs or the benefits. Sometimes, in fact, later events prove that your well-intentioned act of bravery had no good impact at all—in which case you get the dubious experience of being exposed as a fool, and judged naive and ineffective to boot.

Yet for all those pitfalls, is there anything so exhilarating and spiritually uplifting as those moments in our lives when we did find the courage to step beyond our comfort zone to speak up about something we knew in our hearts to be wrong, and wanted to make better?

Up Against the Wall Street

A reader sent me this query the other day:

Okay Laird. Here's your chance. Please comment on the Occupy Wall Street organizing. Organic. Ad hoc. Fascinating. This is a lesson for us all who wish to bring about change. Your impressions please...

This is a good question, and I'm going to give the long answer. I see myself as a social change agent. That is, I dedicate myself to trying to be an influence for positive change in the world. That commitment doesn't particularly distinguish me from others, yet it's foundational for how I make choices about where to devote my energy. As it turns out, knowing that I have that commitment tells you almost nothing about what I do—because there are nearly infinite ways to make a difference.

I went to college during the years 1967-71. That was the height of the Vietnam protest era and I participated in a variety of activities as part of the general foment on campus. I did door-to-door surveying about racism in the middle class Twin Cities suburb of Roseville. I got arrested for joining a sit-in that blocked a draft induction center in Minneapolis. I got together in the summer of 1970 (just before my senior year and after the spring of student strikes that erupted in response to Nixon's invasion of Cambodia) with other college students that I went to high school with, to talk with groups of angry and upset adults in the Republican suburbs Chicago (where I grew up), explaining why students were striking. (I had a low enough lottery number that it looked like I was going to be drafted after graduation and I was preparing the ground for the Conscious Objector status I intended to seek.)

Having taken the time to digest my various protest experiences over that summer, I recall vividly a conversation I had with classmate Doug Hanson once I was back on campus that fall. He and I played on the soccer team together and we were pausing between wind sprints to reconnect after not having seen each other for 15 months—he spent his junior year studying in Europe and missed the crescendo of campus protests at Carleton.

Doug asked me what I thought about everything that had been happening, and how I fit into it. I told him, "I've gotten clear that I'm more of a builder upper than a tearer downer," and that insight has stayed with me ever since. It was the right question at the right time.

Ever since, this realization has provided important guidance for where I invest my life force. To be clear, it is not my analysis that protesting (nonviolently, or otherwise) is wrong or misguided. Rather, I don't see it as my gift, and it rarely brings me joy. Instead, I've been focusing on what would be better (rather than convincing people how bad things are).

Similarly, I have tried to be deliberate in finding suitable venues for my focus. Once I became solidly rooted in my commitment to community as both a suitable model and a robust vehicle for social change work (that is, community simultaneously is a reasonable way to live—that doesn't diminish the opportunities available to others—and is a terrific platform from which to operate in the world), I can look back over the last 37 years (my tenure at Sandhill Farm) and notice the points at which I intentionally expanded my field of focus to something larger:

o 1974—Sandhill: creating a single viable intentional community.

o 1980—Federation of Egalitarian Communities: working with a network of 6-8 income sharing communities to make common cause.

o 1987—Fellowship for Intentional Community: creating a network for all stripes of intentional communities.

o 1987—Process consulting: working with other cooperative groups to help them function better.

o 1997—Dancing Rabbit buys land three miles away: recruiting an exciting forming community to be neighbors, enriching the social milieu without compromising the integrity of Sandhill as a family of friends.

o 2003—Facilitation training: pioneering a two-year program to teach the essential skills of running high quality meetings (which turns out to also be leadership training).

o 2005—Creating Community Where You Are: explicitly broadening FIC's mission beyond intentional communities.

o 2007—Blog: writing every three days about Community and Consensus.

o 2008—Teaching cooperative economics: expanding my teaching horizon beyond social sustainability.

As expansive as this progression may seem, it has proceeded in an orderly way and there are noticeable limitations. For example, I don't work off continent (I'll never run out of work in North America and this is the culture I know best), I only work in English (the only language I'm fluent in, unless you count algebra, or canoeing) and I've chosen to work outside the political system—not because the political system couldn't use help, but because: a) politicians aren't asking for my help; b) I don't trust politicians to tell me the truth (which severely undercuts my effectiveness as an outside facilitator); and c) I think the surest change is bottom up, not top down. I figure if I can change the nature of how problems are solved at the neighborhood level, politicians will essentially have no choice but to honor the integrated, cross-stakeholder requests that bubble up to government agencies, and get out of the way.

All of which is to say, I feel for the frustration that has fueled the protesters who've taken part in Occupy Wall Street, and wholeheartedly agree with the essentially analysis that our current system is not working well. Yet I don't focus my attention there. I'm a cooperative problem solver (I focus both on problems in cooperation, and on how to solve problems cooperatively) and try to spend as little time as possible complaining.

Mind you, I am not suggesting that we become callous to the pain (what kind of chilling world would that be?); I am suggesting instead that we have to learn how to both respond from the heart—to show that we get it viscerally what people in pain are experiencing— and channel those feelings into the energy needed to craft constructive responses. While there's no doubt that well-timed protest can be a powerful galvanizing force in the world, at the end of the day tearing down—or pushing up against the wall—is never enough all by itself.

Why I Train

(Yes, I'm on Amtrak as I compose this blog, but that's not the kind of training I mean... )

Living in community is a social change act. It's a purposeful attempt to create a culture that's more cooperative than mainstream society (which is essentially, competitive, adversarial, and hierarchic).

Having devoted more 60% of my life to community living, I've thought deeply about three questions:

Question #1: What I kinds of change am I capable of effecting? What am I good at?

Question #2: What kinds of change activities am I motivated to engage in? What do I have a burning passion to do?

Question #3: What is the most effective way to focus my energy in the place where the answers to the previous two questions overlap? How can I have the most leverage as a social change agent?

While my answer to this set of questions has evolved over time (and may change yet again), currently it's by teaching an intensive course in Integrative Facilitation. Over a two-year period I work with a group of around 12-15 students who want to learn the skills of high-end facilitation.

The course model is that we meet eight times for concentrated three-day weekends spaced approximately three months apart--affording participants the chance to digest the cumulative experience of each weekend and to put the lessons into practice in their everyday life.

I've broken down the skill set into eight major chunks and each weekend has a teaching theme:
Working content
Formats
Conflict
Power & leadership
Delegation
Consensus
Challenging personalities
Organizational structure

Each weekend is hosted by a group. That group provides room and board to the class in exchange for outside facilitation for 6-9 hours of meetings, tackling issues that the host selects. In addition, the host gets: a) a professional report from the trainer that includes observations and an assessment about how well they're doing from a process standpoint; b) the opportunity to have two members of their group participate in the weekend as auditors; and c) an hour of professional consultation with the trainer.

About a quarter of each weekend is devoted to questions, demonstrations, and practice with the theme. The remaining time is spent on preparing for, delivering, and debriefing afterwards the live work for the host group. As a teacher, I've learned that the students generally develop their skills much more rapidly when working with real meetings, rather than role plays.

As the trainer, I usually work with a partner (different eyes and different styles enhance the students' experience), though I've also delivered this training alone.

Over the two years the class learns a tremendous amount about one another and bonds closely. There is an authenticity and intensity about the experience that means participants are seeing each other in ways that are rare and precious.

Since launching this program in 2003, I've delivered this training four times, and there's a fifth now underway in the Mid-Atlantic States. In January I expect to start a training in northern California. In February I'll start one in Missouri (which is already fully subscribed).

So far, about 50 people have participated in the four trainings. About 10 of these graduates have gone beyond this to explore the possibility of being professional facilitators (or at least facilitating more professionally in their their professions).

The narrow objective of this training is to help people develop a deep understanding of and proficiency in the skill set needed to facilitate meetings of people trying to make collaborative and inclusive decisions. The baseline skills needed to accomplish this include:
o Hearing people accurately
o Knowing the limits of what you can do
o Knowing your own feelings
o Being able to cleanly and concisely articulate your experience
o Being able to see things from other people's perspectives
o Being able to work emotionally (not just rationally)
o Being able to see what agreements might bridge discordant positions
o Being able to work constructively with critical feedback

When you think for a moment about what you can do after developing this skill set, it's apparent that the broader objective of the training is how to be a more effective leader in the context of cooperative culture. These are not just skills needed in meetings, these are skills for every moment you're awake.

It's pretty exciting work.

When How Is Not Concordant with What

I’ve been working as an administrator for the Fellowship for Intentional Community over two decades. Like all nonprofits, FIC is always looking for fresh energy, and we regularly invite newcomers to attend our organizational meetings (which occur semi-annually—the next one starts tomorrow and runs through Sunday, hosted by Daybreak, a newly constructed cohousing community on Portland’s north side) as a way to cast the net.
While we’re regularly discussing organizational openings with candidates who might fill them, there is a particular kind of challenge that is harder to handle than any other. It is when the candidates clearly possess appropriate ardor and skill, yet have a style that is aggressive and demonstrably devoid of a collaborative attitude. Such well-meaning eager beavers come across as more interested in air time than in avoiding error time. While hard working and bright, they are overly enamored of their own thinking and less interested in how that might be further enhanced by the contributions of others.
Over the years, we’ve learned to pay close attention to such mismatches, and to back away from such associations, where their actions, as FIC ambassadors, would broadcast a very different message than the cooperative values our organization is dedicated to espousing. In short, we’ve learned that how we conduct business is every bit as important as what business we’re conducting (to paraphrase communications guru Marshall McLuhan, "The medium is at least half the message"). In recognition of this, we've learned to evaluate both when assessing someone for taking on responsibility in the Fellowship’s name.
In situations where this discordance emerges, I have a personal commitment to offering reflections about it, to see how candidates respond. Are they interested in the feedback (and able to step back and look for what might be true and useful in the observation)? Or are they dismissive and immediately launch into why my perceptions are off-base (warning: here be dragons!)?
We figure that all those who argue that the end justifies the means are not the kind of people we want to be attempting to effect social change under FIC’s banner. We figure the presence of such an attitude means it's time to end our association. In consequence, we occasionally pass up hare-brained opportunities for brilliancy, preferring a more tortoise-paced approach with a more integrated message and a surer foundation. It's a long road, and important to build it well.