End Game with my Father

I recently got this note from a reader:

As someone who has been reading your blog for many years, I've noticed many references to your father, difficulties you had with him and how living in community helped you work through some of these difficulties. As a man in my mid-thirties, I'm currently in a kind of impasse in my relationship with my own father, who lives in another country and has extremely different values and beliefs from my own. I can't help thinking that many people from many backgrounds have difficulties with parents who behave in static, old-fashioned ways. It is also very impressive to read your posts that are concerned with what you do when you go and visit your son—I wish more parents were conscious of these very good ways to be around their adult children. I'm writing because I would be very interested to read about how you worked things out with your father, or how you worked out issues in yourself around your relationship with your father.

What a good question!

The story of me and my father goes back to my childhood. I grew up in the '50s and '60s in the Republican suburbs of Chicago, where you were considered a misguided oddball if you favored Kennedy over Nixon in the landmark election of 1960. Wrapped in my Leave It to Beaver cocoon, I never questioned the conservative values I was steeped in until I went to college in 1967, where the scales fell from eyes. I attended Carleton in southern Minnesota, where all 1350 students lived in dorms and didn't have access to cars without express permission. This was way before the Internet, and we only had each other for entertainment during those long winter months. That environment lent itself nicely to endless conversations about who were and who we wanted to become.

I came to understand that there were a number of unexamined assumptions that undergirded my belief system. This was the height of the Vietnam War and a period of unprecedented social unrest on campus. My life, like that of many of my classmates, went through a major upheaval. Looking back on my college experience, I value it most for the social stimulation and the work I did reordering my core values. As intended, I learned a lot about how to think—I just didn't apply it in the ways my parents anticipated, and my father in particular was appalled at what I did with my education.

My parents grew up in the Depression, in families too poor to afford college. My older brother went into the Air Force out of high school and I was the first one in my family to go to college. It was a proud achievement for my father, who saved diligently to make it possible. Imagine how betrayed he felt by what came back, as I challenged the beliefs that were the bedrock of his sacrifice!

I went through a liberalization in college that led to a philosophical gulf that my father and I never successfully bridged. While I wasn't so naive as to expect my Dad to agree with my views, I fought to be recognized as an independent thinker who could come to different conclusions. My father interpreted my dissension as signs of arrested development, and an inability to cope with the world as it "really was" (as if that were something there was general agreement about). My Dad saw my choice to live in community as a form of dropping out, believing I couldn't stand the competitive heat of the free market kitchen. Sigh.

From the schism that grew out of my college experience we tended to fight and snarl whenever we were together. This mainly took the form of sarcasm and innuendo, and I couldn't be home for longer than 24 hours without falling into this vicious pattern of baiting and debating. It was insufferable to be around us, and for many years I clung to the story that it was all my Dad's fault—if only he could accept my different views as legitimate, we could coexist.

Three years after college I helped start Sandhill Farm. A dozen years after that—fully 18 years into my feud with my father—it finally dawned on me that maybe it wasn't all my father's fault we had such a bad dynamic. With the help of my community mates I started the painful process of looking at my part of the dynamic. This was humbling and awkward work, that ultimately resulted in my sending him a painstakingly written letter that went something like this:

"Our relationship is a mess. While I love you, and I know that you love me, all we do is fight. The only passion we show for each other is when we raise our energy to be nasty to each other, and I hate how we are together.

I've recently been looking at what I've been doing to contribute to what's not working and here's what I can own: [insert list of specific behaviors here].

I want to work on turning my part of this around, what do you think?"

Three weeks later (this was before email) I got a response from my father, which began, "That was a good start. Here are some other ways that you've been contributing to what's not working... "
Ouch! That was not the letter I was looking for. I had hoped that if I unilaterally admitted to some culpability on my part that he'd find a way to admit some of his own, and we could build a demilitarized zone where our caring for each other could manifest in healthier, nonviolent ways. But I didn't get that. Instead, I just got more criticism.

The pivotal part of this story is what I did next. As much courage as it took me to admit my part of the dynamic, it took even more to set down my virtual syringe and not shoot myself up with anger again when my father spurned my olive branch. Instead, I gave up my addiction to anger and finally accepted that he was doing the best he could. I felt sad—I still wasn't getting the relationship I wanted—but it also felt good to be owning my part and to no longer be blaming my father for my misery. After spending half my life actively battling my father, I gave it up.

My Dad died two years after this attempt and we never did reconcile. But I did learn to take responsibility for my feelings, and to understand the power of working on one's own feelings in a conflict, even when you are not met halfway by the other person. In the end, your own feelings are the only ones you ever have any control over anyway.

Family dynamics are often the ones that are most deeply embedded and therefore hardest to shift. I know because it took me about 20 years to get the job done. While I wasn't a particularly quick learner, at least I got there. There have been many more times since then when I've been embroiled in stuck dynamics with others and been buoyed by remembering what I went through with my father. Having successfully taken ownership of my feelings once, each time after that has been a little easier.

While this was not a lesson my father intended to teach me, I nonetheless thank him for it every time I set down the syringe.

Leaf Blowers and Parking

I just spent the last five days in Ann Arbor, which is one of my favorites places to visit. There is something about the ambiance and cultural density in university towns that just makes them more happening places. Plus I have a lot of friends there.

Yesterday I had time for a long walk on a beautiful sunny day and headed into town from my digs at Sunward Cohousing, four miles west of downtown, catching the last of the fall color in the trees. In the hour it took me to get to the greatest concentration of used bookstores, I saw four people using gas-powered leaf blowers to push back Nature's organic residue from driveways and sidewalks—creating a canvas of unspoiled concrete that was bound to last for, maybe 15 minutes on a breezy day.

As it was a college-aged guy operating the machines in every case, I figure they were hired to do yard work and had been taking advantage of the nice weather. Because I was walking, I had plenty of time to contemplate what I was witnessing. Here's what occurred to me:

o The country is still in the economic doldrums—that is, in a condition during which it is especially prudent to think carefully about marginal spending.
o On top of this, Michigan is still in its own special economic hell due to the collapse of the US automotive industry.
o As a country, we are either at or near Peak Oil, the point at which the amount of oil (read gasoline) that is produced will steadily decline—when it is all the more important to think carefully about how to employ a dwindling resource.
o Ann Arbor is home to the University of Michigan—which is not only the largest university in the state, it's one of the most respected universities in the country, with a reputation for the quality of its education. It's reasonable to think that folks here might be ahead if the curve when it comes to forward thinking.

When I put this all together, I had trouble understanding why people were hiring someone to use gas-powered machines to blow leaves off of driveways and sidewalks.3 I can understand that jobs stimulate the economy, and that some people have more cents than sense, but really.

I also walked past a housing complex that proudly displayed this banner in big block letters:

Immediate Occupancy
15 Parking Spaces

You have to wonder about housing where the most salient feature is ample parking. You also have to wonder about how much this country is really getting it about the lifestyle changes needed to achieve any semblance of sustainable living when leaf blowers and parking are so prominently on display on a great day for a walk in Ann Arbor.

I think we have further to go. (And I recommend we not drive to get there.)

Power Outage

I'm at NASCO Institute in Ann Arbor this weekend—it's the annual conference for the North American Students of Cooperation, and draws about 300 people living in student co-ops from all over the US and Canada. It's the single greatest opportunity to work with the next generation of people excited by their first taste of cooperative living (the kids who join houses principally to enjoy cheap rent don't come to this event). I've been on the faculty since 1997 and it's a bright spot on my calendar.

This morning I'm doing a workshop on Power Dynamics and Leadership, and the main point I try to convey is that there are always power dynamics (by which I mean power imbalances and the issues around people's discomfort with how that imbalance is perceived) and the essential thing is that you have to find a way to talk about it. You have to have a way to "out it" as an issue.

In many groups, power is a taboo topic, because its so volatile that the group cannot contain it. One of the challenges peculiar to this topic is that it almost always involves criticism of leaders (the people who hold and use power) and it is often the leaders who are looked to for safeguarding the process by which issues are examined. Checkmate!

I define power as the ability to get others to do something, or to agree to something. While power is neither inherently bad nor good, it's useful, at least in a cooperative setting, to distinguish between "power over" and "power with." In cooperative groups, you want power to be exercised in such ways that the whole group benefits (power with). Conversely, you do not want power to be used in ways where an individual or subgroup benefits at the expense of others (power over).

One of the key points of my workshop is that it is rather common for a leader to use power in such a way that they think they have acted in a more "power with" manner than others in the group perceive them to have acted. When this gap in perception arises, can you talk about it? If you can't (because you don't know how to articulate it, because you're afraid to try, because the other person doesn't want to hear it), it inevitably leads to an erosion of trust in the leadership, and it doesn't encourage others to step up (because they want no part of being treated that way themselves).

I don't believe we have enough good models for healthy cooperative leadership, and we keep burning out the folks who are brave enough to give it a try. There is a tendency to expect leaders to be available for the full range of responsibilities, yet they receive few or no perks in compensation. Mostly, they just get the opportunity to serve.

What Can Be Done to Develop Cooperative Leadership?
I have three ideas about that:

1. We need to be able to talk cleanly about power. In order to be effective, leaders need to be able to wield power. That means there needs to be a clear understanding about what uses of power work well and which do not. It also means that groups need to be to surface tensions around the way power is used. When the air doesn't get cleared, it gets foul.

2. We need to explicitly lay out the qualities wanted in our leaders. There are ways we want cooperative leaders to have the same qualities as corporate leaders (administrative competence, ability to act decisively, good communication skills); and there are way in which we emphatically want them to act differently (good at building team morale, consistently credits staff accomplishments, ability to understand and work constructively with team energy). We've got to do better than just tapping people to take the lead and hoping for the best. We need to take the time to define what qualities we want, so leaders have a realistic idea about what standards they will be measured by.

3. We need to be better at appreciating people who use power well. Leaders often hold their positions because they understand better than others what the group needs and have the courage and skill to focus energy in the right places in a timely way. They often lead the cheers in appreciating the work of others. Who then, will be available to focus laudatory attention on the accomplishments of the leaders?

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.

Stubbing My Toe on the Landing

One of the risks in opening up a conflict for the purpose of making things better is that sometimes it makes things worse.

That happened to me recently while I was working with a group that was focusing on the topic of work participation—defining what kinds of labor satisfy the expectation that every member will contribution to the development and well being of the community. This is a complex topic (it's the issue that I'm most frequently asked to help groups with), and experience has taught me that if there's unresolved tensions among the players (in relationship to the topic), then we won't get good hearing and good problem solving until we've first cleared the air.

While I have a defined approach for accomplishing that—with which I've had considerable success—it doesn't work with everyone and it doesn't work every time. [For an in-depth explanation of how I advocate working with conflict, see my five-blog series starting March 18, 2009.]

Friday night, during the time we'd designated for unpacking unresolved conflicts, one member of the group called out another for shirking. Let's call the accuser Adrian and the accused Jesse. In Adrian's view, Jesse rarely showed up for Work Days, often talked more than he contributed when he did show up, and mainly focused his contributions to the garden, which was Jesse's hobby and not something that everyone in the group felt was a priority.

After Adrian spoke and felt complete, Jesse had a chance to respond. Jesse reported that there was no new information in Adrian's frustrations—that it had all been said before. Jesse felt fine about what contributions he'd been making to the community, and complained that Adrian was always looking over his shoulder, trying to find fault. Clearly, their perspectives on Jesse's contributions varied widely. When asked if they want to explore this further in plenary, they both declined, preferring to meet one-on-one at a later time. They both said they didn't need further attention on this dynamic in order to hear well and work cleanly with the plenary topic of participation.

Taking them at their word, we helped set up a meeting for the coming week, at which a mutually agreeable third party would facilitate.

Nothing more was said about this until the closing evaluation Sunday, at which Jesse witnessed how awful he felt about what had happened with Adrian Friday night. Even though Adrian felt much better (having gotten the distress out in the open), Jesse felt worse.

When Jesse said he didn't need anything more Friday night, we were interpreting that as "I'm OK and I know what to do to try to repair relationship with Adrian." In reality, we learned two days later that what he meant was, "This is excruciating and I want it to end." While Jesse didn't appear to be in untenable pain Friday night, that's what he reported on Sunday. Oops. Never mind that Adrian felt better; Jesse didn't.

When asked, Jesse didn't have any recommendations about what would have preferred, and the group was left to ponder how to better work with conflict that emerges in plenary. Upon reflection, my sense is that we didn't do a good job of establishing to Jesse's satisfaction what was going on for him. That is, what were his feelings and what was his story about what had happened (in relation to what Adrian complained about). Instead, he just felt embarrassed and exposed in front of the group. Examination without connection reinforces isolation. The key is learning what connection or validation means to each individual. It's not good enough that I thought Jesse had been heard; the standard is whether Jesse felt heard. In retrospect, we went too fast, and I should have stepped in (I was coaching the community's facilitators and not running the meeting myself) and ensured that this step had been completed. My bad.

• • •

While I always hope that the response to my work will be positive, there's a lot to be learned from stubbing my toe. In this case, I believe I need to be more deliberate in modeling and teaching how to establish connection when people are in distress. Without that bridge, all subsequent work with distressed individuals will be at risk for not landing well.

There, There, Gertrude

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Oakland this morning, pausing among friends before heading north tomorrow for a weekend of consulting with a regular client in Sonoma County.

As my life's work is centered around community, and this country's highest concentration of community-focused folks is in northern California, the transitive property suggests that I'd have a lot of friends in the Bay Area—and I do. Thus, my reality sharply contrasts with Gertrude Stein's famous one-line put-down of Oakland, "There is no there there." While I tip my hat to her clever word play, she obviously wasn't moving in the right circles.

The boundary between Oakland and Berkeley is seamless; and there are interesting groups and people to see in both places. Whenever I have work out here, I try to carve out as much time as possible on one end or the other to renew acquaintances. Yesterday I had three dates, and today I have three more—all in the Berkeley/Oakland hotspot of my community world.

What Can Brown Do for You?
As a bastion of liberal politics, the Bay Area is noted for its commitment to environmental practices. Thus, I note with amusement that Jerry Brown is running for governor again. Talk about recycling! Jerry's California political career goes all the way back to 1969, when he served for two years on the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees.

Forty-one years later, Jerry is the state's attorney general, and reaching again for the top spot. Right before his current gig, he was the two-term mayor of Oakland (1999-2007). (You see, Gertie, you have to keep your eyes on Oakland.) Way back when Nixon was President, Jerry served as a two-term governor (1975-1983), following in the footsteps of his father, Pat, who had been the Golden State's top official in 1959-1967—thus creating a Brown-bread Democratic sandwich on either side of Ronald Reagan's eight years in Sacramento.

Reagan, as we know, used his governorship as a springboard to the Presidency. Jerry Brown tried the same thing three times, most notably in 1992 (when the more irreverent of my friends were speculating on what it would be like to have Linda Ronstadt—whom Jerry had been dating at the time—as First Lady, rather than on what initiatives Governor Moonbeam would bring to the office). While Jerry's political views made him electable in Oakland, they were not on a national scale, and he was never the Democratic candidate. (In the 1992 Democratic primaries, Jerry ran against Bill Clinton. At the time, Bill admitted to having smoked pot in his youth, yet claimed to have never inhaled. The joke about Jerry was that he never exhaled.)

For all of that, today's San Francisco Chronicle reports that he has a 10-point lead in the most recent Field Poll over Republican challenger Meg Whitman in the race to replace the Governator. I'm reminded of the pagan chant:

Hoof and horn
Hoof and horn
All that dies
Shall be reborn

Cane and grain
Cane and grain
All the falls
Shall rise again

It looks like Californians will get at least one more chance to see what Brown can do for them.

Raining in the Desert

I'm in Las Vegas right now, visiting my son Ceilee, my daughter-in-law Tosca, my two-year-old granddaughter Taivyn, and my five-year-old granddog Zeus. After spending the weekend together, Ceilee and Tosca went to work Monday morning while I stayed home with the wee folk (though at 70 lbs, it's a stretch to attach "wee" to Zeus). Mid-morning I went for a walk with Taivyn & Zeus, and that got me thinking about where I was and about today's adventure in word play…

Raining in the Desert
Oddly enough, I arrived in Las Vegas only to experience overcast skies and chances of rain. As they average less than five inches annually, this was noteworthy. I had left northeast Missouri Thursday evening, where we'd had a solid month of sunny dry weather—great for the harvest, though highly unusual for fall. While dodging scattered raindrops this morning, it occurred to me how odd it was to be seeing my first moisture-laden clouds in a month only after traveling to the desert. Weird.

In addition to steadily rising temperatures, it's my sense that the weather is also rising in degree of predictability. Dry in Missouri with rain in Nevada is a rather clear demonstration of that phenomenon.
Reining in the Desert
My son lives in recently built housing in the southwestern part of the city. As it expands, Las Vegas has gotten in the habit of gobbling up the surrounding desert, one tract at a time. When the housing bubble burst two years ago, Vegas was one of the hardest hit cities. In consequence, there's been contraction the past 24 months and the desert has held its own. When I walk around the block, two of the edges of my rectangular circuit border raw desert. It's striking how sharp the contrast is.

When I look to the east I see a fully developed housing complex, typical of suburban developments anywhere (though with a Southwestern motif, featuring earth-colored stucco exteriors and tiled roofs). When I look west, I see pristine desert, with hardly a speck of vegetation or human disturbance. I was perambulating a schizophrenic boundary between a Chamber of Commerce brochure and a National Geographic photo essay.
Reigning in the Desert
Ceilee & Tosca have been in Vegas for nearly four years now and love it. They recently bought seven Cricket stores (selling cell phones, not insects), which they are hopeful of using to springboard into an entrepreneurial career in business. Knowing their drive and talent, I expect them to succeed.

The environmental reality of Las Vegas is crazy (how can there be a metropolis of two million people living smack in the midst of the desert—where everything except the attitude is imported?). The answer, of course, is that proximity to Hoover Dam makes it all possible, with its cheap electricity and impounded Colorado River water.

Given that the water is now fully subscribed (the Colorado River no longer has an outflow into the Sea of Cortez) and that you can't do anything without water, it's hard to picture how Las Vegas can return to anything like its pre-bust halcyon days of boom town growth. Regardless of how the crisis in second mortgages shakes out, where will they get the water?

Reigning in the Dessert
As it happens, today is my birthday, so it was my call to cap off an all-you-care-to-eat sushi dinner extravaganza with servings of green tea ice cream. And this on top of having indulged in a couple flavors of Ben & Jerry's the night before. Yum! My dessert bowl runneth over.

Reining in the Deseret
Nevada borders Utah, and both states have a substantial Mormon population. In fact, Las Vegas was originally developed as a Mormon settlement in the 1840s, centered around artesian spring waters helpful in sustaining wagon train travel to the West Coast. This was coincident with Brigham Young's efforts to colonize Utah, but it didn't last long. After experiencing trouble with the local Native Americans and also with pioneers moving through the area, the Mormons pulled back to Utah in the recall of 1857—when the true believers were admonished to come to the beehive state and laager there against the unwashed.

After that, things remained relatively quiet in Las Vegas until it was developed as a rail head and officially designated as a city in 1905. After gambling was legalized in Nevada in 1931, Las Vegas started down a path that led to its current persona as Sin City, which is more or less the antithesis of the highly moral, family-oriented Mormon nation, otherwise known as the Deseret.

While Mormons still make up about 12% of the current population of Las Vegas, and enjoy the business opportunities characteristic of a city with a wide-open reputation, they have little influence on the city's determination to be associated with gaming and glitzy entertainment.