Laird's blog

I had an overnight layover in New Orleans Tuesday, as I switched trains en route from Atlanta to Tucson, and Weekend 5 of my cross country odyssey. That gave me a chance to stroll the streets (always a good change of pace when you’re facing three straight sedentary days on the choo-choo) to see how the BP disaster was affecting oyster offerings in the Crescent City.

The answer: bivalves are still plentiful, if a bit smaller and not as firm as those succulent R-month darlings I remember lovingly from prior trips. My testing ground is the Acme Oyster House on Iberville in the French Quarter (which is surely where Wiley Coyote would have frequented if he’d gone for oysters with anything like the dertmination he displayed for road runners). I was impressed that there was a waiting line on the sidewalk (backed up by a New Orleans policeman) even at 9 pm on a Tuesday night in June. Talk about a solid reputation.

As I sandwiched myself onto a stool at the raw bar, I watched the Celtics claw back from a 12-point halftime deficit in Game 3 of the NBA Finals on their own parquet floor. I sucked down two glasses of Abita’s seasonal offering on tap, a bowl of chicken & andouille gumbo, two dozen raw oysters, and then topped it all off with a third dozen charbroiled and sprinkled with parmesan. Yum! I was feeling pretty good about my gustatory prowess until I glanced at the wall and noticed that you have to consume at least 30 dozen in one sitting to get your name mentioned, and the king of the hill was some dude from nearby Hammond who managed to slurp down 42-1/2 dozen (and still walk). Ufda. I wasn’t even within an order of magnitude of honorable mention!

I recently got an email from my friend Becca Krantz, asking for my views on a bush-full of thorny questions about how to run effective meetings. While the list is somewhat eclectic, they’re all worthy queries and I’m inspired to offer my responses as a blog series. Here’s what she asked:

1. Setting up meeting space—what are the minimally acceptable standards? [See my May 26 blog on Meeting Architecture]

2. Children in meetings—what's appropriate for the children and what’s appropriate for the adults? How might the answer vary by topic? [See my blog of May 29, Asking Children to Play in Traffic]

3. What considerations should be taken into account when determining how informally or formally to run meetings?

4. What can be done about getting input from and building consensus with people who don't come to meetings?

5. What are the pros and cons of rules in community?

Today I'll respond to the third question, examining the pros and cons of formality in how meetings are run.

Ma'ikwe and I just launched a two-year facilitation training in the Mid-Atlantic States this past weekend, and mostly it went well. At the outset there were a handful of participants unsure whether they wanted to commit to the full two years, and most of them converted after experiencing a dynamic opening weekend. Note however that I said "most" and not "all." There was one person sampling the training who came to the opposite conclusion, and I want to write today about her, about how my work can fall short even when it's mostly landing long.

Style Clash
Partly our misfit was a matter of communication styles. Where I tend to be more orderly and disciplined about how I work with topics (image a honeybee systematically working a patch of white clover), this woman was more comfortable with a meandering and non-linear way of exchanging information (think butterfly flitting among the blossoms in a random pattern), where an agreed upon topic was more a point of departure than a destination.

After repeatedly experiencing my redirecting her comments to the topic at hand, she felt hemmed in and disrespected. I was reining in her enthusiasm and undercutting much of what she found pleasurable about meaningful discourse.

In addition, there was tension between us around pace. While I work purposefully with groups on how to speak on topic and as non-repetitively as possible (to respect time and preserve the opportunities for others to contribute to the conversation), this woman preferred spaciousness when it was her turn, so that she could present her ideas and relate her experiences in her own style and in multiple ways. Where I saw redundancy, she saw richness and nuance. Where I thought I was protecting the group (emphasizing balance and focus), she thought I was needing to be in control.

I recently got an email from my friend Becca Krantz, asking for my views on a bush-full of thorny questions about how to run effective meetings. While the list is somewhat eclectic, they’re all worthy queries and I’m inspired to offer my responses as a blog series. Here’s what she asked:

1. Setting up meeting space—what are the minimally acceptable standards? [See my May 26 blog on Meeting Architecture]

2. Children in meetings—what's appropriate for the children and what’s appropriate for the adults? How might the answer vary by topic?

3. What considerations should be taken into account when determining how informally or formally to run meetings?

4. What can be done about getting input from and building consensus with people who don't come to meetings?

5. What are the pros and cons of rules in community?

Today I'll respond to the second question, on children in meetings. I've lived in community for 36 years (which means I've been to a lot of meetings), and 29 of those years we've had children in the group, two of them my own (which means I have a lot of familiarity with this topic).

I just got an email from my friend Becca Krantz, asking for my views on a bush-full of thorny questions about how to run effective meetings. While the list is somewhat eclectic, they’re all worthy queries and I’m inspired to offer my responses as a blog series. Here’s what she asked:

1. Setting up meeting space—what are the minimally acceptable standards?

2. Children in meetings—what's appropriate for the children and what’s appropriate for the adults? How might the answer here vary by topic?

3. What considerations should be taken into account when determining how informally or formally to run meetings?

4. What can be done about getting input from and building consensus with people who don't come to meetings?

5. What are the pros and cons of rules in community?

Today I’ll tackle the first topic, which I’m labeling meeting architecture, or how you set up the physical meeting environment. There are several things to keep in mind, and savvy facilitators and meeting planners will take these factors into account when selecting a room and preparing it for the meeting. With good meeting architecture, the space enhances the experience in subtle ways that operate mostly below the participant’s consciousness level (whereas poor architecture will often be noticeably irritating). In no particular order, here are my thoughts on what to think about:

A. Outdoors versus Indoors

I'm in Portland OR for the Fellowship for Intentional Community's spring organizational meetings, and this is my fourth day immersed in the crucible of our deliberations. Board members have gathered from all over the country and there are about a dozen non-regulars who have joined the party, both to renew connections and to find out what FIC is up to these days. Some come with memories (Tree, Bindi, Jeff); some come with curiosity (Terry, Wayne, Lincoln); some come with burning questions (Bob, Deborah, Craig). All are welcome.

The rhythm of the meetings is a lot like the weather, where there's a sense that time has accelerated. While Portland is famous for its precipitation, I don't think I've ever experienced so many cycles of rain squall, alternating with bursts of sunshine—we've gone through more than a dozen in 72 hours. It feels like we've had a month of weather in three days. As I reflect on it this morning, the mercurial skies have supplied an analogous backdrop for our networking deliberations, where there are frequent surges of insight and intense focus on issues, interspersed with meals, coffee breaks, and the easy laughter of friends reconnecting.

Brainstorms in the room have mirrored the pace of the rain storms outside the room. Progress is not always linear, yet we trust the process—that bringing passionate and purposeful people to parlay will produce potent plans and possibilities (not to mention alliteration).

Each meeting has its own flavor, as the exact mix of people is never the same. Often, people we were expecting don't arrive (this time Caroline Estes and Parke Burgess), and others we weren't expecting to, do. Regardless, we dance with whoever comes to the party, and meetings, unlike baseball games, never get rained out.

I’ve been working as an administrator for the Fellowship for Intentional Community over two decades. Like all nonprofits, FIC is always looking for fresh energy, and we regularly invite newcomers to attend our organizational meetings (which occur semi-annually—the next one starts tomorrow and runs through Sunday, hosted by Daybreak, a newly constructed cohousing community on Portland’s north side) as a way to cast the net.

While we’re regularly discussing organizational openings with candidates who might fill them, there is a particular kind of challenge that is harder to handle than any other. It is when the candidates clearly possess appropriate ardor and skill, yet have a style that is aggressive and demonstrably devoid of a collaborative attitude. Such well-meaning eager beavers come across as more interested in air time than in avoiding error time. While hard working and bright, they are overly enamored of their own thinking and less interested in how that might be further enhanced by the contributions of others.

Over the years, we’ve learned to pay close attention to such mismatches, and to back away from such associations, where their actions, as FIC ambassadors, would broadcast a very different message than the cooperative values our organization is dedicated to espousing. In short, we’ve learned that how we conduct business is every bit as important as what business we’re conducting (to paraphrase communications guru Marshall McLuhan, "The medium is at least half the message"). In recognition of this, we've learned to evaluate both when assessing someone for taking on responsibility in the Fellowship’s name.

OK, I've had enough. I'm tired of people trashing consensus based on initial poor experiences. While I can appreciate how this has happened, who promised that changing the world was going to be easy?

In the world of Cultural Creatives (the term coined by sociologist Paul Ray to describe the substantial—and growing—segment of the population who are moving beyond traditional and conservative paradigms to create a different, and hopefully better functioning & more humane society), there is a broad-based analysis that mainstream decision-making sucks. It favors the people with privilege, the people with money, the people with power, the people who are quick, the people who are articulate, and those good at competing. There is a strong impulse to move toward more collaborative and inclusive processes for solving problems—especially when the stakes are high.

Consensus, in one form or another (see my blog of March 17, The Many Flavors of Consensus, for more on this), is among the most popular choices for groups trying to address the challenge of finding a a more cooperative way to make decisions. Unfortunately, having an analysis about the need for something different, as well as the will to do something about it (both of which are excellent things), is not sufficient to guarantee a good result. Bummer.

Yesterday was Ascension Day, commemorating when Jesus went upstairs, departing (in physical form) this vale of tears for the last time. In the spirit of the occasion, I gained considerable altitude Thursday myself.

On board the California Zephyr, in the space of 90 minutes we rose from 5,280 feet in Denver to the Moffat Tunnel—at 9,239 feet it’s the highest elevation reached by any train in the Amtrak system—where bored through the Continental Divide via the six-mile tunnel.

I left Denver in the cool, gray remnants of the rainstorm we had barreled through the night before. To my surprise, 30 minutes out of Denver we hit patches of snow. Within an hour of continual climbing, the occasional streak of white had turned into 4+ inches of wet, glompy frosting on all the trees. Though the snow was melted on all the roads, the solar panels deployed to power the switches in remote high altitude locations were completely blanketed. We had ascended back into winter!

We rose through the low ceiling and then through it into patches of sunshine. In the foggy part, it was hard to discern the engine on curves, just eight cars ahead. At one point, I saw three deer scratching in search of the tender green shoots that had been ubiquitous just the day before.

Appropriately enough, our first stop after Denver was Winter Park, where we were treated to the artistic curling of wet snow as gravity had its creative way with it, easing off the steep pitched metal roof of the open-air waiting shelter at the Amtrak station.

Laird's Loop

Tomorrow evening I board the California Zephyr in Ottumwa IA, westbound for the Bay Area. It's the start of a 41-day road trip. At home today it's rainy and cool. The sorghum seedlings are struggling with the low temperatures and Stan is anxious about getting into the fields as we slide past our frost-free date. The black locusts are still in bloom and the black raspberries are just about to flower.

By the time I return from this monster road trip, the days will be at their longest, the gardeners are likely to be looking for rain, and the black raspberries will be ready to pick. I am departing in the midst of spring, and will be returning with summer fully regnant. While it's a lovely time to travel (and I'll thoroughly enjoy my cross country treks—nine days of which will be by train, with their lovely observation cars sheathed in wrap-around windows), I'll nonetheless miss the unfolding of the growing season at home. I won't be here for the first peas and new potatoes (we just enjoyed the last of the 2009 crop at dinner last night). Everyone will have put their sweatshirts into the back of their closet by the time I return, while my shorts will still have winter dust on them.

Today is National Train Day. You can earn quadruple Guest Reward points if you can arrange to be on the choo-choo this day. Much as I love the train—and I do—I will happily be at home instead, celebrating Sandhill Farm's 36th anniversary.

Sandwiched delicately between Beltane and Mother's Day, I like to think of it as a bridge party, drawing on both: a) the raucous pagan energy honoring the surging growth of the Earth in spring; and b) the supporting and hearth energy that are the quintessential qualities of mothering. Today, you might say, we're honoring both nature and nurture. Also, we'll be eating and drinking a lot.

Mostly, today is about camaraderie, and suspending our normal routines to indulge in visiting with friends and neighbors (many of whom are both). We expect a crowd of about 60-75, with people coming from as far away as St Louis and Madison. Many will stay the night. Festivities officially begin in the afternoon, with a few semi-organized activities to punctuate the progression of the day:
—A Maypole at 3 pm
—Potluck feast at 4 pm, preceded by a welcoming circle that will fill the entire side lawn
—Contra dance (after digestion has proceeded far enough to no longer inhibit free movement), featuring live music and even livelier calling
—Sweat lodge, staring around dusk and continuing in rounds (we can take about 10 at a time) until everyone has had enough or the wood runs out

I woke up in my own bed this morning, with the cool spring air redolent with the sweet odor of black locust blossoms, which are just now popping open here in northeast Missouri. It's one of only two local flowering trees that I unabashedly enjoy the scent of (the other is wild plum), and I'm glad I didn't miss it. (For more on my love affair with black locusts, see my May 21, 2008 blog, Bloomin' & Perfumin'.)

Yesterday morning I was inbound from Louisiana, chugging north on Amtrak's City of New Orleans, and the last stop before Chicago was in suburban Homewood. I laughed when I saw that the city's water tower had been intentionally emblazoned with the slogan, "Home, Sweet Homewood." I've always had a weak spot for wordplay, and here was a whole town that was willing to pay homage to whimsy in the municipal budget! In addition to playing off of a timeless cross-stitch catch phrase, it's evocative of Robert Johnson's famous blues tune, Sweet Home Chicago (it was first made popular by Eric Clapton, and then featured as one of the songs in the 1980 Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi cult hit musical, The Blues Brothers), which is all the more potent for me as the lyrics are about coming back home, and suburban Chicago is my home—or used to be, before I settled at Sandhill Farm in 1974.

April 20, a-state-of-the-art BP oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. The uncapped well is located about 50 miles offshore and is estimated to be spewing around 5,000 barrels—more than 200,000 gallons—of crude oil into the gulf daily and the massive oil slick is just now reaching the shores of Louisiana, driven by a strong south wind. While there are massive efforts underway to stop the leak and to contain the spilled oil with booms, choppy seas are hampering the deployment.

The oil—so prized for the petroleum products we can manufacture from it when it arrives in tankers—is a deadly threat when it arrives as an amoeba-like blob, and the Gulf States are bracing themselves for hard times to come. It's bad news for birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish—locals are gearing up for a total loss of this season's newborn—and will make a mess of the beautiful beaches, seriously undercutting tourism.

Among other things, the spill threatens to smother the most productive oysters beds in the US (Louisiana serves up about 250 million pounds annually, about one-third of the US harvest), perhaps shutting them down for years. I was glad to have enjoyed some gulf oysters at a raw bar this week. Who knows when I'll be able to enjoy them next.

Stopping the leak is going to be very difficult. The well penetrates the seabed at a depth of more than a mile and the break in the pipe occurred at around 5000 feet down. In the end, this incident may become the largest oil spill in US history, surpassing that of the Exxon Valdez, which leaked around 11 million gallons of oil into Alaskan waters in 1989.

Today starts the second weekend of the New Orleans Jazz Festival, and I’m leaving before the music starts this afternoon.

I’ve just wrapped up two days in the Crescent City (and am sitting in the Enterprise Rental Office on Chef Menteur Hwy, typing today's entry as I await the four-cylinder chariot that I’ll drive to Natchitoches—pronounced, for some reason, as NACK-i-tish), and thought I'd post some reflections. I coordinated my trip to be here at the same time as my son (Ceilee) and daughter-in-law (Tosca), who are in town for the jazz festival. I was in town mainly to be with them and to enjoy the Cajun cuisine (I'm just catching the tail end of oyster season). Ceilee & Tosca have two good friends from Las Vegas, Kenny & Ricci, who just moved back to New Orleans, and we stayed at Ricci's mom's house in suburban Chalmette. As Kenny's new job doesn't start until Monday morning, he served as our tour guide.

One of the specialties of the Big Easy is frozen concoctions served up in to go cups. You can get them all over town, and the best known of these is probably the hurricane—a deadly combination of gin, vodka, rum, triple sec, amaretto, and a splash of fruit juices which is guaranteed to seed the nucleus of a tropical storm in your stomach. However, I was no sooner picked up at the Amtrak station Tuesday afternoon than we headed for the Port of Call—a hole in the wall bar on Esplanade—and a sampling of what was touted as a much superior amalgamation of alcohol and fruit juices styled a monsoon. While I didn't conduct a blind taste test, I am willing to attest that enough tastes will make you go blind. I was glad I wasn't driving.

Who dat?

Tuesday through Thursday I was part of a crew working full bore to build a cistern (see my blog of April 23, Bridge Work). By Friday, we were rained out, and it’s not clear which month we’ll be able to get back to it. Sigh. Welcome to the vagaries of Midwest spring weather.

It started raining Thursday night, and continued through the day on Friday. All together we had about an inch through mid-day Saturday, which the gardens needed and was by no means excessive. But it was enough to precipitate cave-ins along the sides of the cistern pit, collapsing clumps of soggy clay and dirt atop our unsecured block walls. All of that will need to be dug out and the soil removed from block cavities before the walls can be laid true and grouted securely in place. We were about half a day from having that work done before the rain caught up with us. As it will probably require a backhoe to re-excavate the hole (if you were wondering about the possibility of manually removing wet, sticky clay from a trench over one’s head, think pyramids), we’ll have to wait for enough dry weather that the weight of the equipment doesn’t trigger more cave-ins. That probably translates to June.

Given that I need to be on hand long enough to oversee the digging out, the completion of the block wall assembly, surface bonding the walls, and pouring the concrete for the barrel-vaulted top, a peek at my calendar means that this work won’t happen sooner than July. So the rains—while good for morel and shiitake production—were untimely for cistern production.

As momentum robbing as this was for our cistern crew, our work in April will mostly still be usable in July, so it’s more about delay than loss. The news for farmers in central Missouri was more troublesome.

As a professional facilitator and conflict worker, a lot of what I do is build bridges between two or more folks having trouble hearing each other. While my life in community didn't start out with this focus it has decidedly become a central part of what I do.

After 36 years of living at Sandhill Farm, my role has gradually evolved from homesteader (there was no end to what things we didn't know how to do when we bravely moved onto the land in the spring of 1974) to community networker (I became my community's delegate to the Federation of Egalitarian Communities in 1979) to nonprofit administrator (I've been the Secretary of the Fellowship for Intentional Community since the late '80s) to facilitation trainer (mainly through a two-year program I pioneered in 2003, where I teach others how to build bridges).

Over the decades, my life has shifted more toward meetings and report writing, and away from milking cows and swinging hammers. While I know why this has happened and don't regret my choices, I haven't lost my enjoyment of more physical tasks, and I've been looking forward for some time to this past week, where I set aside my laptop to honcho building a cistern next to my wife's house at Dancing Rabbit.

Friday afternoon I got a surprise phone call from Xanthia, a woman I met five years ago at an FIC organizational meeting in Los Angeles. She’s been interested in community for years and gives me a call every now and then to catch me up on her journey toward a more cooperative life. It’s been a sweet connection in the outer orbit of my life as a community networker.

In addition to telling me that she'll be retiring soon and moving to northwest Tennessee to live with her sister, she inquired about how my partner, Ma’ikwe, was doing with her challenges with fibromyalgia (see my Dec 14 blog Adventures in Hydrotherapy) and having a section of the roof blown off her house (see my April 7 blog The Roof Is Risen, Indeed). It turned out that Xanthia has been reading my blog and was sympathetically tracking some of the struggles that Ma’ikwe has faced in recent months. I was touched by her caring and surprised that she was following my writing so closely.

In the spectrum of intentional communities, Sandhill Farm is more of an intentional family than an intentional village (such as our neighbors, Dancing Rabbit, who have a population of 50 going on 500). That said, we nonetheless have been serious about growing—just not as much or as fast.

Sandhill has 12 bedrooms, yet we only have five adults living here as members now, with a couple and their two-year-old son slated to join us in June. That will still leave us with immediate openings, and begs the question about how selective we should be in choosing among prospectives. Because we'll never be large, each member has a decided impact on the group's flavor, and the nuance we wrestle with is how important it is that we're excited about a candidate, as opposed to there being no red flags. It's the difference between insisting on being positive, versus settling for the absence of dissonance.

While my group is not of the same mind about this, I lean toward a minimum that at least one other member really wants the person to join. Absent that, I'm worried about the dynamic where the new person holds a strong view on some issue that no one else agrees with. While a person could live here for 10 years and never be in that position, if it does occur, what will sustain us through the awkwardness? Knowing that the relationship with that person is genuinely valued by someone I already have a commitment with to work through tough issues, will help me respond with compassion—instead of with irritation—when there's tough sledding. While I don't expect to be best friends with all community members, I want to feel optimistic about our prospects for being allies in the creation and sustenance of cooperative culture.

It's that time again. When the enticement of balmy April weather must be firmly resisted in favor of wrestling at the dining room table with the thicket of schedules and forms that stand between me and the avoidance IRS penalties. All of which is to say, taxes must be postmarked by Thursday. Thus, I went into total immersion yesterday morning (pausing only to send up this flare to my blog constituency).

I do the taxes for the whole community. That means that I start by preparing Sandhill's corporate return, parlay that into completing every member's 1040, and conclude by doing returns for the state of Missouri. (For nuances about the favorable tax options available to us as an income-sharing community, see my blog of last year, Mining the Tax Code. For more about how I relate personally to being the Designated Tax Matters Partner, see my blog of two years ago, The Tax Man Cometh.)

Every year there's a sequence to this treasure hunt:

a) Pore over the electronic accounting to see that things have been entered properly (Hint: they're never completely right). It's kind of like an Easter egg hunt, where you're looking for anomalies, trying to discover as many as you can before you hand in your basket to the judges.

b) Pull together the oddments of accounting that are needed to create a complete financial statement and balance sheet (accounts receivables as of Dec 31; market value of all our bank accounts, loans, and investments; how many days of last year each person was a member—fun stuff like that).

c) Calculate depreciation and complete Form 4562. (For this I need the odometer readings on all our vehicles when the clock struck midnight Dec 31.)

I'm in Kalamazoo this weekend, doing a series of training workshops for students at Western Michigan University (they've asked for power, delegation, facilitation, membership, and conflict—pretty much a full smörgåsbord).

When I left home in the pre-dawn hours of Thursday (to catch the 6:12 choo choo out of Quincy IL), the sky was clear and spring was raging ahead after being delayed by winter's reluctant departure from the Midwest. You could almost watch tree buds and flowers open up as warmth surged back into the soil. I debated whether to bring my fleece vest on this trip or not. Temperatures the past two weeks had been steadily pleasant, even flirting with the low 80s on occasion (which is showing off this early in the season), and who needs to schlep extra clothing? Given that it was only 40 degrees at dawn in Quincy, I decided at the last moment to bring the vest, and I was plenty glad I did when I arrived in Kalamazoo.

While the trees here are in early leaf (offering smudges of chartreuse to contrast jauntily with the browns and grays that had dominated the winter palette), the temperatures were retro—a throwback to late February. In town, the Bradford pears and cherries were decked out in dress whites and the grape hyacinth was out in numbers (just like in Missouri), yet spring was in a state of suspended animation. There was a weak sun trying to poke out of scudding clouds and remnants of two days of steady rain occasionally shifted back into wet snow flurries. Yuck.

In the north, spring just takes a little longer and its progress is more sketchy. Though Kalamazoo is located smack in the middle of southwestern Michigan—the garden spot for the wolverine state—Michigan is still a northern state, and Mother Nature was just sending a reminder.