Laird's Commentary on Community and Consensus

Thoughts About HOA Governance

2024-10-31T10:22:00.001-05:00

Recently, a friend was visiting, telling me with some excitement about a condominium that she and her daughter are having build for them. They are hoping to move in by December.

As I understand it, there will be 14 units and the developer intends—as one of their last acts—to set up a standard governance structure, with a board of directors and the typical array of officers: President, Vice-President, Secretary, and Treasurer. All households will have one vote and periodically there will be elections to see who is on the board. In turn, the board will determine who fills the officer roles. Among other duties, the President will set the agenda (perhaps in consultation with the other officers), and facilitate board meetings, at which binding decisions will be made. In all likelihood, board meetings will be run according to Roberts Rules of Order.

My guess is that the vast majority of HOA are governed in this way. Based on my 4+ decades of working with cooperative groups, however, I know this can be done better.

Don't Start with a Structure; Start with a Conversation

As my friend was open to hearing my ideas about how this might be done better, I put together this basic list of foundational recommendations:

First off, set aside the question of what governance structure residents want to use until everyone can gather and discuss what they want it to accomplish. (Don't place the cart ahead of the horse.)

I imagine that most (all?) residents may agree on the following features:

—That all residents will have a reasonable opportunity to be heard on any topic to be decided at the group level, before a decision is reached.

—That issues impacting the whole group will be discussed and decided at whole group meetings (plenaries) to which everyone will be notified ahead (two weeks?) about the timing of the meeting, its location, and the proposed agenda—so that there are no surprises, and everyone will have an adequate opportunity to share their input on topics of interest in the event that their household will miss the meeting.

—There should be a clear pathway by which topics get on the plenary agenda, which everyone has access to.

—The ideal in HOA decisions is discerning what, on balance will be best for all. This does not guarantee that others will agree with your thinking about an issue, or that your household’s preferences will prevail, no matter how strongly held.

—A reasonable effort will be made to find responses to issues that will work for all owners. However, if that does not seem possible, the group may make decisions by vote (one vote per household), with a majority prevailing.

—Clear written records will be maintained about the topics discussed in plenaries, the gist of what was considered, and any outcomes. A time will be set (one week?) for when meeting minutes are expected to be released for review and comment. Once accepted (or corrected) they will be kept in a file accessible to all residents. This may be physical, electronic, or both. In particular, this record should be made known to all prospective buyers, so they’ll have a better idea about they are getting into if they buy.

I further recommend:

• While the ideal is to have each household represented at every plenary, the reality is that people lead busy lives and that this will not always be possible, thus it needs to be possible to conduct business from time to time with one or more households absent. The keys to this working well are:

~Defining what constitutes a quorum (the minimum number of households present at a plenary to make binding decisions); and

~An understanding that households who expect to miss a meeting are allowed to submit input about topics to be discussed to everyone ahead of time, which will be duly considered, but is not binding.

~I suggest that you do not allow proxies, as someone not present will not be able to hear and be persuaded by what others have to say—they simply have to trust their neighbors to act in the best interests of the whole. (This prevents someone blocking consideration of a matter through non-attendance.)

• If proper process has been followed regarding advanced notification about when a topic will be discussed in plenary and a household chooses not to attend the meeting, they will have to trust the group to do good work without them, and will nonetheless be bound by the plenary’s decisions.

• When there is a turnover in ownership of a unit, the group will be responsibility to see that the new owner is made aware of: a) how the HOA functions; and b) the body of agreements in place, which they will be expected to abide by.

• Meetings, in the ideal, should be run (facilitated) by someone who is suitably disinterested in the outcome of the topics to be discussed. If there is no such person in your group available for a given topic, consider asking the member of a different HOA to facilitate that topic. Note: I am expressly recommending that you unlink the traditional role of president from the person who runs plenaries, as the skill set of someone who may be a suitable public face or point of contact for the group may have no overlap with the ability to run meetings well. The facilitator’s primary job is to see that the group follows its process agreements and that all voices have been heard and considered. Facilitators should not be taking sides.

• Just because there may be a legal requirement that the HOA has a designated President does not mean you are obliged to give them any power, and I suggest that you don’t. Keep that role titular.

• When it seems in the group’s interest to delegate, don’t start by asking for volunteers to fill slots (either for a manager position or for a committee). Rather, start by thoroughly delineating what you want that person (or persons) to accomplish and in what time frame—so that people who step forward have as clear a picture as possible of what they are signing up for and will be held accountable for. This should expressly include what they can decide on their own, and when they must consult—the limits of their power.

• Next, take time to discuss what qualities are desired in people filling the slot(s), so that everyone can reflect on whether they have them or not, before you ask for volunteers or nominations. This process will considerably reduce the level of frustration that arises with people not fulfilling assignments well. (Hint: if there are no available candidates within the group with the desired qualities, consider hiring outside the group.)

• Discuss how the HOA might productively respond if interpersonal tensions (conflict) arise among you that do not get resolved in a reasonable timeframe by the players involved. I guarantee you that this will occasionally happen—despite the best of intentions. It can be excruciating when tensions persist because the players are either unwilling or unable to work their way through it and this impacts everyone, seriously degrading the experience of living together, and the group's response has a significantly better chance of succeeding if you have an understanding about it ahead of need, rather than creating one in the moment.

• • •

As all of the above concepts are developed more fully elsewhere in this blog, you can consider this an outline of Cooperative Living Light.

Books That Have Touched Me Most

2024-10-16T17:34:00.002-05:00

Last week, a friend asked me for a list of the books that have most impacted my life. As that seemed a compelling request, I am happy to share my response. As you'll see, I am an eclectic reader, and part of the fun is not knowing at the outset when a book will strike.a deep chord, or in what ways. It's such a joy to be surprised (which, I reckon, is why I'm still checking books out of the library, even as death draws near).

In no particular order:

Terror by Dan Simmons

This is a retelling of the tragedy of the Franklin Expedition to discover the Northwest Passage in 1945, as told from the perspective of Captain Crozier, second in command. Everyone perished and it chronicles the slow deaths of the crew as ice holds the ships fast (The Erebus and The Terror) and there is no escape in the frozen arctic. It’s both a story about the hubris of the British Admiralty and a powerful introduction to the very different worlds of the Inuit who were all around the British and whose offers to help the starving sailors was consistently spurned (what, after all, could heathens teach the British—sound familiar?) It powerfully introduces the reader into the alternate reality of animism and the culture of a people who had made peace with the cold.

How It Is by Viola Cordova

This book is a posthumously published work based on the collected writings of Viola Cordova, a Jicarilla Apache who had a foot in two cultures—both as a traditional indigenous woman and as a tenured university professor of philosophy who specialized in cosmology. Without being preachy or judgmental, she explains the broad differences between Indigenous origin stories and those of the dominating European settlers, illuminating how hard it was to understand each others’ perspective (It’s evocative of Ruth Benedict's classic anthropology study, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which attempts to explain the profound cultural differences between Western Europe and that of Japan in the context of World War II). I was especially touched by this book because it help me understand and articulate how I related so viscerally to a sense of place after living at Sandhill for four decades. It turned out I was very drawn to a Native American spiritual view of place and right relationship to the Earth, even though I've—to my knowledge—no indigenous blood or training. It was (and is) a profound insight for me.

The Mists of Avalon by Marian Zimmer Bradley

I have always read a fair amount of science fiction/fantasy, and this retelling of the Arthurian legend from the pagan perspective was eye-opening for me, helping me understand how the winners author the histories (thereby controlling the narrative, and belittling the world of magic and Earth-based ritual). And throughout it all, it’s a cracking good love story. The initial sexual union of the young Arthur and Morgan le Fey is among the most erotic passages I've ever read.

Magister Ludi by Hermann Hesse

This my favorite Hesse book, telling the story of Joseph Knecht, who ascends to the pinnacle of excellence as a practitioner of the Glass Bead Game (the German title of this classic is Das Glasperlenspiel), an imaginary sport that involves the delicate and careful placement of glass beads on a board (a la Go, but different). Knecht rises from mundane roots to achieve his mastery and the story hinges on how little such notoriety is worth in the overall scheme of things once you have it. Right at the top of his game he resigns his position as master in favor of tutoring a difficult teen, with tragic results. For me this story illuminates questions about what truly has value in life, as well as uncertainties inherent in life's choices.

A Story Like the Wind and A Far-off Place by Laurens van der Post

This pair of fictional books by a Dutch author chronicles the adventures of two late teens who miraculously survive the violent overthrow of the boy's Boer family farm by Chinese insurrectionists, until they safely make their way to the southwest coast of Africa (across the Kalahari Desert) and find British relief. It’s a gripping story of courage, self-reliance, justice, and multicultural complexity.

People of the Deer by Farley Mowat

I read most of Mowat's works in my 20s, as I was obsessed with stories of the Canadian north. In this work of fictional anthropology, Mowat carefully describes the decline and ultimate collapse of a small Inuit tribal unit who had survived for centuries in symbiotic relationship with the herds of reindeer in the arctic north. These people lived inland and followed the deer as they migrated across Canada’s tundra. While fish were also part of their diet, they had created a stable subsistence life based mainly around deer protein and their deep knowledge of where the deer would be at a given time. On the one hand, contact with fur traders led to the introduction of guns, which enhanced the efficiency of their hunts, it also upset the balance of their delicate ecology, and Mowat gives readers a glimpse of the demise of these inland tribes.

On the one hand, this book gave me insights into how humans could adapt and even thrive in what most would consider a hostile environment. On the other, it opened my eyes to the possibility of viable culture based on cooperation (rather than competition) and the power of living with the land, rather than trying to subdue it (themes that were reinforced in both Dune, and The Chalice and the Blade).

The Entitled by Frank Deford

This is a work of fiction by one of America’s best sportswriter’s of the late 20th Century. It tells the story of a baseball lifer who gets an unexpected chance late in life to manage at the major league level and is determined to make the most of it. Among other things, this means doing his best to work sensitively with the culture and ego of his star player, a Latino slugger. The ride is bumpy but the manager's honesty and hard work pay off. He earns his players’ trust and the team has an excellent season, with prospects to make the playoffs. Then scandal erupts when the star player is accused of sexually assaulting a white woman who has a credible story and all hell breaks loose. Now what?

It happens that the manager's daughter is a lawyer and she decides to investigate, rather than see her father’s dream go up in smoke without a look. She ultimately saves the day (without dad knowing what she’s up to) and is able to prove that the woman made up the story and the ballplayer has been falsely accused. In addition to the drama of the story itself (Deford is an spellbinding raconteur) the author succeeds in illuminating the multicultural nuances of contemporary sports, and how baseball managing involves intuition, not just a reliance on percentages.

From Good to Great by Jim Collins

This work of nonfiction was written by a business professor at the University of Colorado, who gathered together a team of graduate students to investigate an anomaly: in poring over the stock history of thousands of publicly traded companies (which meant their financial records were in the public record), he found 11 companies that had a number of years of average performance, followed by a sudden surge of performance that was at least 3x better than the Dow Jones average and which they were able to sustain for 15+ years. His research question was: what happened to explain that?

His team was able to identify a handful of common themes about the corporate culture of those 11 companies that I found both inspirational and illuminating as the executive manager of the non-profit Fellowship for Intentional Community (1987-2015), and I have unhesitatingly recommended this title to anyone interested in establishing sound foundational management principles.

The Spirit of Intimacy by Sobonfu Somé

I stumbled onto this nonfiction gem more than 20 years ago, while staying in a client’s basement and perusing the bookshelf before going to bed. It’s a straightforward description of traditional West African village life and how the individual relates to the whole. It was, as you might suspect, a relative easy matter for me to substitute "intentional community" for “village” and see how well Somé’s wisdom was just as viable. This was both an affirmation that intentional community was onto something powerful, and also somewhat humbling in that what I had heretofore thought was groundbreaking and revolutionary was little more than rediscovering ancient wisdom that was largely lost in the impersonality of modern living.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

This book is a very unique and challenging treatment of the complex interplay of three people interacting mainly in isolation on the South Island of New Zealand: a white woman artist, a Maori man, and his mute son, who has been beaten and abused by the man, though it takes a while for that to become clear. The woman painstakingly builds a relationship with the boy and tires to understand the cycle of violence and how to shift it rather than just condemn and interrupt it. It’s an agonizing, yet eye-opening read, opening doors you may not have known existed.

Dune by Frank Herbert

This, of course, is a well-known, classic science fiction work, with a number of sequels. I can think of no more powerful introduction into a possible future resulting from ineffective responses to climate change. While fiction, it paints a highly imaginative future that includes interplanetary travel and high intrigue (some things never change), with various groups vying for world dominance. There are both good and evil in abundance, as well as the universal challenge to wield power constructively. In particular, this book explores life on a planet where water—one of life’s absolute necessities—is extremely short and therefore all the more precious. What might that be like? Dune gave me a first peek behind that curtain.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

This is a complex, tightly woven piece of historical fiction rooted in the Middle Ages, pivoting off the key role libraries and monasteries played in preserving much of the precious knowledge about the world that had been collected up until the fall of Rome and was precariously being maintained for the future (when the sun would come out again in the Renaissance). It is also a mystery, full of codes, intrigues, and secret passages. While you need to pay close attention to not lose your way—just like the characters—it was well worth the journey

Sitting in the Fire by Arnie Mindell

A friend recommended this book to me early in my career as a group process consultant and it opened up to me an understanding about how to work constructively with non-rational input (which abounds at every meeting if you’re paying attention), as well as the concepts of rank and privilege, which are in play constantly (the key here being attaining consciousness of what’s going on, not trying to eliminate rank and privilege as factors). I took three steps forward in my work as a cooperative group consultant after reading this book.

The Chalice and The Blade by Riane Eisler

As someone already committed to cooperative living and intentional community, it was a breath of fresh air to read Eisler's work of comparative anthropology, making the case that while competitive cultures have dominated the modern scene there have been a number of examples of successful cultures rooted in cooperation over the ages, affirming my deep suspicion that humans are not inherently competitive—they are conditioned that way. And what can be learned can be unlearned.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I came across this beauty only recently. Kimmerer writes from two perspectives (a la Cordova in How It Is): both as a Native American who is deeply familiar with native plants from her upbringing, and as a credentialed university botanist. Throughout the book she patiently explains how Native Americans view certain plants and contrasts that with how those same plants are valued (or not) by contemporary society—mainly for their commercial potential, making it clear—without rubbing the reader’s nose in it—how short-sighted it is to reduce a plant's worth to its commercial value, and how much there still remains to learn from the amazing symbiotic and complex relationships in the plant kingdom.

Elderhood by Louise Aronson

I picked up this book three years ago at a church garage sale, and it's the best single book I know that demystifies what it’s like to be a senior—in contrast to simply an older adult— and what it could be like, if we turned our attention to the possibilities. Aronson is a gerontologist—a doctor who specializes in aging and how people change as they age. In addition to plenty of statistics about the reality of aging, Elderhood explains how being a senior is a different phase of life than being an older adult and is best thought of in that light. Considerable emphasis is placed on having conversations about one’s fears and hopes with others who are in same phase of life, and then broadening those conversations to include younger folks who mean well but don’t yet have a feel for what you’re going through. Very inspirational.

Covered with Night by Nicole Eustace

I bought this book on whim at our local Indie bookstore, while shopping for a Xmas present for Susan two years ago, and was riveted by the impact of its main premise: that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy purposefully shifted their frame of reference when they reflected on the futility of war and violence to settle disputes. After who know how long they engaged in war with neighboring tribes, instead they shifted to an orientation of right relationship in the world. Thus, when someone committed an act of violence—even murder—they saw the perpetrators as out of alignment with the world and were mainly focused on retuning them to right relationship, rather on retribution or punishment.

By carefully reading Quaker diaries of the time, the author unpacks a specific instance of an actual murder of a native fur trapper by a pair of traders that occurred around 1730, west of Philadelphia, explaining how difficult it was for whites and the Iroquois Confederacy to understand each other because they had such different goals in mind and it never occurred to the whites that the “more primitive” Native Americans could hold a perspective worth taking into account.

Hearing of a culture purposefully switching away from war to solve disputes was incredibly heartening to me. If it happened once, it could happen again, couldn’t it?

Remembering Ceilee

2024-08-31T08:24:00.000-05:00

As I reported in my previous blog, my son, Ceilee, died Aug 5. He was 43. While many family and friends were impacted by his death, I have been thinking mostly about Annie (his mother), Taivyn (his 16-year-old daughter), Connor (his 13-year-old son), and myself.

Here is a photo of Annie, Connor, Taivyn, and Ceilee taken three years ago, during a vastly different, happier August, when all of us were together at a road house on Lake Chautauqua in western NY (where Annie's family shares rights to a lakeside cottage):

After the tide of life ebbed from Ceilee early this August, I have spent much of the month strolling somberly along the agate beach he left behind, randomly picking up and savoring some of the bright stones left there. This sharing highlights some of the mementos that caught my eye and that I hold dear.

Though it is by no means the sum of his life, these are nonetheless fragments of a father’s precious memories, the articulation of which has helped me process my grief.

• Holding his vernix-smeared warm body on my belly right after being born, while Annie continued to labor to deliver the placenta. All of us were exhausted from being up all night, having concentrated on the birth. It was a cold sunny day in January, and I was aglow in the miracle of new life.

• At his second birthday, we had a party at Sandhill and some of our friends with young children (his peers) were in attendance and I wanted Ceilee to show off what he knew by asking him to identify body parts. With an unfamiliar audience, however, he got shy—and was unwilling to perform. At first I was frustrated, and then it dawned on me how ridiculous I was being. Children are not trained seals.

• As Ceilee was homeschooled until he went to public high school (mainly for social reasons), we were able to do a good deal of traveling together. The first time that just the two us hit the road, was right as he turned three. He and I journeyed by train to Duluth, to visit my good friends from college, Tony & Susan, and their daughter, Britta, who was about Ceilee’s age. I recall revealing to a stranger as we changed trains in St Paul that it was my son's birthday and he spontaneously gave Ceilee a quarter.

Susan and I (we got together in 2015, after Tony died in 2004, and Yana dropped me in 2015) recalled a particular moment of that visit, when Ceilee and Britta decided to set up a play farm. Ceilee suddenly stopped everything to first establish which way was north. While such a directional obsession is somewhat weird in a three-year-old, this turned out to be valuable later on when he rode shotgun on long car trips and I depended on him to read maps and help with directions.

• Later that year, I took a solo vacation to Alaska for 17 days, to visit another college friend (Peg Kehrer) in Juneau. It was the longest I’d ever been away from my son up to that point, and I recall walking around the farm when I returned (in August) and he accompanied me, showing me the gardens (and all the ripening tomatoes). I have a particular image of his turning his head up to investigate the drooping seed head of a sunflower plant growing on the border of the garden, to see if it had a fragrance. It was such a joy to see his curiosity about Nature.

• When he was five, Ann took him into the county library for reading hour, to increase his contact with other young kids. The concept was that different businessmen and town officials would volunteer to read a story to the children, and that day it was the turn of a local bank president. He had selected a book about pandas, and began his session by asking any of the youngsters gathered around if they knew anything about pandas. One girl enthusiastically piped up, “Pandas are a kind of bear,” to which the bank president responded, “That’s right.”

Ceilee raised his hand at that point, and when called upon, informed the president, “Actually, scientists think pandas are more closely related to raccoons.” You could have heard a pin drop. Suddenly the president realized he was in over his head discussing evolution with a 5-year-old, and hastily ended the Q&A and retreated to the safety of reading the book. Parents sitting in the back of the room, aware of the president’s acute embarrassment, and were stuffing their hands in the mouths to keep from howling with laughter.

What the president was unaware of was that we had a subscription to National Geographic Zoo Books, a periodical devoted to acquainting children with exotic animals and we had just read about pandas. Oops. Bad luck for the president.

• Both of my kids (Ceilee and his younger sister, Jo) were born at Sandhill Farm, where the community had made a conscious decision to not have a television. As part of the deal, I taught both my kids to read, and spent an enormous amount of time reading aloud to both of them, to instill in them a love of books. I’m talking about tens of thousands of pages each, and those hours together were special.

• I recall coming home from a road trip when he was still quite young (maybe 6?) and his greeting me with a new word he’d learned, correctly guessing that I may not know it: crepuscular. He was so proud of reversing the flow of our interactive learning—which from that point forward, it was never again a one-way street.

• From age 7 onward he would often accompany me to community network meetings. We would have the travel time together—often going by car or train. He understood that he would have only limited access to me while I was working but all of me when we were en route, and it pleased me that he had a personal experience of what his father did—a connection I never had with my father.

One time, when he was 8, we were at an FIC board meeting at Shannon Farm in Afton VA. He often chose to sit in on the meetings, even though he never spoke, nor was he expected to. People found it a bit unnerving that an 8-year-old had the discipline and attention span to pull that off, but there we were.

At the closing circle (after three days of meetings), we did a round of appreciation where each person took a turn saying something they appreciated about the person in the spotlight, As it happened, our host, Dan Questenberry, was sitting to Ceilee’s left, and thus was the first speak when it was Ceilee’s turn to receive. Looking appreciatively at my son, Dan began, “Oh good, I get to start you off… “

Because of the rotation we used for this exercise, Dan wasn’t in the spotlight until an hour later, right at the end, and Ceilee was the last person to speak. Turning to him, Ceilee began, “Oh good, I get to finish you off.”

He’d been holding onto that rejoinder for an hour, waiting for the right moment. Dan’s partner, Jenny, came up to me afterwards and observed, “Ceilee’s a midget, right?” She couldn’t imagine an 8-year-old with that kind of presence and sense of timing.

• A key feature of Ceilee’s early teen years was doing Taekwondo once weekly. It was eye-opening for Annie and me to see him accept a level of discipline from his instructors that he railed against with his parents. It has heartening to see him grow up in that way. The key, I suppose, was that he chose Taekwondo, rather than had it imposed upon him.

• I have many memories of being in Nature with Ceilee. Mostly canoeing, but there was a good deal of backpacking interspersed in there. Once, when we were canoeing in northern Manitoba I lost my only pair of glasses in an ill-advised attempt to shoot a rapids. While we survived the dunking just fine, Ceilee had to help me read the road signs on the drive home.

Another time we did a trip that traversed parts of the Nelson, Hayes, and Echimamish Rivers, one of the key features of which was a nasty 4-mile portage—the longest I ever did. Sorting all of our gear (canoe included) into five units for portaging, we had to cover 32 miles between us to schlep everything across (five trips forward when we were loaded, and three backwards, empty-handed). The rhythm of this was to carry one unit as far as you could, and then rest by walking backward until you reached the first unit you could handle, which you then picked up and started forward again. It took us about 5 hours all told and Ceilee never complained once.

Another time, we backpacked a segment and a half of the Pacific Crest Trail one June, from Castle Crags to Old Station in northern California. We got off the southbound Coast Starlight at the Dunsmuir stop, and hitched to Redding to rejoin the train at the end of our trek. We had shipped all our non-camping luggage to the Bay Area before boarding the train in Seattle (where I had been doing some community networking), and caught up with it again in Berkeley. Incredibly, we only encountered 10 people on the trail over the course of 11 days in June—peak hiking season.

One canoe trip we laid out an ambitious circle route in northern Saskatchewan, but realized one-third of the way into the trip that we had bitten off too much, and would need to cut it short. After arriving at the bottom of Reindeer Lake, I left Ceilee bivouacked in the village of Southend, and hitched back to our car. It took me 24 hours to get there and back, as I had to travel the equivalent of Chicago to Washington DC (because the roads that far north are not nearly as direct or numerous as the water routes). By the time I’d returned he’d made friends with a number of the indigenous children.

Hiking once in the Olympic National Park in Washington, I have a memory of urging Ceilee to resist the temptation to walk closer to a mama bear to get a better camera angle. Happily, he never got between mama and her cub.

• Annie and I both struggled mightily when it came to buying Ceilee clothes. While Annie and I were never much into fashion, Ceilee, naturally enough for a teenager, often wanted something more stylish, and the battles were a strain on all of us. Finally, we hit on an elegant solution. We created an annual clothing allowance for Ceilee, and gave him free rein over managing it. If he wanted to blow one-fourth of his budget on a pair of Air Jordans, that was his call—just don’t come back to us asking for more money. And it worked!

• I visited Ceilee on campus seven times during his undergraduate days at Amherst College, where, among other things, he taught me beer pong (which, for some reason, was called “Beirut” at the time). All that practice paid off during graduation weekend, when he and I formed a Dad-and-Son team that went undefeated.

• In the spring of his senior year, we made it a point to attend a Yankee-Red Sox game at iconic Fenway Park. We both loved sports, and baseball was my first love. It was a proud papa moment for me when, years later, Ceilee confided that he enjoyed going to baseball games twice as much with me as with his friends, because I could illuminate subtleties of the game that most fans miss (like the third baseman dropping back to play deeper when there were two strikes on the batter).

• As an adult, Ceilee and I shared some political views, but not all. I was a liberal Democrat, and he was a libertarian. While we frequently disagreed about the proper role of government—sometimes with animation—we both worked hard to never let that shake the foundations of our love, something I failed to accomplish with my Republican father.

• When my good friend Geoph Kozeny was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, I traveled to the Bay Area to be with him toward the end, and to help him sort out his estate. While there, Ceilee visited to say good-bye to someone who was a regular feature of his growing up at Sandhill (Geoph would visit Sandhill the week between Christmas and New Year’s every year). It was a poignant connection. On the one hand, Geoph was dying. On the other, I recall rendezvousing with Ceilee at the Ashby BART stop after he landed at SFO, and then sitting at the bar at nearby Kirala—one of my favorite Japanese restaurants, where he revealed that he and Tosca were pregnant with Taivyn. The wheel of life.

• I first became aware that drugs were impacting Ceilee’s life when I visited him at his rental house in the suburbs of St Louis to watch the 2013 Super Bowl. Tosca (his wife) had struggled with drugs as a teenager and had recently relapsed. Less clear was how much Ceilee might have been doing drugs with her. He went into a depressive spiral after getting Tosca into rehab, and seeing his family falling apart. Once Tosca got out of rehab (in Los Angeles), she chose to stay there rather than return to Missouri, and Ceilee moved out there with the kids to bring everyone together and attempt to rebuild the family. While Tosca was clear she was happy to co-parent with Ceilee, she didn’t want to continue as intimate partners and that rejection was hard for him.

For the next decade—right up until his death—Ceilee struggled to right the ship. Sometimes things went better and sometimes not. While I would visit him as much as I could, I never picked up on his doing drugs when I was with him. But it’s also true that I am not skilled at seeing the signs and he never admitted to having a drug habit—even though Annie and I explicitly asked.

During the past decade, Annie and I both anguished over how much to support our son—what was giving him chances to dig himself out of a hole, and what was enabling? Because of the exhaustion associated with being in that state of unknowing, and witnessing his constant state of struggle, there was part of me that felt relief when he died, because the struggle was over. To be clear, this in no way diminishes my overwhelming sense of loss, or the sadness I feel for Annie, Taivyn, and Connor—those of us he left behind.

• I last saw Ceilee in April, when he visited Susan and me in Duluth for 6 days. Among other things he tightened the handrails along the stairs to the basement and the second story. Today, I think of him every time I use the stairs, which is many times daily.

On Ceilee Dying at 43

2024-08-07T11:19:00.000-05:00

This week I got a call I never wanted to receive, informing me that my son, Ceilee, had been found dead in his bathroom, apparently of a drug overdose. I can only conceive of this as every parent's nightmare.

Ceilee had been struggling to put his life together for years, which included some serious bouts of depression. At some point drugs entered the picture and his mother (Annie, my ex-partner and dear friend) and I were slow to read the signs that that was part of the equation, which significantly complicated his chances for recovery. (While I don't have details about what drugs he was taking, or in what concentrations or frequency, none of that matters now. Dead is dead.)

Ceilee leaves behind a daughter, Taivyn (16), and a son, Connor (13). My grandchildren. While it had been my hope (as well as my plea to him) that their need for a stable father would be sufficient incentive for him to right the ship, it was not to be. While I do not understand drug addiction, neither do I judge those who succumb. There is no question but that it can be an awful scourge—one that has touched me this week in the most personal of ways. Both his mother and I made attempts to talk with him about his drug use, but he never opened up with us about it. I reckon he always thought he could control it; rather than the reverse. Now, a light has been extinguished that will never shine again.

Today, there is a hollow spot in my soul, and I am feeling profoundly sad. For me, for Annie, for Taivyn & Connor. There are no winners.

I had hoped to never experience the demise of either of my children, but here I am. This week, I have been living under a brooding, endless cloud, wandering kaleidoscopically from one precious memory to another, knowing there will be no new ones coming. The book is closed.

While it's hard to imagine that I'll ever laugh again—I know that, eventually, I will. I also know that it's important to be fully available for the grief, and that it's not something that can be hurried or scheduled. Further, I know that untold numbers of other parents have walked this lonely, shadowy road before, and that sustains me in my misery.

Writing about this helps. At least a little.

The Relative Fluidity of Community Values and the Permanence of Community Buildings

2024-07-09T18:07:00.000-05:00

Looking back over my 50 years of personal experience with intentional community, I have some things to say about the role of common values in communities, about how to think about community buildings (as distinct from private dwellings), and about how the one relates to the other. Let me take them in turn.

I. Common Values

Intentional Communities are called that because residents have purposefully come together around explicit common values. That is, they've made the choice to seek out a life in association with others with whom they share key values. While there can be great variety in what those values are (spiritual, ecological, dietary, parenting philosophy, alignment with certain personal growth disciplines, political agenda, sexual orientation—you name it, and in any combination), the point is that group members agree on those that are the foundation for their life together, and they recruit new members on that basis.

What is often misunderstood about common values, is that they do not eliminate disagreement among members—both because there are any number of ways that members can (and often do) disagree about matters not addressed by the common values, and because different people interpret the same words differently, and those nuances are typically not exposed until you get into the nitty gritty of living together.

So why bother having common values? They are helpful in three main ways:

a) They are the essence of your elevator speech when recruiting new members. You want all new residents to agree to be guided by reasonable interpretations of the group's common values. (If a prospective cannot agree to abide by that, tell them thanks, but no thanks.)

b) Communities do their best work when they regularly identify which common values are in play when wrestling with any given issue, for the purpose of figuring out how best to balance them when choosing how to respond. That's the heavy lifting of plenary considerations, and should generally be well-grounded on a foundation of common values.

c) They also help distinguish what groups are obliged to wrestle with, and what is a member's personal request, that groups are not obliged to honor.

When groups relate to their values in this way—as living, dynamic concepts, rather than as stone tablets handed down by founding fathers & mothers—the community becomes a manifestation of its values, which evolve over time.

With this in mind, I advise groups not to belabor refining their common values at the outset, through a series of what-if thought experiments (how will we handle x, or situation y if either occurs?) Reality will be challenging enough, without worrying about how many angels can be accommodated on a pinhead.

A corollary is understanding that groups effectively refine what their common values mean through the decisions they make. To be sure, the weight that the group gives certain values can (and almost certainly will) change over time—both because there are inevitable shifts in community membership, and because 20-year-olds may value things differently as they become 40-year-olds, and then 60-year-olds, etc.

(Thus, when a long-term member responds to a request to reconsider (or reinterpret) a value with, That's not the way we do things here, it's not particularly helpful. Far better, in my view, is something like, In the past we made the decision to handle this issue as follows… What do you think is different about the current situation that justifies a new approach? See how this both honors what has been done before, yet leaves the door open to making adjustments, in light of new perspectives, or new circumstances?)

Looked at all together, the body of decisions and actions taken by the group over the course of its history becomes an increasingly nuanced statement of what exactly you stand for (or stood for in the past). What's more, you should know that prospective members will be more attracted to what you are, than what you say you intend to be.

II. Community Buildings

Now let's switch gears and consider buildings. While I'm not an architect, I have built some community buildings and been involved in any number of design charrettes. From that experience I want to share some principles about community structures meant to serve the whole. Some are peculiar to the dynamics of community; others are generic to construction in any circumstance.

• While buildings typically last a long time (40+ years), the functions that the community wants that building to serve are likely to change before the building's useful life has been exhausted. Thus, an important design criteria is how easily can you reconfigure how space is used if you change your mind about what you'd like. Example: when Sandhill Farm (my community for four decades) built a major building in 1981, we took this principle to heart by constructing a two-story 25'x48' earth-sheltered building that had no interior load-bearing walls on the lower story. Forty years later, the community has twice completely changed its mind about how to use the bottom half of the building, and it was no big deal to do so either time. Whew.

• Communities' ability to attract and retain members with high-level construction and maintenance skills is hit or miss. Great when you have it; expensive when you don't. Additional caution: while I don't think this is causative, it is relatively common that people who possess blue collar skills such as carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, HVAC expertise, and the like are not necessarily great at soft skills such as communication and relationship repair. Thus, be advised that when you sacrifice the latter to secure the former you are sowing the whirlwind.

• Be cautious about accepting a design for a community building that relies on novel technology or a complicated system to function well. Because membership turnover goes with the territory, what will you do when the "expert" leaves?

• Before signing off on a design feature, ask yourself the question, how will we repair it if it breaks or no longer functions as expected? If you don't have a good answer, think about it some more.

• For things with a relatively short lifespan, the original purchase price is often the most important financial consideration. With durable goods, however—generally defined as things expected to last more than three years—it is prudent to also have a close look at projected maintenance costs. In fact, the longer you expect an item to last, the more important it is to consider maintenance costs. Buildings, of course, are something you expect to be very durable. As such it's generally advisable to use the highest quality materials you can afford, and those which are expected to require the least maintenance, or need replacing least frequently. Example: metal roofing or tiles, rather than shingles.

• Don't limit your thinking solely to indoor space when designing a building; it behooves you to also think outside the box—literally—to include the use of spaces immediately adjacent to the building's thermal envelope, which have the potential to have high utility at low-cost.

Example 1: at Sandhill (in northeastern MO) we had hot humid summers and cold winters. In the winter we'd use our screened-in east-facing porch for firewood storage. For the other three seasons, it was prime social space. It would catch the morning sun when the day was cool—perfect for morning coffee—and be in the shade when the afternoon sun was bearing down, and any breeze was cherished. (As a bonus, it was the ideal spot for processing horseradish in the fall, when the noxious fumes would assault your mucous membranes if attempted indoors.)

Example 2: for minimal cost Sandhill built an unheated expansion to the back porch for the primary purpose of storing canning supplies (obviating the need to schlep boxes in and out of the attic all year). This was a big deal for a community that grew about 80% of its own food, and preserved things in quantity.

III. The Intersection of Common Values & Community Buildings

Years ago, we were having a discussion at Sandhill about the possibility of constructing a new building, when one relatively new member expressed disapproval of how past community buildings were designed, because they didn't adequately take into account permaculture principles.

I recall vividly my response at the time. With a certain amount of irritation, I said the community made decisions about the design of past buildings in exactly the same way we'd approach future ones. To wit, we'd discuss it as a group and combine the best thinking of the current membership to determine the design parameters, giving extra weight to the preferences of the project honcho.

Thus, while I tried to assure the new member that the community would be happy to include his sense of permaculture principles when designing future buildings—so long as he stayed—I was unwilling to feel ashamed that we hadn't anticipated his perspective in the past.

By and large there is nothing that communities do that is a longer lasting statement of how they interpret their values at a certain point in time than its buildings, which often have a lifespan that exceeds that of their constructors. You'll do well to keep that in mind (and remain humble). My advice? Do the best you can with what you have at the time, and expect to get smarter as you go.

What was once a shiny, new state-of-the-art accomplishment can inadvertently slide into the ignominy of becoming a stodgy embarrassment over the course of its lifetime. Oops!

Happy 50th Sandhill Farm!

2024-05-08T13:43:00.000-05:00

Today I'm offering a kaleidoscope of memories from my first five years at Sandhill Farm, on the occasion of its Golden Anniversary.

Exactly 50 years ago today, Ann Shrader and I arrived at the 63-acre property two miles west of Rutledge MO (that we had just purchased two weeks prior for the grand price of $13,500) that would be the start of Sandhill Farm. We rendezvoused there with fellow pioneers, Ed Pultz and Wendy Soderlund, who had driven up from their home in Memphis TN to live near Memphis MO (our county seat).

Both red and white spirea were in full bloom, framing the outside of the modest white clapboard, one-bedroom house that the two couples took turns occupying (while the other lived in a tent) until we completed a 16'x30' renovation on the south side that added two bedrooms and expanded the bathroom. Probably its most distinctive feature was the checkerboard pink & black linoleum tiles on the kitchen floor. (Hard to believe that could ever have been in fashion—excepting, perhaps, at a Good & Plenty factory.)

We were full of enthusiasm for our experiment in community living—which was a good thing, given the bottomless pit of our naiveté. As we had arrived just after the frost free date for northern MO, one of our first acts was getting the garden planted. I still recall Ann's and my excitement at seeing the first shoot emerge from our carefully planted rows of vegetable seeds, only to discover later that it was milkweed, not sweet corn. Talk about a rookie error.

While the house stood on the highest point of the property (in the southwest corner), there was a house located directly to our south that was higher still—the home of Edna & Earnest Childers. They were in their 80s and the only remaining residents of Sandhill after Charlie Gilmer died in 1972. Charlie was the last person to have have lived in our house, which we negotiated the purchase of from his surviving son and daughter-in-law, Bob & Lilian.

It's noteworthy that Earnest, our neighbor, was born in that house and had lived there his entire life. Amazingly, he was already two years old when the Santa Fe Railroad laid tracks nearby, in the late 1880s. The town of Rutledge sprang up at that point, as a service stop along the route from Chicago to Kansas City. Though Edna & Earnest both passed away a few years after we arrived, Sandhill has been continuously occupied since the 1850s. (Before that, we understand it was a seasonal camping spot for indigenous Native Americans.) In the years prior to the Show Me State being fully platted and the current county lines defined, Sandhill was something of a regional center, and the location from where a frontier circuit judge would periodically dispense justice in our corner of the state.

While Ann focused on gardening (something she still does today), Ed took charge of overseeing the house extension, working closely with Wendy's father, an experienced builder/architect. I bought a copy of H. P. Richter's Wiring Simplified (for $0.87) from the local Ace Hardware store and became the community's electrician—while we were doing the house extension, we rewired everything (switching from fuses to circuit breakers) and reroofed the entire house. Laying concrete blocks for the extension's foundation was my first foray into cementitious work, which also became a community niche for me. (Over the years I learned to do concrete work, as well as lay block, brick, tile, and tuck pointing—all flowing from that first summer.)

In the early years we tried all manner of homestead things, substituting labor for dollars. Example: raking leaves in the fall from the Childers' massive white oaks (that were sprouts before the arrival of white settlers) and then packing them into circular bins we fashioned from scrap woven wire fencing. After a couple years of rain and snow we had our own leaf mold, for use as a garden soil amendment.

Our first dog was Rochester, a medium-sized stray that showed up unannounced one day and never left. He was with us for nine years and was the only dog in my life that was closer to me than any other human. Our first cat was another stray, Seymour, an orange tabby. I took it as a good omen (for a cooperative community) that the two of them got along famously. Both were outdoor pets and they would huddle together for warmth on an old blanket inside a plywood kennel on the front porch during the winter months.

Early on we acquired a Jersey milk cow, Rebecca. While we didn't get gobs of milk, it was high in butterfat and we were self-sufficient in butter in those days. (Cream is most readily churned to butter at 62 degrees, and I did it often enough that I could tell by feel when the gallon we had taken out of the fridge had warmed to the right temp.)

Milking time was one of the highlights of the day for both Seymour and Rochester. Seymour would follow the milker down to the barn, where he could depend on getting some squirts of fresh milk for his trouble. While the distance from house to barn was only about 50 yards, as soon as Seymour headed down there, Rochester would make a game of overtaking the cat and putting his entire head in his mouth. Seymour would patiently wait until Rochester released him and then would travel several more yards until Rochester did it again. By the time Seymour made it to the barn, his head would be covered in dog slobber.

While the cost of living in our area was low (hence the bargain land prices), so were the opportunities for employment, and we scrambled to figure out a way to make ends meet. At one time or another, in the early years all of us took jobs off the farm. Some taught, some worked for the extension service, some did work for neighbors. As I recall, that first summer Ed drove a tractor for a neighbor, earning the not-so-handsome wage of $60 for a 40-hour week. After that we never worked for less than $2/hour (hard bargainers that we were).

For most of its existence, Sandhill's signature product was organic sorghum, a traditional sweetener in the Midwest and South. The seed for that was planted when Ann & I stopped by the homestead of Joe Pearl & Eva Grover (a mile or two south of Memphis) to buy some sorghum during the fall of 1975. We stayed long enough to watch it being made and were fascinated by the process. They were in their 70s and it was obvious the work was tiring for them. We offered to help, and before we knew it we were back every day, lending a hand. They would only make about 7 gallons a day, yet it impressed us that every drop was sold about as fast as it was made.

Thinking that this might be a specialty product for Sandhill, we planted some cane the next year and traded our labor in 1976 for the use of the Grover's equipment to process it. That went well enough that we took it another step in 1977 and had stainless steel cooking pans made for us at a metal fabrication shop in Quincy IL. We bought a sorghum mill to do our own pressing, and had labels made announcing the availability of Sandhill Sorghum. While we were somewhat concerned about being in competition with the Grovers (we didn't want to bite that hand), it happened that Joe Pearl had a stroke in 1977 and they never made sorghum again, and thus we became the sole sorghum producers in Scotland County. For a period of more than 40 years, sorghum was the flagship product of the community's agricultural portfolio.

Community was a tenuous concept the first five years, as Ann & I struggled to get beyond being one couple living with others who tried it out for a year or two and then moved on. Following Ed & Wendy, there was Pamela Johnston & Michael Almon. Then we had Jesse Evans, Lin McGee, and Linda Joseph (all from Texas, for some reason). It was something of a revolving door in the early years. After five years, it was down to just three of us: Ann, Tim Jost, and me.

Our breakthrough in stability came circa 1979, when Stan Hildebrand, Grady Holley, and Thea Page arrived. Over the ensuing five years the only change in personnel was Clarissa Gyorgy (who came to us from Twin Oaks in Virginia) while Thea moved to Twin Oaks, along with her 2-year old daughter, Shining. After that we were never fewer than 5, and it felt like we'd crossed the line into being a stable intentional community. Whew.

While losing members was always hard, those early years are largely happy memories, and I look back with amazement at what we were able to accomplish with sufficient pluck and luck.

Trusting Your Gut as a Facilitator

2024-02-15T13:07:00.000-06:00

For the last two decades, the most complex and fun thing I do on a regular basis is train facilitators for working in cooperative culture.

Fundamental to my approach is teaching the necessity (and skill set) needed to work both rationally (with ideas) and emotionally (with energy). That said, humans are a good deal more complex than just those two components, and I want to focus today on working intuitively—knowing when to do something because it feels right, whether you can explain it or not.

To be fair, for most people this is not accessible when they first learn to facilitate, because they don't yet have sufficient body knowing in the role of facilitator to access subconscious inspirations, or sufficient grounding to trust such inspirations.

But you can get there, and I think I do some of my best work when I allow my gut to enter into an internal dialog with my head and heart about what to do. This shows up in a couple ways.

Planning

About 15 months ago I did 10 days of work in person with a longstanding group that was deeply divided over who they were now that the kids had grown up and started questioning the course that had been laid out by their elders. They were stuck and wanted outside facilitation to guide them through an attempt to figure out whether there was any hope of reconciliation or whether it was time to seek an amicable divorce.

The personal strain among members was so bad that there had been moments of near physical violence, which is not something I commonly encounter. Working with a dear friend and fellow facilitator, Sarah Ross, we were given a small suite of rooms in the basement of the common house, where we could meet with individuals when they wanted to confer with us, and where we could discuss between us what was happening in the group and how best to proceed.

Each night Sarah and I would talk over where we were, and where we might go next, and I'd go to bed with an open mind about how to start the next day. By placing that question in the center of my attention as my last conscious thought, my subconscious would chew on it overnight, and every morning I awoke with clarity about how to proceed. I did this every day for nine days, and came to trust it.

While I love working this way, it's quite rare to get the chance to be with a group for that long a stretch. More commonly, the longest I have is from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon, which means only two overnights.

In the moment

In addition to dreaming into the future (described above), there is a more immediate version of intuition playing a key role in my facilitation. Often enough, someone will tell a story about how something has gone wrong for them, or they're afraid that it will, and I have learned in those moments to try to let myself feel into their reality and imagine what that might be like—to get what they're describing viscerally, not just rationally. For a few minutes, I try to be in their skin, and reflect back what I imagine them to have experienced, with explicit attention to the emotions.

When I get this right (practice helps), it builds a bridge to that person, who might otherwise feel isolated and is likely to not trust that they have been accurately heard or held. They are able to exhale, and they become more available to hear what others are saying. This step both deepens the conversation (legitimizing emotional experiences and impact) and deescalates tension—both of which can be highly beneficial. To be clear, I am not "taking their side"; I am becoming them, temporarily—a facility I make available to others in the room as well.

Sometimes new facilitators report that they are too empathic, by which they mean they can get so entangled in another's story that they lose track of who and where they are. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I don't have that problem. I know what I'm doing when I try on another's footwear. While I may or may not do a good job of reading the other's reality, I never lose sight of why I'm doing it, or who I am. I never worry about losing track of what's me, and what's astral projection.

Taken another step, once you have a bead on an outlier's reality, you have invaluable clues about how to build a bridge to them when it comes to problem solving.

Getting in Touch with me Directly

2024-01-29T17:59:00.002-06:00

A reader just posted this Comment on my blog:

Is there a good email or preferred way to reach you directly?

laird@ic.org

The Art of the Report

2024-01-28T11:35:00.000-06:00

Early in my 35-year career as a group dynamics professional, I became aware that most people only digest and retain about 20% of what happens when I work with them. Ugh.

I believe there are many reasons for this:

—There's typically a lot going on, and it's easy to drop stitches.

—The tendency to be so self-absorbed (how does this impact me?) that they miss the bigger picture.

—A lot of folks aren't that good at listening.

—Being too embarrassed to admit when you're confused, and thus failing to ask questions to better understand.

—Not being open to new ideas (because you're so invested in the old ones—even when they're demonstrably not working).

As a consequence of this insight, I developed the habit of writing an after action report, in which I carefully go over what happened while I was with them, plus what I observed and what I recommend going forward. Even though there is often little that's new in these reports (from what the group was given orally while I was with them), a good report can significantly enhance what the group can make use of.

OK, so what constitutes a "good report"? Good question.

While not a court transcript, it should, I believe, cover the flow and sequence of the conversation, and succinctly identify the themes, conclusions, and next steps that emerge from each segment of the work. It should incorporate reflections about the energy in the room, not just the ideas. It should also capture unfinished business which either surfaced tangentially, or for which there wasn't time to address.

Writing a thorough report takes me about as much time as the meeting itself. Why so long? Partly because many people won't read a longer report and it can take me a while to boil down my comments to what I consider essential. (There is a quote attributable to Mark Twain that applies here: I apologize for such a long letter—I didn't have time to write a short one.)

In my experience, concision—making one's point clearly, yet with an economy of words—is often the last skill learned among speakers and writers.

All of that said, there are a few other things I try to include in group reports:

• Any insights into the dynamics of that particular group that went unnamed while I was present. This may mean looking more deeply into what I noticed happening, or illuminating the awkward interplay of multiple activities that are not in and of themselves problematic.

• An analysis of why certain practices can lead to deleterious consequences, and offering specific advice about how to accomplish the same result with a different approach that's less freighted with danger.

• When offering critical feedback I try hard to be specific and direct (notice when X said this and Y responded in this way, leading to this misunderstanding or that degree of reactivity).

• When groups are doing well, I make an effort to celebrate their strengths as well as the ways in which they might improve. (All sulphur and no molasses makes for a mean diet.)

The Essential Ingredients to Excellent Reportage

1. Careful observation. Hidden in this criterion is the need for a large degree of free attention, so that you don't miss subtleties.

2. Good notes (don't expect to hold everything in your head).

3. The capacity to shift perspectives and see what's happening through the eyes of the various players. Actual evil, by which I mean intentional mischief or harm, is much rarer than is supposed—in general, people intend well, and it's your job as reporter to frame your comments in such a way that good intentions are honored, while not neglecting to illuminate concerns. It's an art.

3. The ability to write clearly (which, sadly, is less common than one would hope).

4. Timeliness (I have a personal standard of trying to complete reports within two weeks of finishing an in-person stint).

While not rocket science, neither is good reportage accidental. It's a discipline, and well worth cultivating if you want to be effective in the world.

A final word: please don't let my laundry list of how to author good reports overwhelm you from trying (since I can't imagine ever getting that good, why try?). Any reporting can be worthwhile, so long is it's an accurate reflection of what you observed, and delivered in a compassionate and even-handed voice.

The Dynamics When Someone Gets Upset and Walks Out of a Meeting

2024-01-20T15:03:00.000-06:00

Working with a group of nascent facilitators last month, the question came up: What do you do when someone leaves a unfinished meeting in distress, triggered by something that happened inthe room (not because they suddenly remembered they have to pick up their kid from cello practice)?

While it's not something you want to have happen, most of us have experienced it—especially if you've been living in intentional community for any length of time, and it feels yucky. It feels like a failure.

[One of my mentors, Caroline Estes, use to say that if you're not thinking about leaving the group at least once every three months, you're either ducking the hard stuff, or you're not paying attention. The idea is that reactivity is to be expected when you engage on issues that matter and about which people disagree, and this may cause you to be fed up with people's stubbornness (attachment to getting their way), or it may cause you to question whether you are in the right group.]

In any event, I want to tackle this apple in three bites:

Bite I: Missing or Ignoring the Signs

Version A: If someone goes from placid to postal in a matter of seconds, it almost certainly indicates that they came into the meeting already amped up about an unresolved dynamic, which or may not be related to the topic at hand (sometimes the tension is with an individual or with a committee, and just hearing them speak sets the person off). Or it may be that they have built-up frustration with how the group has handled the topic under discussion and they are now on a hair trigger. In any event, it's rare that no one is aware that this person (let's call them Person D) is churning about something.

Version B: In this scenario, the reactivity builds over the course of the meeting until it boils over, and Person D leaves, usually in anger or in tears. Their circuits are overloaded, they are unable to take in any more information, and they may be afraid they'll say or do something from frustration that they'll regret later. Having no confidence in the group's willingness or ability to work with their upset, they depart the scene.

In both versions, I'm wondering about the group's commitment to working emotionally, or its ability to do so effectively. To be sure, this is not a minor deal—agreeing to work with emotions—nor is it a trivial skill to do with sensitivity and neutrality, yet I believe both elements are essential to creating high-functioning cooperative groups. And really, do we have a choice? People are not just thinking animals, we are feeling animals as well. It's a package deal.

While some in the group are likely to be more emotionally (or relationally) oriented, while others are more rationally (or idea) oriented, it goes with the territory that both will be present whenever groups gather, and I've come to the view that it works much better if you acknowledge that, and learn to work both sides of the street—instead of holding onto the ridiculous notion that feelings have no place in meetings (which comes directly from a mainstream culture that tries to do just that, and pays an enormous price in terms of alienation, and dissipated energy)—as if using only one of your tools is better than using more of them.

(Please understand that I am not saying that strong feelings are in play with every topic, yet neither will they be rare.)

When there is no agreement to engage emotionally, people learn to try to quash their feelings (rather than suffer the group's disapproval over their "loss of control") or to not speak up when they notice that others seem to be struggling (due to lack of agency). Not only do you lose the attention of the person in distress, but those noticing the person going into distress will be distracted by their rising reactivity, wondering what it means, and whether there might be an eruption. Very distracting, and very messy.

For information about how effective emotional engagement might look, reference these blog entries:

Questions About Working with Emotions in Group

Key Facilitation Skills: Working Constructively with Emotions

Bite II: OK, So We Didn't Catch it Before it Happened—Now What?

Regardless of what opportunities to work with the tensions were missed before person D walks (or storms) out of the meeting, what are your options once they have?

It's been my experience that people in high distress generally feel isolated and don't trust that they have been understood, or even that others want to know what's going on for them. With that in mind, I believe that the first step in compassionate deescalation is to reach out to the disaffected person in an attempt to show them you care—both about them and their views.

How do you do that? By inviting Person D to tell you what happened for them, expressly including the feelings, and what the meaning is for them of their reaction. If some of that has already happened (perhaps before the walkout), then the person engaging with Person D can start with an attempted reflection of both their views and their feelings, staying with it until Person D reports that they feel heard. This should always be deescalating—because you are contradicting the isolation, and everyone likes to be understood and cared about.

Note that I am not saying you need to agree with them. Nor should you promise that Person D will get their way or have their views weighted more seriously by virtue of having gotten upset.

If you are facilitating alone, and there is no one suitable or willing to be the group's ambassador to Person D, you must decide whether to postpone reaching out to them until after the meeting, or call a break during which you attempt this in the moment. This can be a tough call.

If you decide to do it afterwards, you can handle this yourself. Be aware though, that in staying with the meeting, that it may well make more sense to suspend what you had been doing right before the walkout to hear people's reactions to Person D's departure, and perhaps what led up to it. In serious cases, this could be the remainder of the meeting. What's more, you should be prepared to offer Persom D a summary of what was said about them after they left the meeting.

If you decide Person D's departure is better addressed immediately, you have a number of options, including:

• If you are team facilitating, one of your number can seek out Person D while others continue the meeting.

• If that's not available, you might ask someone from your Conflict Resolution Team to step up—if such exists.

• Finally, you might ask for a volunteer to do so (while the meeting continues under your facilitation), if you think there are people in the group who have a sense of how to do this with compassion and sensitivity.

Bite III. Impact on the Group

—If you don't engage with Person D's emotions

In my view, attempting to pick up the meeting again at the point of interruption, and acting as if the eruption didn't happen, is a highly questionable choice. Not only will it be hard to do (at the very least, people will need a moment or two to stand and shake out the adrenaline), but some will almost certainly have their attention on processing what happened, rather than on the meeting agenda, which will significantly complicate doing good work.

By "engaging with Person D's emotions" I do not mean judging them for being upset, or even for walking out. I mean sharing reactions to what happened, what people understood about Person D's experience, and how the group might have handled it better.

—If you attempt to engage with Person D's feelings but they jump ship anyway

Even if you are persuaded by my argument for trying to understand what's going on for someone when they're triggered, there's no guarantee that the attempt will succeed in reestablishing a connection. Person D may remain upset, and leave the room in frustration. In fact, done poorly, you may make things worse. Which is undoubtedly why it's so popular to not attempt it.

Going the other way, however, there's opportunity for making things much better. Knowing that, I encourage all facilitators to try to develop their capacity to work with feelings (as well as ideas), and to live in the place of hope, possibility, and courage.

Why I Never Say "Compromise" When Facilitating

2023-11-19T12:05:00.000-06:00

As a consensus facilitator, I am constantly trying to make it easier for everyone to contribute what they have that's relevant to the conversation. Then I do what I can to establish how those contributions are rooted in a reasonable interpretation of group values (and therefore worthy of taking into account), as distinct from personal preferences.

About this time, I generally point out that the right to offer one's views and have them be taken seriously is tied at the hip to the responsibility to treat respectfully the views that differ from theirs and have been similarly vetted.

Absent this framing, it's relatively common for groups to get bogged down with people who are inspired to defend their viewpoints because they are tied to common values—accusing those with disparate views of being selfish and not thinking of what's best for the group. In short, such folks believe they are holding the high moral ground and defending the group against self-centered marauders.

But let's break this down. suppose one segment of the group favors installing solar panels on the roof of the common house. While there is an initial capital outlay, it will repay itself over time in lower utility bills and is in line with the group's commitment to being environmentally responsible (which we'll refer to as common value E, for ecological impact). What's not to like?

Now let's imagine there is another segment of the group that objects to this action, because HOA dues will go up (at least temporarily) to fund this project and they are hanging on by their fingernails to meet current HOA dues. They are afraid of being priced out. Their concern is grounded in the group's commitment to being affordable (which we'll cleverly label value A). They feel solid in raising their concerns about the solar panels.

The key to keeping the conversation away from tug-of-war energy (which is rarely productive and feels yucky) is laying out that being concerned with common value A is not tantamount with being anti-environmental. Just as being promotional of value E does not mean you're oblivious to concerns about affordability.

While I'm not saying people are never selfish, mostly they're reasonable and the thing I need to do in a situation like the above is to establish that no one is holding the high morale ground (so please check your righteousness at the door). The challenge is figuring out how to balance these two values in this situation. Who has ideas about how to fund the solar panels without pricing residents out of the community?

What I don't suggest is a compromise, which might look something like "Lets' buy half the solar panels now so the strain on budgets is more tolerable, and look at buying the other half later." I do not favor cutting the baby in half. Instead I work hard to get the group to see that no one is in the wrong place or saying anything inappropriate. You are on the same team. Who has ideas about how to move forward in such a way that both sides' concerns are addressed?

Examples of what this might look: a) borrowing money from the capital fund to finance the solar panels (with the understanding that the fund will be replenished with the money saved on utility bills; b) perhaps one or more members with deep pockets would be willing to front the purchase price of the solar panels, to be repaid by savings from utility bills; or c) maybe the group could do a series of fundraising event to generate the money needed for the panels, so that they can be a model for the neighborhood.

Do you see how all of these potential solutions respect both core values in play, and do not call for anyone to compromise their principles?

While I believe that the good intention behind asking people to compromise (or to accept that a proposed solution is "good enough for now") is to get everyone to recognize that we won't get out of a stalemate if no one moves, this framing has more than a whiff of least common denominator, and lukewarm energy. It's invites the group to settle for a "solution" that's equally painful to all parties, and generally lacks dynamism.

The key to finding creative solutions—perhaps ones that no one had in mind at the start of the meeting—is holding the group in a space where they believe that synergy and magic are possible, and the group has learned to appreciate the breadth of differing viewpoints for its ability to broaden the foundation, rather than dreading their expression as a complication.

Yes, this is radical stuff. But way better than pressuring one another to compromise, or to try to carry the day through the dubious strategy of stating one's preference repeatedly in the vain hope that you'll wear down the opposition through persistence, perhaps accompanied by steadily increasing shrillness. Have you ever been in that meeting? They're exhausting, and strain the fabric of the community.

What I Think I'm Good at as a Facilitator

2023-10-22T16:59:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been wrestling with some health issues related to my dance with multiple myeloma, which brings into sharper focus my mortality. In consequence, I've been thinking a good deal the last month about how to wrap things up, how to hand off, and what I still want to say in this forum. Today's entry falls into this last bucket.

I've been a professional facilitator since 1987—about half my life. So what, after all these years, do I think I'm really good at as a facilitator of groups who desire inclusive outcomes? To be clear, I'm not talking about things I alone can do; just the things I can do consistently at a high level, and which I hope are both useful and aspirational.

In no particular order, here's my list—all of which are learnable:

1. I'm fluent in the language of numbers

Math has always come easily for me, and it took quite a while to understand that that's relatively rare. That is, many people zone out when numbers enter the conversation. They may not understand which numbers are important, or how to display them to illuminate an issue. Most groups defer to those who claim facility with numbers and hope for the best. Thus, it's an advantage that I can wade into numbers and sort out what's happening in short order.

While not every issue has a significant financial component, many do, and I can ride the waves.

2. I'm good in a storm

By which I mean I don't lose my center in the midst of high reactivity. If anything, the moment slows down for me when people go into emotional distress. (For one thing, I don't have to guess what's going on; upset people are going to tell me.) The leverage point here is that I don't get tense when someone else gets tense. Emotional reactions are normal (part of the range of human response) and I've learned to treat them as data and energy, both of which can be highly beneficial—if you learn to see them that way and how to work with them constructively.

When groups do not have an understanding about working with emotions, or any agreement about how to do it, there tends to be considerable nervousness about how to proceed in the presence of high reactivity, accompanied by a strong vibe that expressing upset is immature and inappropriate (we were having a civil conversation until you erupted).

3. Pinning down details

While this tends to be a non-sexy mop-up phase of working an issue, I'm diligent about who will do what, by when, with what resources, in collaboration with whom, and with what expectations around reporting along the way. When implementation details are left unspecified, you often have to come back later. and clean up the ends you left loose. Inefficient.

4. Finding suitable homes for orphans and loose ends

It's not at all unusual for something to surface in the context of working an issue that is beyond what you agreed to address. While it may be appropriate to tackle at the group level, you may not have time to deal with it in the moment. Perhaps it's an expansion of the topic at hand, or maybe it's something tangential. In either case, I don't let the group go there—unless it makes an explicit decision to do so—and I'm good at seeing that such items are assigned a shepherd so that the topic comes back in an orderly way.

5. Adept at separating wheat from chaff (or signal from noise, choose your metaphor)

There is an art to sussing out which pieces of information or viewpoints are crucial to a consideration, or might become serviceable bridge planks connecting people who see an issue differently. Some of this is discarding repetitive or off-center statements; some of it is noticing when there is an energetic surge in the room when someone offers something potent.

This shows up in tight summaries, and the ability to highlight leverage points when a group struggles to find the balance point among strongly held differences. It is not necessary to include all input in a summary, so long as you include the key pieces, which helps participants feel heard and establishes forward momentum, from which workable solutions can be build.

6. Extracting all the product possible in the last 5 minutes of a consideration

This is a special application of the last point—understanding what's possible toward the end of the time allotted to work an issue. Often there is potential agreement that is in the air but not yet widely seen or made explicit—product that will dissipate if not identified and validated in the moment—product which will have to be reassembled later, brick by brick.

Many times this is partial product rather than final solutions, but it all counts and helps people feel good about having participated in the meeting.

7. Constantly shifting the lens through which I experience a meeting

This has at least three components: I'm tracking a) ideas, b) energy, and c) time. I am not doing these things simultaneously, but sequentially, over and over—without drawing the group's attention to where my focus is at any given moment.

The sum of these assessments helps me determine what is the best use of the group's time in the moment, and is constantly shifting.

8. Ability to work fluently with both ideas and energy

As a subset of the previous point, I purposefully attempt to ride both horses whenever I facilitate, weighing such disparate factors as where is the conversation going, who haven't we heard from, do I detect tension or boredom in the group, is the group engaged or listless, which ideas seem to have landed mostly strongly, where is there resistance to the main thrust of the conversation, and what does it mean?

In particular, I have a facility for working with the non-rational, as well as the rational, which can be a significant aid in participants feeling that I am present for what they have to contribute, and will be an ally in their views being accurately understood.

9. My energetic range of engagement

While my default mode is up-tempo and high energy, I am able to slow down and soften my approach when I sense that shift is called for (say, when a person is in tears, or sharing something vulnerable with the group). I am much more effective as a facilitator when I'm able to bring my energy into alignment with that of the speaker, and that calls for range.

10. Understanding the myriad ways in which groups of people will necessarily contain considerable diversity, and the power of offering a variety of on-ramps into conversations

While most cooperative groups include a commitment to diversity among their common values, few have actually talked through what that means. For the most part they are thinking about not discriminating on the basis of factors protected by Fair Housing laws (ethnicity, race, religious preference, sexual orientation, gender, age, and the like). But diversity shows up in many more ways than that (for example, high structure/low structure, risk tolerant/risk averse, fast thinkers/slow thinkers, introverts/extroverts, people who love speaking in front of 30 people/those who are scared to death of public speaking).

When groups fail to understand that such diversity is present, they tend to default into operating in ways that are most comfortable to those with the strongest voices (or those who were there first), with the unintended consequence that others feel marginalized and unwelcome—which is rarely intentional, or helpful.

Aware of this dynamic (and the tendency for it being a blind spot) I'll conduct my work with a variety of formats, greatly increasing the likelihood that there will be something for everyone.

11. Information is concentrated in resistance

I try to be sensitive to signs of resistance in the group, as it almost always indicates a tender spot that needs to be understood in order to solve the issue at hand. Instead of being irritated by resistance, I get curious about it. What does the reaction mean relative to the topic? How does the reaction give me clues about how to build bridge to that person?

12. The potency of passionate neutrality

Many hold a model of the facilitator as someone who is dispassionate—who never loses their cool, and is always even-tempered. I'm not that guy. I figure if I'm going to ask meeting participants to show up with their whole selves, then I need to do so as well. This does not mean that I take sides (a facilitator non-no), but it does mean that I laugh, cheer, and express frustration. I'm human and I think it's a misstep to try to be an automaton. You need to be real.

13. Why and how to integrate heart work with head work in the same meeting

While there is increasing awareness among cooperative groups that room needs to be made for working emotionally, in many groups this translates to designating certain meetings as "heart circles" where reactions are explored but no decisions are made.

While this is better than never making space for emotional sharing at all, it's my belief that people are complicated all the time and groups are better served by allowing the widest possible range of human input all the time (rather than insisting that it be translated into rational statements in order to be seriously considered). Yes, this is a challenge—but so is group living. Operating as if rational input is the only kind that's legitimate means cutting yourself off from emotional, intuitive, spiritual, and kinesthetic knowing. How smart is that?

Over the course of my career as a facilitator I've learned when and how to offer ways to access these different kinds of knowing.

14. Can hit the curve

While it's always a good idea to have a clear plan for how to work an issue, sometimes, in the course of a meeting you encounter surprises. Now what? You have to be able to see that something unanticipated has occurred, assess its impact on your plan, and decide on the spot whether to continue with the path you'd laid out or start off-roading. This calls for courage, as the plan represents a safety net for some facilitators and they may be loath to give it up—even when it isn't working—because it's too scary to go off-script.

15. Can see the bridge before others

Most of us have been raised in competitive culture, one consequence of which is a conditioned psychological imperative to be able to identify one's personal contribution in any given situation—as it satisfies the need to see how we are unique. Thus, we tend to look for differences before we look for similarities when responding to the ideas of others.

Because I'm aware of this dynamic, I've worked hard to train myself to undo this conditioning, and to look for common ground before I look for ways in which ideas don't fit together well. As expectations have a profound impact on what you find, I tend to see solutions sooner than others, simply because that's what I'm looking for.

16. Fearlessness

While there's no question but that I sometimes get things wrong (perhaps I frame a conversation poorly, struggle to connect accurately with an isolated speaker, or push someone beyond their capacity), I am always going to try—excepting only when I see no hope of how my stepping in can be helpful‚ either because I have no clarity about how to connect with a person, or because I experience someone as completely barricaded against my observations and insights.

That said, if I sense a way to name what's happening that has heretofore not been articulated, I am always going to try to offer that picture to the group.

17. Weaving

I've come to understand that I have an unusually large RAM (random access memory in IT parlance), which allows me to recall on Sunday afternoon what someone said Friday evening, demonstrating that I'm paying close attention to what people are saying, and am constantly looking for ways to put together elements from different speakers—both to reduce complexity to something more manageable, and to establish a broad foundation for potential solutions.

Understandably, people love it when the facilitator remembers what they said. To be clear, it's not a matter of my taking sides—it's a matter of my remembering and valuing their input. They don't have to repeat their view, or defend their turf, because I won't leave them behind.

18. Reports

This may seem like a mundane thing, but the standard for reports is actually quite low and there's an art to writing summaries that are pithy. yet complete and accessible. And I'm good at it. There was a time when I was essentially crafting a report (or a handout, or blog entry, or article for publication) nearly every day, and I honed my skills through years of practice.

As a facilitation trainer, I commit to giving students detailed reports of my observations about their efforts facilitating meetings that I have observed. It takes me about as much time to craft those reports as it does to observe the meetings, but it's an irreplaceable element of what I offer as a teacher and professional facilitator.

19. Giving and receiving constructive feedback

One of the (many) areas in which cooperative culture strives to be different from mainstream culture, is when it comes to feedback. Because the mainstream models are generally atrocious, most of us come to community living with little understanding about how to do this cleanly. That's the bad news.

The good news is that it can be learned—and is well worth doing. As a trainer, it's imperative that I walk my talk on this, which means being willing to listen carefully to critical feedback with maximal openness and minimal defensiveness. To be sure, this isn't always easy, but it's important.

20. Ability to walk in another's shoes

When it's clear that someone is sharing from a depth of conviction, I try to feel into how the situation looks to that person, the better to "get" where they are coming from. When I do this well, and am able to demonstrate that level of understanding when reflecting back what they said, the speaker relaxes—because they have been understood—satisfying an almost universal human desire.

21. Ability to speak plainly and accessibly

As you can probably intuit from this blog, there is a fair amount of my speaking and writing, and I work hard at expressing myself in ways that are concise, memorable, and easy to understand. I do this by using plain language (not pedantic), employing apt metaphors, avoiding the passive voice, and not ducking the hard stuff. It's a dance, but I can hear the music.

Adapting to Reality

2023-08-02T17:03:00.001-05:00

Well, I saw an orthopedic specialist last week and it's official: my rotator cuff muscles are shot and I'm giving up my ambitions to become a Major League pitcher. I tell you, this growing older business comes at a cost and you have be nimble to keep up.

In the last couple years I've been focusing more on the challenges of aging, and adapting to a changing range of options. Many of the things I used to enjoy doing when younger are no longer possible, and I've had to reconfigure expectations to bring them into alignment with diminished capacities.

Part of this is giving up being John Wayne. These days I let my partner shovel the snow, mow the lawn, and schlep the heavy suitcases upstairs—because she's stronger than I am. Fortunately, there is still plenty I can do, and derive pleasure from, so I dwell there, instead of in the land of lament.

For example, I can still cook and get things done in the kitchen (even though I rely on a step stool these days to access the higher shelves), which is something I've always enjoyed and now have more time to indulge. While I no longer do concrete work, I took pleasure in repairing a wooden high chair this afternoon in anticipation of a visit next week from Susan's daughter (Britta) and eldest grandson, 4-year-old Nico.

And, knock on lignin, I still enjoy full cognitive capacity, which includes writing, teaching, facilitating, and playing duplicate bridge. I read voraciously (and eclectically), and Susan and I plot out vacations to exotic places, to spice up our days.

(During a family reunion last month, I reconnected with a nephew who works for the State Dept and has just begun a three-year assignment in Melbourne, Australia. This inspired my daughter (Jo) and me to cook up a month-long once-in-a-lifetime trip to Oceania in December 2024—partners included—taking advantage of having family in country. We've already put down a deposit on a steeply discounted 10-day cruise from Sydney to New Zealand as part of the itinerary. We're pretty stoked. Jo is a terrier when it comes to organizing and sniffing out bargains, so mostly I just stand back and send in money when she tells me to. After a lifetime of handling my own logistics, which I still do for solo travel, it's a pleasure to turn it over to my competent daughter. I've always wondered what it would be like to fly halfway around the world—now it looks like I'll get to find out.)

Though I have two flavors of cancer (multiple myeloma and prostate), both of which my oncologist has been clever enough to manage for me with minimal disruption of my everyday life (my pill regimen contains more syllables than you can imagine), it's a wondrous life, and I wouldn't miss it for anything.

Navigating the Boundary Between Transparency and Discretion

2023-06-04T15:43:00.001-05:00

This past week I received notice that Communities magazine is planning its winter issue on the theme of Privacy and Transparency. Reflecting on that inspired this monograph.

As a process consultant, I frequently get hired to work with groups bogged down in conflict—often intractable conflict, by which I mean the group has tried what it can think of doing on its own, and it's still stuck in the swamp.

Aside from the challenge of inviting groups into the chaotic, yet potent world of emotional exploration (which is always an element of conflict), whenever a portion of my work is done on the side—in contrast with working the dynamic in the presence of the entire group—there arises a question about what, if anything, that gets disclosed in the examination is appropriate to share with the rest of the group.

Coming from the perspective of professional counseling and/or HR concerns, there is often a strong urge to shut it down, promising protagonists that nothing shared in the process of working through the conflict will be revealed to others. While well intended, I think, in the context of community, this is a big mistake.

Better, I believe, is that the group offer support to members working through conflict with the understanding from the outset that a summary of what comes out in the exploration will be shared with the rest of the group. Mind you, a summary—not a court transcript or a Zoom recording.

Here's how I think it should be set up. Someone should be assigned to drafting a neutral summary ahead of time (so that they are doing the work of gathering the needed information from the get-go), and after it has been drafted it should then be reviewed by the protagonists for acceptability before it's disseminated to the group. I think it's fine that this information not be shared outside the community except with the express permission of the people involved.

To be clear, a good summary will include mention of people's emotional responses—that's part of the story. However, I know from experience (having personally crafted any number of these summaries) that you can adequately defang outbursts, such that you're accurately reporting the reactions, yet leaving out any name-calling or incendiary statements. This is not about voyeurism; it's about getting an overall sense of the full picture. Neglecting to mention that people are hopping mad (when in fact they are) doesn't help anyone understand what's truly happening.

Why do this? For a number of reasons:

• It's quite rare that no one in the group is aware of the tension being worked on, and in the absence of first-hand information about what's happening, people will speculate or make up stories to fill the void. A century ago, Mark Twain sagely observed, "A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots." Better, I think, is supplying the truth with slip-on footwear with good traction.

• Trust and good relationships are the lifeblood of community. Anything that impedes the flow of accurate information, however well-intentioned, degrades trust.

• One of the ways that bullies control the narrative and undercut attempts to hold them accountable for unacceptable behavior, is by isolating people and thereby dominating the story about what happened between themselves and others. It's their word against yours, and they'll make you pay for speaking out against them. (if you question whether people could really get away with such outrageous behavior, you need look no further than the popularity Donald Trump has enjoyed through outright lying, and attacking anyone who dares stand up to him.) It's much harder for this approach to be successful when everyone is current on what's going down.

• It's not unusual for the parties involved in the conflict to make agreements about doing things differently going forward, and these commitments tend to carry more gravitas when posted publicly (I'm not talking about printing minutes in the local newspaper; I'm talking about sharing summaries on the members-only community listserv).

• Agreements made in the dynamic moment may be abundantly clear, yet that clarity is susceptible to serious erosion if not captured in writing. People's memories tend to diverge over time and hard-earned agreements have a way of slipping away if you're not diligent and capturing them in the moment.

• There can be confusion about what the Conflict Support Team is doing if they never report on their activities. How can the community reasonably evaluate the performance of a team that operates in secrecy?

• When members work through tensions and reestablish repaired relationship, that's a success. Rather than worry about everyone knowing details about how you may have messed up, think of the benefit of everyone knowing how you owned up to deleterious impact, and labored to put things right.

• There is a marked tendency for people to behave better when they know that everyone is watching, or will be told how they behaved in a session set up to work through conflict.

A community is not just a random group of strangers—it's an aggregation of people who have explicitly agreed to create a cooperative culture based on a known vision and common values. They have committed to healthy relationships with one another, and cleaning up missteps as they occur. As a result, there is a different standard of compassion, accountability, and engagement and I am basing my recommendations on what will best serve those goals. Burying dirt under the carpet will not get the job done. It only leads to lumpy floors, and poor footing going forward.

All of that said, you cannot expect group members to be of one mind about this without a conversation about its implications. That means you have to talk about how you want handle this at the time you establish the Conflict Support Team, and before you need to apply it to a specific situation—when the discussion will tend to be seen through the lens of how to manage a particular person, rather than what's best as a standard for everyone.

The Exception that Proves the Rule

One more point. Although I support a baseline understanding that nothing gets disseminated about what occurred in a conflict clearing without the people involved in the conflict signing off on the summary, there is a circumstance where I think protagonists should not be permitted to block the sharing of discovered information—when the facilitators learn that something happened (or is reasonably likely to have happened) that puts the community at serious risk.

I'm thinking about major financial exposure, illegal activity, compromised member safety, a direct violation of a member agreement… those kinds of things. While such occurrences are rare (thankfully), they are not unknown, and there needs to be a clear path whereby the community is promptly informed about what has been learned, so that it can complete any investigation of events and determine the best course forward.

Note that if this occurs, the follow-up should be managed by a different configuration of people—not by the Conflict Support Team, as it's outside their mandate.

The Third Rail of Emotional Abuse

2023-04-12T13:39:00.001-05:00

I recently received this anonymous inquiry:

I'm very curious about emotional abuse. I'm concerned about a community member who has a history of trauma and is also a trauma therapist who is twisting the words of others to cause them to feel bad about themselves. It feels like emotional abuse. We're working toward mediation process but I'm wondering how a conflict resolution team would work with this type of pattern.

While I know no more details about this situation than what's contained in the paragraph above, I think it's a good topic.

At the outset, it's important to understand that I have no training in trauma response, per se, and do not consider myself an expert in that arena. That said, I do consider myself an expert on conflict in cooperative groups, and hold the view that it's imperative for cooperative groups to be able to work constructively with feelings (which are invariably in the room whether you have agreements about them or not, and undoubtedly are a central feature of trauma).

While it's up to each community to establish what protocols will serve the group best with respect to the emergence of conflict and non-trivial distress, here's how I would engage with the dynamic described by the inquirer:

Let's make this as messy as possible, and assume that there are at least three different perspectives on what was happening (where the same event was experienced first-hand by three different people, all of whom may be having a different response).

Let's say Pat is the trauma therapist, Chris is the person who has been made to feel bad about themselves, and Dale is someone upset observing this.

If I were facilitating when this dynamic emerged, I would step in to interrupt the dynamic as soon as I was conscious of someone being in noticeable distress (most likely cuing in to Chris or Dale, based on the scenario presented). Note that I would interrupt the exchanges as soon as I recognized distress or reactivity—I would not wait until I determined that abuse had occurred, which can be a more complex assessment.

When stepping in, I would try to engage the person I sensed was most in distress and then work my way around the room, until everyone in reaction had had a chance to say what was going on for them. In this instance, the fulminating tension may be between Chris and Pat, or it may be between Dale & Pat.

(For that matter, there could be tension between Dale & Chris: I recall how irritated my mother was when I would would criticize my father for going into a rant and belittling her—she told me in n o uncertain terms to butt out; she didn't want me defending her.)

I would engage with each person long enough to establish what they are feeling, their version of what happened, and its impact on them. I would steer them away from labeling others, assigning motivation to others, or from analyzing the situation. I would simply be asking them to report what they've experienced and its meaning to them. After listening to their responses, I would reflect back the essence of what I heard, doing my best to match both their words and their energy. I would be trying to walk in their shoes.

Essential to this being effective is staying with it until the speaker reports feeling heard. Caution: It is often insufficient to simply assert, "I hear you" or to nod sympathetically. You have to be able to demonstrate to the upset person's satisfaction, that you get what they've told you.

My thinking here is that people in distress often feel isolated and are not confident that others will be open to hearing about their experience, or to understand it even if they get to tell their story. With that in mind, the very first order of business is to establish connection, so that information can flow.

How It Might Look to Pat

This can have a very wide range, including the following possibilities:

• Pat may have been abusive yet have no consciousness of it.

• Pat may own that they were purposefully trying to hurt Chris (I don't run into this often, but it's a possibility).

• Pat may believe they engaged with Chris in ways that they felt were ethical and constructive.

• Pat may be oblivious to what they had done, or its impact on Chris.

• Pat may recognize that they had gone overboard (in some sense) and are in remorse about it.

Even if you stipulate that Pat is skilled as a trauma therapist, that doesn't preclude their having a blind spot about the ways in which they can trigger trauma in others, nor does it guarantee that they are always aware of when they have been triggered. Finally, therapists are likely to have a preferred method for working trauma, and there is no single approach that's 100% effective.

Thus, while it's reasonable to expect a trauma therapist to be sensitive to what will be triggering in others, and to be deft in picking up on cues that what they're doing is landing poorly, there are no certainties.

Pat might be completely at ease with what they did; they might be embarrassed; they might be curious (that Dale thinks they were abusive); they might also be in reaction themselves (to who knows what).

How It Might Look to Chris

Just because Dale believes Pat was abusing Chris, does not necessarily mean that Chris experienced Pat as abusive. It's important, I think, to not jump ahead, and to listen carefully to each player's story. There could well be three very disparate realities in play without anyone being "wrong."

While it seems unlikely that Chris enjoyed their interaction with Pat, discomfort or confusion is not necessarily abuse. Was the exchange embarrassing? Overwhelming? Unrelenting? Accusatory? Trauma-triggering (in ways that Pat might reasonably be expected to know or be sensitive to)? There is a wealth of possibilities here.

I can imagine that Chris might be in tears, shaking, or completely shut down. Or they might be outwardly calm, or even untouched by what Dale found intolerable.

By describing Pat's interactions with Chris as "abusive," it suggests that Pat—at least in Dale's eyes—placed Chris in an awkward (excruciating?) spot, without license to do so.

How It Might Look to Dale

It seems certain from the description that Dale had a definite negative reaction to what Pat was doing with Chris.

This could stem from any or all of the following:

—Outrage on behalf of the group (that Chris could be treated this way).

—Upset over the perception that Pat is acting out of integrity as a trauma therapist (misusing their license).

—Frustration with the group that Pat's behavior has been tolerated.

—Personal irritation with Pat that has its roots in prior unresolved issues.

How to Proceed

With all these moving parts, I'd need to make an in-the-moment assessment of where the major axis of tension ran and begin there. In condensed form, here is the sequence I'd follow:

• Interrupt the damaging or upsetting exchanges (stop the merry-go-round)

• Acknowledge the protagonists' experiences (noting where they are similar and where they diverge)

• Decide (interactively with the players and the group) whether to take it further in the moment, or set something up afterwards in another setting. If the former, I would work in dyads, starting with those most triggered or most in distress, attempting to repair relationship damage and to reopen channels of communication. Problem solving would follow that (commitments the two might make to each other about how to proceed differently in the future).

If the latter, I'd stay with it long enough to get a commitment from each party about a time and place to reconvene.

If the Facilitator Is Overwhelmed or Ineffective

This is where the Conflict Resolution Team might come into play, being on call to step in at need if the facilitator cannot answer the bell. While I strongly advocate that groups have such a team, there are three essential things that need to be in place for that hope to be realized:

1. A general agreement to engage with strong feelings when they surface (permission).

2. Clarity about how those feelings will be worked with (while there are a number of modalities for working with conflict, the group needs to bless at least one of the them, so members know what they've signed up for).

3. Sufficient skill in the community to be able to facilitate this work using the chosen modality.

It does no good to have a general agreement to work with conflict if there is no agreement about how to go about it, or no confidence in the group's ability to navigate it successfully.

Spring Trainings 2023

2023-04-03T17:10:00.001-05:00

This past weekend marked the start of the second quarter—a time of transitions. Winter is nearly over (though it doesn't feel that way in Duluth, where we're flirting with all-time record snowfalls) and it's time to think spring.

Play Ball!

In sports, transitions are everywhere. The baseball season opened last Thursday. College hoops ends tonight, and the pros will enter their playoff gauntlet in another week, with pro hockey to follow the week after.

For all of that, the sporting highlight of the week is the Masters golf tournament, to be contested April 6-9 in Augusta GA, amidst the azaleas.

Brave New World

I am also undergoing an important personal transition—with respect to treatment of my multiple myeloma (MM), an incurable blood cancer that nearly stopped my clock back in 2016, when it was first discovered in me. Back in the fall, when it was apparent that my current regimen for MM management was starting to lose its efficacy, my Duluth oncologist and Mayo hematologist agreed that it was time for CAR-T as the next step. This is where science fiction meets the present.

CAR stands for chimeric antigen receptor. Through genetic engineering (accomplished in a Bristol-Myers-Squibb lab in NJ), CARs have been added to my natural T-cells which allow my own immune system to recognize and combat the cancer directly—rather than relying on chemical poisons, and their attendant side effects. Because the original cells came from me, there are no rejection issues. Further, because the new T-cells will reproduce true, I will not need further infusions. It's one and done.

I'm typing this from my hotel room in Rochester MN, where I've already been in residence for a month, principally to undergo CAR-T cell therapy. I just received the infusion of the new T-cells last week, yet will need to remain in town through April to make sure the integration goes smoothly. Mayo is currently the only location worldwide where CAR-T is offered on an outpatient basis. I go into Mayo (two blocks away via carpeted underground tunnels) every day and get looked over by the CAR-T team. Mostly this is routine (knock on wood), and I'm done in less than an hour. The rest of the day I'm free.

This only works because Mayo is large and forward looking. They made the commitment to this therapy some years ago and now have a dedicated suite location within their sprawling complex where a trained staff of 20 focuses solely on CAR-T treatment for blood cancers, under the auspices of their hematology department. In a few years they will have developed the in-house capacity to do the genetic work as well. One stop shopping.

What an exciting time to be alive! CAR-T only received FDA approval as a treatment for MM 18 months ago, and I am riding the crest of the advances being made in blood cancer treatment.

Process Trainings This Spring

Much as I enjoy watching sports (and benefitting from the latest advances in cancer research), life is much more than just enjoying the efforts of others from the sidelines. It's a participatory sport. With that in mind, Let's talk about what I can do for you.

I have lined up a number of hands-on learning opportunities this spring—all via Zoom—that build on my 40 years of community living experience and 35 years as a cooperative group dynamics specialist.

In chronological order, I'm offering:

10-hour courses produced by the Foundation for Intentional Community—

1. Aging Gracefully in Community • 5 two-hour sessions delivered on consecutive Thursdays • March 30-April 27

If we live long enough, we all reach our senior years. This course will help you understand how to make the most of those years, and how intentional community can be a terrific context for it.

2. Participation & Work in Community • 5 two-hour sessions delivered on consecutive Tuesdays • April 4-May 2

A close look at the myriad ways groups get bogged down over member contributions to the maintenance and well-being of the community, along with ideas about how to set up a high-functioning program.

3. Working with Conflict in Community • 5 two-hour sessions delivered on consecutive Thursdays • May 11-June 8

Understanding the imperative of groups being able to work constructively with feelings, and how to do it.

For each of the above, clink on the hyperlink for details about costs and timing.

Two-year course produced by CANBRIDGE, my process consulting collective—

4. Integrative Facilitation & Leadership Training

This two-year program consists of 8 three-day weekends, spaced approximately three months apart (allowing ample time for integration and practice between sessions).

I pioneered this training program in 2003. Since then I've delivered it 15 times. It's the most fun thing I do. The faculty for the course will be myself and two accomplished former students, Penny Sirota and Brent Levin.

Each weekend will be organized around one or more components of the facilitator's skill set. In addition to a set of handouts germane to the teaching themes of that session, there will be an opportunity for in-depth practice with the material to make sure the principles are well understood. That said, the bulk of each weekend will be devoted to student teams preparing for, delivering, and debriefing the facilitation of live meetings for a volunteer group with real issues—all under the guidance and safety net of the trainers. (I figure you'll learn faster how to swim if we throw you into the deep end of the pool right away—with appropriate life rings—rather than watching me swim or hearing stories about it.)

Teaching themes include:

• working with the whole person

• working content (the facilitator's basic tool kit)

• formats & containers

• consensus (how to work issues effectively)

• conflict (working with emotions)

• diversity & privilege

• foundational personal work

• power & leadership

• organizational structure (the key committees and their functions)

• delegation

• challenging personalities

No prior facilitation experience is needed—you just need curiosity about how things can function well in cooperative culture, and a willingness to learn.

There are two ways to participate in the course:

a) As a full student, you are eligible to do the live facilitating, receive 1:1 time with a trainer (personal mentoring), and a detailed written report from me about your live facilitating, including what you did well and where you can improve.

b) As an auditor, you can participate in all classroom activities and will receive all handouts, but are not eligible for doing live facilitating, or the same degree of personal attention as a full student.

This newest edition of the training—my 16th—begins June 22-25, 2023, and will run through March 6-9, 2025.

While there is an upper limit of 18 in the class, there is still room for a few more to enroll.

For additional details (including cost), or to reserve your space in the course, write me at laird@ic.org

Is it time to make a transition in your life?

The Genius of Indigenous Culture

2023-03-12T15:54:00.000-05:00

Over the winter holidays I read a fascinating book that I picked up on whim while Xmas shopping at one of Duluth's indie bookstores: Covered with Night, by Nicole Eustace.

It's well-researched historical fiction, examining the machinations surrounding the murder of a native fur hunter by two white traders in eastern Pennsylvania while dickering over the price of the hunter's pelts in February 1721—fully three centuries ago. This occurred at a frontier outpost some 30 miles west of Philadelphia, which at that time was a burgeoning, yet modest trade center and port on entry. William Penn, the founding Quaker, had just died (in 1718), and Pennsylvania was in the midst of trying to sort out who would control the colony and whether it would remain in Quaker hands.

The power of the narrative is that the dialog and thoughts are extrapolated from detailed diaries kept by Quaker officials who were part of the Philadelphia town council at the time, as well as the correspondence of other key white players. While there was (apparently) no source material available from indigenous people, there was nonetheless plenty of critical statements about the actions and motivations of the white players because of the ongoing tensions between Quakers and non-Quakers.

On the indigenous side, the largest player was the Haudenosaunee—otherwise referred to as the Iroquois Confederacy—an aggregation of five tribes in the northeast: the Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga (just after the seminal incident that the book is based around, the Tuscarora joined the Confederacy, making it six nations). While other regional tribes were also part of the mix, I want to focus in particular on the role of the Haudenosaunee in this reflection.

Eustace does a terrific job of unpacking the varied ways in which the Eurocentric and Indigenous cultures differed and often misunderstood each other, a problem that has persisted throughout US history, often with tragic and outrageous consequences.

In no particular order, here are some of the contrasts illuminated by Covered with Night:

A. Relationship to Gender

While there were gendered occupational roles among the native peoples, when it came to decision-making, the views of tribal women were taken every bit as seriously as those of tribal men. The Haudenosaunee would simply not proceed on an important tribal issue until they'd heard from the women. This stands in sharp contrast with the European practice of not even asking women what they thought, or allowing them to hold political office.

B. Relationship to Integrity

In reading about the Haudensaunee's emphasis on personal integrity, I was reminded of the first of Miguel Ruiz' tenets for living a quality life: be impeccable with your word, which essentially means keeping your commitments and walking your talk. This is laid out in depth in his 1997 book, The Four Agreements. Not surprisingly, Ruiz' writing is a distillation of ancient Toltec wisdom, helping people to live in right relationship with themselves, with others, with life itself, and with God (if your cosmology includes the concept of a supreme spiritual entity).

While such guidance may not seem that special, the white folks on the scene struggled mightily with it—then as now. They would repeatedly make promises to indigenous people that they would not keep (setting the tone right away for a pattern of treaty violations that continued for centuries). And it was even worse than that. The Quaker Meeting based in Philadelphia came out solidly against slavery about a decade before this murder incident, yet all the wealthy Quakers in town owned and traded in slaves. Hypocrisy R Us.

Further, it is no little thing that the two brothers who committed the murder represented the European law in their segment of Pennsylvania. Oops!

Among whites, apparently, personal integrity is standard you hold others to. If you question that as a relevant part of our white heritage (given that it happened 300 years ago), reflect on what we're seeing among us today, where the outrageous lies and behavior of Donald Trump, George Santos, and Fox News can be documented and exposed and it's not clear that there are consequences. Among the Haudenosaunee you would be held accountable for your word.

C. Relationship to Land

The Haudenosaunee, like most indigenous tribes, did not view land as a privatized commodity, and thus they had trouble understanding the white's continued interest in expanding farmland (and fencing it in) and obtaining mineral rights to traditional native lands. In indigenous thinking, the land was an asset held in trust for all. Among Europeans, it was an asset in which to store wealth, and suitable for exploitation at the owner's sole discretion. All manner of mischief ensued from this discrepancy of perspective.

While the native approach may not have been the acme of regenerative agriculture, they had been productively working the land for centuries before the whites arrived. The contrasting European style was to emphasize quick returns. Once the land's natural fertility had been depleted, they simply moved further west.

D. Relationship to Justice

A key element of the cultural misunderstandings was a profound difference in how justice was perceived. While the Haudenosaunee sense of justice had evolved (over a long time) into one that emphasized reconciliation and relationship repair, Europeans were locked into a focus on retribution, punishment, and assignment of blame. Reputedly, the dying words of the native hunter were, "My friends have killed me," indicating that even after having received a mortal wound, he continued to view his attackers as his friends (with whom he'd done business in the past).

Where the Iroquois tried to reinforce good behavior through the reward of connection and a secure place in the tribe, the Europeans were attempting to control aberrant behavior through threat of punishment and loss of freedom. One used the carrot; the other the stick. Where the Haudenosaunee expected gifts from the Europeans as a token of what value they placed on a good relationship with them (all the more important when that relationship had been strained), the Europeans interpreted that expectation as compensation, more like a fine. As such, the signals were constantly being misconstrued.

E. Relationship to Relationship

The whites saw the indigenous people as inferior (essentially as children and undeveloped), consistently misunderstanding that other cultures may not only be well developed, but better adapted. It is fundamentally different to be trying to outcompete or dominate those around you, versus trying to coexist peaceably with your neighbors. Where Europeans were looking for edges and information to file away for future advantage; indigenous peoples were looking for ways to find harmony and file away edges and rough spots.

F. Relationship to Intentional Communities Today

In reading this story I was profoundly struck by the parallel between the culture that the Iroquois Confederacy had consciously chosen (moving away from embracing war as a solution to problems) and what intentional communities strive to create as cooperative culture, as a distinct alternative from the competitive and adversarial mainstream culture of the dominant society.

To be clear, I don't think intentional communities are consciously trying to emulate indigenous culture (though there may be some of that in places). Rather I think it's a matter of a good idea resurfacing independently at a different point in history, because of the inequity and misery that's endemic in modern society, and the compelling need to integrate better with the natural world.

I find it incredibly heartening to learn that the cultural path we community builders are trying to define is one that has been trodden before.

Swimming in Liminal Waters

2022-12-15T09:19:00.001-06:00

Over the course of my 35-year career as a group process professional, I've gradually been developing a deeper appreciation for working intuitively—trusting my sense of what to do in a given situation, even if a rational explanation is out of reach in the moment of choice.

I recently experienced a profound expansion of what is possible in this realm when given the unusual opportunity to work with a group for nine days straight—in person, no less. The group had been around for decades but found itself in a very deep hole, with major unresolved interpersonal tensions, low trust, and no willingness to work on relationship repair. Ugh.

Each day my work partner and I would discuss what we'd try to do with the group to evoke the positives and ameliorate the negatives. It was tough sledding, and many of my ordinary tools were off the table. So we had to wing it.

When I work with a client, my habit is to clear my calendar for the duration of the work cycle, and fully immerse myself in their reality. When doing so, I elevate my energy and enhance my focus. Essentially, I'm all in.

Historically, the outer limit of my direct work with a client is limited to 48 hours (Friday evening to Sunday afternoon). Rarely, that has stretched to three or four days. So nine days represented entirely new territory.

The problem wasn't figuring out where to help (there was no end of things in that category); it was figuring out how to sequence the engagement such that we drew out as much poison as possible, and sensitively gave them every chance to find a path forward that would allow the community to continue forward without placing anyone adrift on an ice floe.

When working over a weekend it's fairly common for me to go to bed at night with an open question about how to proceed the next day and have the answer emerge from my sleep cycle. That is, I awake with clarity about how to proceed that I didn't have when I closed my eyes the night before. In fact, this has happened frequently enough that I've come to trust it—even though I don't understand how it works—and is part of how I've developed my intuitive muscles.

What was eye-opening about my recent gig-in-residence was that I did this every night for nine days.

What's more, there was an echo of this when I crafted my after-action summary of what was accomplished, my analysis, and the work remaining. Three times I went to bed thinking about how best to frame what I had to say… and three times I woke up in the morning with surety about how to proceed.

As a facilitation trainer, for a long time I have emphasized what I style "riding two horses," by which I mean paying attention to what is said, as well as the energy with which it is conveyed and received. Now I've come to embrace the additional nuance of developing and learning to trust one's intuition—inspirations about how to understand and engage that operate below the rational level. It's a different kind of knowing, yet no less potent.

As a facilitator, intuition is about developing sufficient confidence to commit to an action without knowing what it will engender, because it feels right. To be sure, this is not about taking wild guesses, nor is it reading horoscopes. My sense of the right way to focus a conversation, or to frame a question, is substantially informed by a wealth of real world experiences with groups in struggle. The dynamic image I hold around this is committing my weight forward to take a step without knowing where the floor is, trusting that it will be there when my foot comes down.

We humans are such fascinating and nuanced creatures. What a blast I'm having exploring new rooms in the house that is my life.

Musings about Modern Life

2022-11-12T08:23:00.001-06:00

I just got back from10 days of immersion at Ionia, a 35-year-old community in Kaslilof, AK that requested my help with community dynamics. My experience there—in the company of my work partner, Sarah Ross—brought to the surface of our consciousness a number of choices we mostly take for granted (because it's the water we swim in), and I was reflecting on that this morning.

1. Flush toilets

Ionia doesn't have them. Sarah and I have divergent histories on this. I have 41 years of community living under my belt—all of which were in communities that didn't have flush toilets. When you sprinkle in about year of wilderness camping over my lifetime, this was not new territory for me. For Sarah it was more challenging. Yes, she'd done some primitive camping, so she knew the principles, but it wasn't what she was expecting, and she had to cope.—which she did with excellent grace.

The main argument is that flush toilets are combining two resources (potable water and human excrement—a fertilizer, whence the term night soil) to create black water, a potentially toxic waste that must be dealt with safely through sewage treatment, either municipally or on site. While this expense may make more sense in urban settings where they are obliged to prioritize public health (originally to deal with cholera and typhoid in the 19th Century, but god knows what all today), in rural settings there is room to rethink the cost/benefit ratio—especially in light of shrinking water resources and innovative technologies for safely composting human manure—something China, Korea, and Japan have been dealing with more sensibly all along.

2. Access to high-speed internet

In contrast with the primitive plumbing, we had good internet access in our suite (an enclave in the basement of the common house). Because much of Ionia's commitment in simple living paralleled my experience at Sandhill, I understood what had happened. The community was launched in 1987, at the dawn of the Information Age , and they weren't thinking about computers, and wanted to limit exposure to mainstream media. Eventually it made more sense to embrace computers and access to the internet—while still discouraging televisions. They have a media room in the common house where members watch movies, and of course, people can easily stream television shows in their private spaces, so it's a slippery slope. But Sandhill did the same dance and I get it.

3. Privacy

As mentioned above, Sarah and I were bivouacked in a small suite in the basement of the common house. It was modest, but no different than what members were allotted who also resided in the common house. We had a door which opened to a modest common space with a table, a couch, and a chair. We also had a small fridge and an electric kettle where we could make tea and coffee. Separated by curtains, we each had our own sleeping space off the common area, partitioned by movable shelves that extended to six feet, providing visual separation, but not acoustic. Fortunately, this was not a big deal for either Sarah and me (as we are not particularly private people), though we paused to reflect on how that would likely have been more challenging for our romantic partners, or even for other work partners.

I found the openness that's encouraged in community living to be refreshing and honest, but I have also learned that it is too much octane for others, and some bridges are too far to cross. It didn't even occur to me to ask about accommodations before agreeing to come to Ionia, and, in retrospect, I'm surprised that the community didn't bring it up. Fortunately, it wasn't a problem, but it could have been a stressor that got in the way our doing our best work.

4. Common house construction

The thing about community buildings is that they are snapshots of community values and sensibilities that last a long time. While the community evolves and moves on, the building lasts, and it serves as a testament to where you were when it was designed and constructed. In the case of the Ionian common house, it was log construction and very large, built many years ago. It was a million dollar investment that features three stories, high ceilings, and room for many group functions. While it has well-insulated walls and ceilings, and hydronic floor heating (where hot water is circulated through pipes embedded in the concrete basement floor), it must be fierce to keep that building warm through the cold Alaskan winters. I can hardly imagine how much wood they have to go through, and the labor that entails. In consequence, the building was heated, but not toasty. People wore long sleeves and hats to the meetings, and regularly huddled near wood stoves. I understood the balancing act—we had made the same choices at Sandhill, though our buildings were smaller and fewer, and our winters milder.

Since the common house was built, the community has learned new and better techniques for construction, including timber frame and light clay straw slip. Today they would build the common house differently. Meanwhile, they have what they have, and are trying to make the best of it.

The other room (besides our basement suite) where Sarah and I spent a lot of time was the media room (where the community watched movies and held meetings). Apropos movie watching, it had a low ceiling and dim lights—perfect for movies, but a strain for meetings. The room held the energy, and but the dimness cast a pall on the energy and low lighting made it a challenge to read facial expressions across the room. I think it might have played differently in other seasons, but we were already in winter (8-12 inches of snow fell while we were there, and the ambient temperature never rose above freezing). Dawn didn't occur until halfway through the morning meeting.

5. Diet

Ionia was founded on a commitment to a macrobiotic diet, which is strong on brown rice, local vegetables, lacto-fermentation, no meat or dairy, and no coffee or alcohol. While there has been some easing off of being strict about those principles, there remains a strong focus on fresh and local food that is still largely macrobiotic. Food is a rallying point in the community, and Sarah and I consistently enjoyed excellent dinners in rotation among people's households over the course of our 10 days on campus.

It was a balm to relax in the warmth and ease of eating together after meetings focused on what's being hard in the community (which was what we did during the day and was the reason we were there). The hospitality around food was superb.

6. The Malling of Alaska

Finally, I want to share a poignant story about our hosts. Being mindful that their commitment to simple living is not something familiar or comfortable to all visitors, we fielded multiple offers in our first days to take a trip to town (by which they meant Soldotna, a village on 4000 that's 30 minutes away and features a mall) where we might enjoy a cheeseburger or go shopping. While both Sarah and I occasionally do those things, we did not crave them and politely declined.

Our hosts were being mindful and had learned over time that many visitors benefit from a dose of mainstream culture to sustain their balance while at Ionia. It was a sweet gesture. To be sure, we asked for a few creature comforts and they were graciously supplied: I got coffee and half-and-half (no, oat milk was not an acceptable substitute for my morning ritual) and Sarah got bananas and yogurt. We tried to be low-maintenance visitors, and they tried to be good hosts. I thought we both did well.

Overall, it was good to be reminded that "normal" lifestyle choices can often be usefully questioned. That's why they call it "intentional community."

My Senior Moments

2022-10-28T06:54:00.000-05:00

This year I've had the opportunity to be part of a team of instructors delivering a five-week webinar (10 hours in total) entitled Aging Gracefully in Community, being produced through the Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC). The second incarnation of this webinar will happen over five consecutive Wednesdays. It started Oct 26 and will run through Nov 23.

I'm teaching the first and third classes, and preparing for them has provided me the occasion to reflect on where I'm at with my life as a senior—something I strongly advise other seniors to do. I also crossed the threshold of my 73 birthday this past week, which is as good a time as any to step back and take stock.

I stepped down as the main administrator of FIC at the end of 2015, retiring from one of my two careers after a 28-year run. As it happened, I discovered immediately afterwards that I had multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer, which knocked me back for a time. After spending the bulk of 2016 in treatment (I benefited greatly from excellent care at a local hospital, and from a stem cell transplant at Mayo Clinic), I have been able to manage the cancer and recover sufficient strength and stamina to resume my other career—the one I haven't retired from—teaching and consulting about cooperative group dynamics.

This ongoing passion is something I've been doing since 1987, specializing in working with intentional communities and working with the whole person (not just the rational part). When I got a second chance on how my senior years might play out (I was pretty far down the well when the cancer was discovered in early '16 and might not have made it back), that served as a wake-up call. Colors were a little brighter, and there is nothing quite like near-death to sharpen the concentration and appreciate the preciousness of what you have. It's an opportunity to strip away the drek and prioritize the joy.

Well, continuing my career in group process was an easy call (so long as I retain solid cognitive skills, knock on wood), as that definitely brings me joy, It's my main venue for social change work, and it's simultaneous my main impetus for personal work. A hard to beat combo.

That said, my relationship to this work has evolved, and never more so than in the last three years. Let me count the ways:

(Actually everything evolves, though we are not always paying attention, or willing to reconsider things in light of new information. I have a good friend who once shared the insight, Don't you sometimes just long for the unexamined life? Hah! Personal work can be grueling! And it's sobering to absorb that it never ends—you never actually reach the top of the mountain.)

• Marked increase in divisiveness and the breakdown of cicil discourse—not just at the macro political level; I'm talking about the dynamics in communities as well.

• Social impact of the pandemic and the strain on cooperative groups as people weathered a long stretch of limiting how much they saw one another in the same room. (This has been especially hard on extroverts.)

• Discovering that Zoom can be an effective delivery tool for teaching and consulting. Not the same as working in-person, to be sure, yet more.nuanced and potent than I suspected at the outset.

• Increased opportunities to teach.

• Balancing immediate needs with strategic planning (it's hard to complete long rang projects when I manage opportunities on the LIFO inventory system).

Here's how all of this had impacted the various segments of of my work:

—Blog and articles

While I've spent markedly less time writing for public consumption the last three years, it's not because I've run out of things to say. It's because I've run out of time to write them, in deference to crafting handouts, client reports, slide shows for Zoom trainings, agendas, professional evaluations, and treading water with email (which includes a sharp up tick in student correspondence). Some of this is remunerative. Most of it is not. In any event, I'm not writing less; I'm writing differently. (Although my blog postings have been way down, I still managed to get four articles posted in Communities magazine this past year.)

—Teaching

Not counting conference workshops (I've done more than 100 in my career) I've been actively teaching since I pioneered my signature two-year facilitation training in 2003 (see below). That said, the pandemic gave a rocket boost to online offerings, and I'm along for the ride. Since 2019 I've tripled how much time I spend teaching. Fortunately, I love it, and it aligns well with my desire to be an agent for positive social change. Unfortunately, it means there's less time for everything else. (I'm even teaching an 8-part series, Learning to Play Bridge, through a local community ed program, and I love that, too!)

—Writing books about group dynamics

This is getting the short end of the stick. I don't prioritizing it, because it's anguishing for me to turn down client requests to protect time for books. My motivation is further undercut by the knowledge that pretty much everything I want to say in a book has already been captured in my blog—it just isn't organized as well as a book would be. Though I haven't given up, I'm definitely noticing that I'm not getting to the work.

—Integrative Facilitation Training (IFT)

I started this course 19 years ago and have now delivered it 16 times. It's the most fun thing I do on a regular basis. The teaching emphasizes an experiential model, where two-thirds of each weekend is devoted to students preparing for, delivering, and debriefing live meetings for a host group, who provides real issues for the students to cut their teeth on, under professional guidance. Students get practice facing live ammunition, and host groups get free outside help with sticky issues—everyone benefits.

I've noticed recently that it's becoming harder to reconcile the active needs of the host with the pedagogical needs of the course. It happens like this: hosts, understandably, want to get maximal benefit from outside help and typically select difficult topics—things where they have struggled on their own. While that is useful training for the students (coping with the nontrivial), topics that are freighted with tensions (often the most troublesome kind) require dealing with the tensions first, before moving on to problem solving, and often it's hard to effect the relationship repair and get deeper into the topic in the time allotted. Thus, students get a fair amount of practice working with tensions (good) but not so much with problem solving (which is a problem).

Most groups are poor at working through tensions, understanding how to productively work issues, or how to use plenary time effectively—all which are things I know how to do and try to emphasize when I teach. In an effort to have the group work where it needs the most help (for example, learning how to use plenary time well) the students don't get as much practice using formats that enhance inclusivity (but come at a cost of slowing things down). It's a dilemma when host needs doesn't align well with what the students need. So this is on my mind right now.

The Next Round of IFT

Incidentally, if you're interested in my thinking about cooperative group dynamics, there is no single better way to absorb (in both your head and your body) the breadth of what I and my fellow trainers have come to understand about this field than by enrolling in one of my two-year trainings, where you'll get to be in a special learning milieu for eight 3-day weekends, spaced approximately three months apart.

While the surface focus of the training is how to understand and make good decisions (as the facilitator) when responding to the complexities and complications of plenaries trying to make inclusive decisions, the utility of the training is much broader than that.

• The context of the IFT course is understanding the secular dynamics of community, and we are committed to doing that both by discussing and analyzing community, and be being a community for the two years we are together. That means we speak from our hearts as well as our heads; we speak transparently and we speak with compassion. When stuff comes up in class—we talk about it. We teach the moment as much as the curriculum. We strive for a level of engagement and authenticity that is rarely found in this vale of tears.

• We expect everyone to be doing personal work in relationship to the materials. Good facilitation is not just learning formulaic responses, or memorizing scripts. While we offer templates, we don't teach paint-by-number facilitation; we teach heart-centered facilitation where practitioners learn to integrate thoughts and feelings, and to identify and trust their instincts.

• It turns out that facilitation training is also leadership training, as the overlap in skills and mind set are nearly identical. Thus, students can benefit from the training even if they never facilitate meetings, because it will help them fill leadership roles—in community, at work, or even in their family—with confidence and clarity. It also helps students be better followers, and better meeting participants (because they have a better sense of what the facilitator is trying to do).

Note: While I expect to continue training facilitators for as long as I can, there's no telling how much sand I still have in the upper half of my hourglass, so you might want to sign up sooner than later if you think IFT might be a good fit for you. My next training, which will be Zoom-based, will start Jan 12 and there's still room for more as of today. If this tickles your fancy, send me an email (laird@ic.org) and I'll give you the full picture.

• • •

I get it that seniors use their latter years in a wide variety of ways, and I respect that this is a very personal choice. It's not for me to tell others what to do. Nonetheless, for what it's worth, I am offering this overview of how I'm spending a significant portion of mine.

Note I have not written about the other major components of my life: time with my partner, Susan; staying connected with family and friends; indulging in my recreational pastimes of celebration cooking, duplicate bridge, solving the daily NYT crosswords, and travel (tonight I fly to Anchorage for two weeks with a community on the Kenai Peninsula—a place I've never been to before—marking the first time I will have traveled to work with a client in person in 31 months).

While the pace of my life has changed considerably (remember, I'm half retired), I see no reason to ship my oars and drift off into the sunset. I believe in an engaged life, and that generally means sailing close to the wind. The challenge is how best to do that as conditions around me shift, as well as my capacity and physical limitations. With all these parts in motion, there is a constant need to reassess and make adjustments. It goes with the territory. For all of that, however, there is no question about whether or not to try. I still get up every morning wondering how I can get best into what the late John Lewis characterized as "good trouble."

Noise

2022-09-14T13:40:00.001-05:00

Every now and then the right book comes along just as I'm ready to benefit from its message. That happened last month when I consumed Noise, by Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow), Oliver Sibony, and Cass Sunstein.

This book came out last year and explores the concept of bad decisions and why people make them, distinguishing between bias and randomness. With bias, things are slanted in a particular direction (consciously or unconsciously). With noise, the range of responses is randomly diffused—the more noise, the wider the diffusion. Things you'd prefer be consistent, turn out not to be. Examples include the sentences judges give people convicted of the same offense, insurance rates that adjusters set for the same coverage, the wide range of agreement among evaluators in assessing personnel candidates.

It turns out that wherever judgment is involved, there is noise—and more of it than most realize. Worse, it's not just found in differences between people. It also occurs when the same person faces the same situation, but at a different time of day, or on a different day of the week, or after the local sports team won over the weekend.

Decision Hygiene

The authors have a number of specific suggestions for how to approach decision-making to reduce noise.

• Delay discussing solutions (potential decisions) until you've first agreed on the criteria you'll use to assess the evaluate candidate proposals. Further, allow people an opportunity to think about what they believe the criteria should be by themselves before discussing it collectively, as groups tend to be strongly influenced by the first couple of people who speak, and ideas are less likely to be lost if they have been written down ahead of time.

• To the extent possible, consider focusing attention on how the candidates rate, one criteria at a time, delaying a discussion of the whole until the end.

• Evaluation will be less noisy if you ask different people or teams to assess candidates in different criteria (the idea being that the wisdom of the group is typically better than the wisdom of an individual).

• In expressing where a candidate proposal stands with respect to each criteria, it's generally better to rank them comparatively rather than on an absolute scale, as there tends to be much tighter agreement about comparative standing than what is meant by an arbitrary numerical scale.

Impact of Noise in Cooperative Groups

While this was not a lens through which the authors of Noise looked, it occurs to me that this book has some things to say about how cooperative groups might enhance their decision-making. To wit:

—Matching the process investment to the stakes. The above outline for how to reduce noise needs to be in some reasonable proportion to consequences. When the outcome matters a lot, you can justify being more careful. When the impact is low, it may not be worth it.

—In cooperative groups, how a decision is made typically matters as much as what decision gets made. With that in mind, there can be a large value placed on inclusivity (the lowest possible barrier for someone's relevant input to be expressed and considered), and it behooves groups to be especially mindful of how default open discussion and rounds tend to inadvertently favor the quick, and those who are comfortable speaking in front of the group. Or, in situations where the group is unskilled at working with disagreement or with the expression of strong feelings, how those with thick skin or a loud voice can have more sway—independent of whether they have better discernment.

—Delegating to a manager or team may be expedient and efficient, but it probably means more noise. It might be useful to reflect on that tradeoff before blithely embracing it.

Who knew that paying attention to noise could be so productive?

The Gift of Good Process—All Delivered Before Xmas Morning

2022-08-19T08:17:00.005-05:00

I'll be conducting a variety of courses from now through the end of the year, and I'm laying them out here—both because one or more may interest you, or people you know (and I'd be pleased to have your help banging the drum).

I. Facilitation Training

This is my signature two-year course, which I've been doing since 2003 and have delivered 15 times, reaching about 175 students. It will be conducted via Zoom (which I've experimented with the last two years and feel solid about, based on having conducted 15 training weekends and facilitated multiple group meetings via that medium).

The class meets for eight 3-day weekends (from Thursday evening through Sunday afternoon), spaced approximately three months apart. No prior facilitation experience is required—you just need a positive attitude, an open mind, and a reliable modem. In addition to teaching the basics, the course will cover considerable nuance about group dynamics in a cooperative setting—all of which applies just as well to leadership in cooperative culture.

In addition to receiving approximately 50 handouts, there will be a principal teaching theme for each weekend:

• Working Content
• Formats
• Conflict
• Consensus
• Power & Leadership
• Organizational Structure
• Delegation
• Challenging Personalities

Half of each weekend is devoted to preparing for, delivering, and debriefing live meetings facilitated by students—as it's my belief that lessons are better grounded when facing live ammunition. The trainers (there will be three of us) will hold your hand throughout and be a safety net as you learn to fly.

Most students come affiliated with an intentional community, but that isn't a requirement, so long as you understand we are teaching you to operate collaboratively and inclusively.

While I am open to students from any situation and with any background, I want to make you aware of the potential this training provides when multiple people participate from the same group—it is much easier to digest and bring home the learnings when you have buddies, and much more possible to shift the culture and practices of your group when the inspiration comes from more than one voice. The benefits are geometric (that is, your group gets four times the boost when you double the number of students).

This is the most fun thing I do, passing along what I've distilled from four decades in the field. At a minimum, this course will make you a better facilitator or help you understand better what good facilitation is. At its best, it will change your life.

The new course is penciled in as follows:

Weekend I Sept 22-25, 2022

Weekend II Jan 12-15, 2023

Weekend III Mar 30-April 2, 2023

Weekend IV     June 22-25, 2023
Weekend V       Sept 7-10, 2023
Weekend VI       Dec 7-10, 2023
Weekend VII      Mar 7-10, 2024
Weekend VIII June 6-9, 2024

There is still room in this course for more students (we accept a maximum of 18). If we don't reach critical mass (12 students is the minimum) by next month, we'll postpone the start until January, bump back all the weekends and add a new date for Weekend VIII.

The cost is $450/weekend for full students (discounts are available if you pay up front) and $300/weekend for auditors. While both full students and auditors are welcome in all classroom sessions, only full students get to facilitate live meetings during class weekends, and receive detailed written comments about their facilitation.

If you have questions or want additional details reach me via email: laird@ic.org

II. National Cohousing Conference • Aug 25-28 • Madison WI

Coming right up (next week!), I'll be traveling for work for the first time since March 2000—ending a drought of 29 months. (I used to travel once a month for work—my how times have changed.)

—Aug 25 (Thursday) • I am teaching an all-day (6-hour) intensive styled Consensus 301, aimed at helping groups who are struggling with consensus, to better understand how they might untangle and be get better results. I have been working with secular consensus for 45 years and have a deep understanding of both the problems and potential solutions. In six hours there will be plenty of time to get responses to individual questions.

Click here for details and the possibility of a one-day pass for this offering alone. I believe you can participate either in-person (best) or via Zoom (next best).

—Aug 27 (Sat) • I am offering a 90-min workshop entitled Consensus 101 (9-10:30 am), covering the basics of what you'll need to get off to the right start.

—Aug 27 (Sat) • I am offering a 90-min workshop entitled Participation (1:30-3 pm), unpacking the morass of issues that arise around non-monetary member contributions to the maintenance and well-being of the community. This topic is the single most requested that clients ask me to help with, because of its complexity. I'll lay out the key questions groups need to address in order to clear the fog.

Again, you'll have the choice of registering for just the workshops, or the whole megillah. Click here for your options.

III. FIC Webinars

Continuing an ambitious program of 10-hour online courses sponsored by the Foundation of Intentional Community, all of which have been offered once already this year, here are the ones being repeated in the months ahead. Each course will be comprised of 2-hour Zoom sessions, held at the same time of day and on the same day of the week for five consecutive weeks. For details and registration for each course, please click on the titles, which are hyperlinked to FIC.

—Facilitation (Tuesdays) • Sept 13-Oct 11

—Consensus 101 (Thursdays) • Sept 15-Oct 13

—Conflict (Tuesdays) • Oct 25-Nov 22

—Aging Gracefully in Community (Wednesdays) • Oct 26-Nov 23 (for this course only, I am part of a team of presenters, and I am only leading the first session)

—Membership (Thursdays) • Oct 27-Nov 23 (note that the last class will held on Wed, to avoid Thanksgiving—the rest will be on Thursdays)

In addition to the main entrées listed above, here are a couple of 1-hour appetizers offered free of charge:

• Facilitating Your Group Through Anything • Aug 23 • 2:30-3:30 pm Eastern

In this session I'll walk through how to handle the nasty stuff: topics that are complex and/or volatile. This is a teaser for the 10-hour Facilitation course listed above.

• Understanding How Consensus Works in Cooperative Groups • Aug 23 • 6-7 pm Eastern

The key focus here will be on essential communication skills needed to make consensus sing. This is a teaser for the 10-hour Consensus 101 course listed above.

I hope to see some of your smiling faces soon.

Remembering Lina

2022-08-17T12:28:00.001-05:00

My friend and mentor, Caroline Estes, died July 13, passing peacefully after four months in hospice. She was 94 and had lived a full and impactful life that touched me deeply.

We first met in the spring of 1987. I had taken Amtrak's Empire Builder from Chicago to Oregon, fresh from the first board meeting of the newly reconstituted Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) at Stelle IL. I caught up with Caroline for a cup of coffee at Alpha-Bit, the magical bookstore/cafe/art gallery that her community, Alpha Farm, operated in Mapleton—a wide spot in the road between Eugene and Florence, on the sinuous banks of the Siuslaw River (of Once a Great Notion fame).

I had set up the rendezvous both to put a face to the name, and to fill her in on what had happened at the seminal FIC gathering. She had a reputation as a tour de force as a community networker in the Pacific Northwest, and I aspired to strengthen connections with communities on the West Coast. As an added incentive, Alpha Farm was an income-sharing community—just like my community, Sandhill Farm—and there weren't many of us around with whom to talk shop.

We clicked immediately, nattering nonstop for a couple of hours, pausing only to inhale and to refill our coffee cups. (I knew right away that I was in the right place because Alpha-Bit served half-and-half in a small pitcher.)

She spent her early childhood in a privileged family in Texas, before moving to California at the age of 10. As an adult she became a Quaker, which was the grounding for her understanding of consensus. Her nickname as a child was Lina, and I am invoking that term of endearment in this remembrance.

Caroline as Grandmother of Secular Consensus

We didn't meet face-to-face until she was 57, and already well established at Alpha (15 years after she'd helped found the community in 1972). By then she'd already worked to adapt consensus as a religious practice to meet the needs of decision-making in community settings. In response to requests to share her methods, Caroline had developed a five-day consensus & facilitation training, and I eagerly signed up for the next round. It came at just the right time for me. I knew enough about cooperative group dynamics to have a slew of questions, but wasn't so settled in my ways that I couldn't shift my thinking or practice.

Together with her protégé, Lysbeth Borie (also a long-time Alpha member), the two comprised Alpha Institute, a subsidiary of the community that offered consensus training and professional facilitation. In addition to steady work in cooperative groups throughout Ecotopia, for a number of years they were the consensus trainers of choice among Waldorf schools across the breadth of North America.

The occasion of Caroline's passing weaves together a number of threads for me. Lysbeth was the person who broke the news to me, and I have a fond memory of my first gig as an outside facilitator in December, 1987, when Lysbeth and I partnered to assist Appletree, a fledgling income-sharing community on Cottage Grove OR. Caroline helped us plan the engagement—even pulling out a packet of precious frozen blueberries from Alpha's larder, so that we could offer Appletree members a memorable dessert as part of our time together. For Caroline, good food and good dynamics went hand in hand, and it was a signature element of her penchant for interweaving engagement and conviviality.

Caroline as Mentor

Caroline was both a friend and a Friend, who was able to retain the spirit of Quaker consensus without necessarily defining it as a pathway to knowing the divine. Under her deft touch, it was also developed as a pathway to divine what was best for the group, which was the field in which she and I walked together.

Among the lessons I absorbed from Caroline was the preciousness of facilitator neutrality, without lapsing into passivity. It is an art knowing when you've heard enough from the group to be able to float a proposal that might balance the whole, and facilitators need to be brave as well as disinterested.

Caroline taught me how to read a meeting—which is a subtle combination of listening deeply to statements, while at the same time tracking the energy that lay beneath and around the words. (Neither of which, BTW, is enhanced by today's increasing reliance on social media, which has significantly degraded both attention spans and the ability of people to hear accurately. Impatience and consensus don't play well together.)

As a master facilitator she was a rock. When managing large groups (100+), which she did on a number of occasions at the height of her career, she had legendary stamina (and erect posture), and was able to redirect obstreperous behavior simply through her presence, the judicious use of silence, and a raised eyebrow. When the number of participants exceeded her capacity to track each person, she learned to scan sections of the group for discordant energy, following that up with individual scrutiny as needed.

She taught me how to toggle one's attention when facilitating, alternately lightly between what was being said (and how that applied to the topic at hand), and where the energy was trending—two things that are not always aligned, yet need to be to reach the promised land.

Based on her genteel upbringing, it was hard for Caroline to express or to work directly with strong emotions—especially negative ones—which is something I've come to view as an essential skill as a consultant/facilitator working with cooperative groups. To be sure, she understood fully when feelings were in play, but considered it unpleasant, invasive, or ill-bred to expose them in group. Thus, she was never comfortable sailing close to the winds of distress.

Caroline's gifts were overwhelmingly offered orally and in person. She left behind a paucity of written material—very few articles or reports. If she wanted to communicate, she would dictate an email, pick up the phone, or write a letter (remember when people used to do that?). To my knowledge, she didn't participate in social media at all, which, as you might imagine, contributed significantly to her disappearing from the radar of folks in need of what she had to offer the last couple decades.

While it's my sense that there is every bit as much need today as there ever was for what Caroline could teach, in the 21st century she had essentially outlived the ability to attract clients, given the limitations of how she functioned. Contemporary marketing had left her behind—making it all the more important for me to honor my professional debt to her in this eulogy.

For two decades (1988-2008) Caroline was a regular participant in FIC, which met semi-annually for three-to-four days at a time to discuss strategies and reset the gyroscope. Caroline was at the center of the wheel and a significant voice in how the organization evolved. For many years, the two of us made a point of carving out one evening at each gathering to go out to a local restaurant for dinner. For three hours it would just be the two of us—catching up, musing, laughing, and strategizing about the road ahead.

Caroline as Communitarian

I consider Alpha to be one of the most beautifully sited communities I've ever seen, nestled into a finger valley of Oregon's Coast Range. Bordered on two sides by BLM land and Forest Service property, it even features a babbling stream that feeds into Deadwood Creek and is home to spawning salmon.

Many years before the community landed there, Alpha was the site of an early post office, when European settlers first populated the Willamette Valley. Interestingly, operating a rural mail route has been a mainstay of Alpha's balance sheet, offering dependable income in an otherwise uncertain backwater economy. (While Alpha-Bit was a solid success when it came to local relations, it was never a profit center.)

Caroline was devoted to Jim, her husband of many years. He grew up in Mississippi and shared her sharp intellect, political savvy, progressive outlook, love of language, and the discipline of speaking with a civil tongue (a diminishing art these days). He worked as a newspaperman, and would recreationally edit menus while awaiting service at restaurants. When possible, they'd attend live theater and symphony concerts, especially the annual Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene. He predeceased her by nine years.

In 2008, while Jim was still with us, I took the train to Oregon following my niece's wedding in San Antonio to attend Lina's 80th birthday bash at Alpha Farm. It was a joy to witness firsthand the appreciation of so many people whose lives she had touched—both in the community and among the Deadwood neighborhood. (I don't believe I've ever cooked so much fresh asparagus in my life.)

Caroline was also stubborn—especially when it came to Alpha. She cared deeply about her vision that the community be a sanctuary of sanity and a beacon of light in times of darkness. She was loath to delegate significant authority without her oversight. She insisted on a complex olio of social justice, hospitality, environmental consciousness, and graciousness—all of which was both inspiring and exasperating for those who sometimes wanted to balance things differently… especially the budget.

Impressively, Caroline lived to celebrate Alpha's golden anniversary. She was there for every one of the past 50 years, and it's a monumental testament to dedication and service that few can claim.

Goodbye Lina, my mentor and friend. Please know that I will continue my grieving by baking a cherry pie, with Montmorencies harvested from a neighbor's backyard, topped with locally churned vanilla ice cream (nothing low fat about it)—all of which I know would make you smile.

Teaching the Rest of the Year—An Updated Menu

2022-05-26T16:36:00.000-05:00

Back in December I posted a sneak preview of courses I'd be offering 2022 (Teaching in the Year Ahead).

While quite a bit of that has come to pass, some things have become more defined, and new things have gelled. So I'm inspired to offer this revised list of offerings for the remainder of the year.

Facilitation Training

As planned, I completed two rounds of my two-year training in recent months (I had been conducting three concurrently), which has made room on my dance card to launch another round. I have the teaching group lined up—all I need is students. Our hope is to start Sept 22-25.

If this interests you or your group, drop me an email (laird@ic.org) and I'll send you a flyer that lays it all out.

FIC Webinars

In addition to what's posted in Teaching in the Year Ahead I will be part of the faculty for a new offering, Aging Gracefully in Community, which will be offered for five consecutive Tuesdays (each session two hours long), starting June 21. To prime the pump there will be a free introductory gathering, May 31, that will last for 90 minutes. Click here for information about the teaser.

Workshops at the National Cohousing Conference • Aug 25-28

I'll be offering three things:

• An all-day pre-conference intensive styled Consensus 301: Rx for Groups Struggling with Making It Work Well. This will happen Thursday, Aug 25.

Plus these two in-conference workshops (90-min each) occurring during the main event (exact times TBA):

• Participation: Issues in Member Contributions

• Consensus 101: Understanding the Basics

Podcasts

In the last month I've been interviewed for two different podcasts—which is a new platform for me:

Rebecca Mesritz put one together for FIC about Skilled Facilitation, and is available now.

Sen Zahn interviewed me this week as part of a segment on Conflict that she'll be editing for Peace Talks Radio, a program syndicated to 60 public radio stations in the US, and others abroad. As of today, no date has been set for when this podcast will be available.

Fortunately, I like being busy.

Property Rights & Social Contracts

2022-05-13T06:06:00.001-05:00

A number of intentional communities struggle with the concept of a member's rights in relation to the community's rights, and I want to focus on a particular aspect of it that shows up when there's a vacancy.

It's relatively common for forming communities (this is particularly the case with cohousing groups) to promise prospective members that they'll have a free hand if they decide to sell. Understandably, this sweetens the pot for people on the fence about whether to buy a unit—helping the group to cross the finish line in selling out, which helps contain costs for early adopters.

The downside is that it's a questionable practice allowing a departing member to be in charge of selecting their replacement. While I don't want to be alarmist and this often works OK, the seller is generally more concerned with a quick sale at a good price, while the community's priority is a good fit—and those two objectives don't always align.

Worse, what if the seller is departing on less than good terms? Uh oh. They may not be motivated to care that much about how well the new buyer will blend with the community, or be completely forthcoming about the responsibilities and commitments that community members are expected to accept.

Key to sorting this out is understanding that an owner's property rights are distinct from a person's social contract as a member of the community. They are not the same thing. While it's very much in the community's interest to have property owners be members, the two do not automatically coincide.

While the property owner may have legal control over who they sell their property to (it depends on applicable laws and how things have been set up with the community), they do not have the right to unilaterally bless the buyer as a member of the community—which right rests solely with the community.

When these two concepts are conflated, mischief ensues.

The Power of Proactive Marketing

Because you want property ownership and community membership to go together, it is very much in the community's interest to play an active role in recruiting suitable buyers. In the ideal, the community will develop and maintain a waiting list of people you already have screened for suitability (value alignment, adequate financial means, and whatever else is on your wish list—maybe you're looking for a cellist for the chamber music ensemble, or a gourmet cook who can turn out elegant meals for 40), so that the exiting member will have an easy time selling and the community will be happy with the new member.

In one of the more creative versions of this, I know of a group where members have agreed to use the community as the real estate broker. In exchange for lining up a buyer (which the community has already determined it wants as a new member) it earns a commission on the deal, with the earnings going into a community improvement fund, thereby taking pressure off HOA dues. Nice.

However, if the group takes a passive, or hands-off approach in selecting the new buyer (which I don't recommend) it needs to step forward to assert its rights with respect to the social contract—establishing how the rights of membership in the community are tied to social behavior, not to property rights.

Misunderstanding Fair Housing Laws

Since 1968, it is US federal law that property owners cannot discriminate in who they rent or sell housing to on the basis of seven things: race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, and familial status. (There are parallel strata laws in Canada, but I am not as cognizant of the details.) Many communities mistakenly interpret this to mean that they are obliged to accept as a member anyone who applies and can meet the financial requirements. Not so! In fact, it's legal to be selective on the basis of any criteria other than the seven protected classes. Of course, it's a nuanced question what qualities you may want to screen for—I'm only making the case that communities are not legally prohibited from doing so.

While communities may be constrained about who buys and rents real property, they have considerable leeway about who is a member of the community—and therefore eligible to enjoy the rights and privileges thereof.

Make sure your group doesn't miss the boat on this.