Sometimes life provides answers you are seeking before you realize it.

When I wrote about “resilience” last November, I was wondering how our society can become self generating, creating what it wants to become, rather than powerlessly watching the undoing of things that seems to be happening all around us.

One answer is; get a group of committed, can-do people together who want to create a context to support others in creating concrete, practical outcomes.

The very day I returned from the Art of Hosting conference on November 16, I had a meeting to attend. Something different immediately struck me about this group. These people were planning to make a real impact in our community by hosting a gathering to support practical action towards environmental sustainability in Ottawa. The conveners didn’t yet know exactly how this was going to happen, but they had sketched out a process and had invited others to attend to shape it out that. I enthusiastically joined in; here was the kind of action I had been seeking.

The culmination of months of work and extraordinary collaboration happened this past weekend and it more than met expectations. Close to 200 people gathered at Dow’s Lake Pavilion to gain support for over 30 different projects, each of which will make a difference to environmental sustainability in Ottawa.

The event is called the 3i Summit. The 3 “I”s: Interact, Innovate and Initiate describe the trajectory required for community level collaboration. Intended to achieve practical outcomes, the focus of the Summit has been a call for projects that can achieve tangible outcomes.

Projects were grouped into three categories; infrastructure, community impact and forums.

Infrastructure projects provide the support needed for other initiatives to gain ground. For example, the Ottawa Sustainability Fund collects funds to disperse to other initiatives. Founded in 2006, this organization has been effective in helping a variety of initiatives gain traction. Now it is seeking support to build to the next level, to fund a broader base of collaborative projects. The Eco Talent Network, a newly minted initiative presently at the idea stage, has the intention of mining the extraordinary talent, skills and expertise in Ottawa and matching this talent with specific needs expressed from not for profits and community groups.

Community Impact Projects are projects focused on specific improvements in the community and preference was given to projects that could be replicable or scalable. The Hilson Outdoor School Classroom would be a place for students to learn about nature in their own school yard. The success of this outdoor classroom could inspire other schools across the city to follow suit. The Ottawa Centre Eco-district is about showcasing green buildings and businesses, using existing infrastructure and infrastructure planned by the city to encourage more green buildings and businesses within the downtown core.

Forums are opportunities to continue to gather, inspire and collaborate. For example, the Ottawa Strategies Circle will be a monthly dinner to connect people with expertise and resources with grassroots leaders starting up new initiatives. The CCSR conference, already established in Ottawa, and holding its 5^th conference November 6 2012, will host the next “3i” gathering; a time to showcase progress for projects initiated during the summit and benefit from the worldwide expertise the conference attracts.

Why is it that initiatives to protect the environment can engender such hostility? Here is a case in point; the First Nation’s in Alberta and NWT have pledged to work to stop the Northern Gateway Pipeline project; a 1200 km pipeline which would be constructed across Alberta and British Columbia to bring oil to the coast to be sent to China.

In an article about First Nation’s reaction to the Northern Gateway Pipeline Project in The Sun Jan 27 2012, the comment section explodes with vitriolic resentment. This is reaction to protecting the environment multiplied with racism which makes it especially antagonistic. One commenter calls the move “selfish” and insists that the pipeline would benefit “all Canadians”.

Do people really believe that an initiative such as this would be of benefit to themselves? Clearly this project would benefit Enbridge, the company wanting to transport the oil. There is the benefit of jobs and spin off companies from the Alberta Tarsands and the pipeline. These are economic benefits that extend to the cities and towns in the vicinity.

I can understand that many people have no idea of how important forests, clean water and fisheries are to humanity, who are ignorant of our dependence on these things. I am perplexed by the depth of the anger. It is of such intensity, it seems to come from a place of fear and of protecting one’s own survival. Is it a fear of losing an economy we have come to depend on? Is it a fear of scarcity, that the pool of jobs will dry up? Is it a fear of wilderness itself? If so, it is a misplaced fear because it is the earth’s lungs in the form of forests and the earth’s blood in the form of waterways, that we truly depend.

I walked by my Hibiscus bush in my living room, like I do every day, noticing the magnificent blossom which had emerged the night before . On this morning, though, a blossom at eye level caught my attention. In particular, it was the exquisite curve of the stamen, trembling with pollen stalks, completed with delicate punctuation marks at the tip, which arrested me.

I stood and really noticed this mystery, in my living room. I was moved to grab my sketch pad and to draw it and as I drew I meditated on the miracle of emergence. What caused the plant to create this flower? What cellular mechanisms allow for a leaf to become a flower with hues of red, pink and orange, delicately arranged around its reproductive organs?

Later did some research online and came to the conclusion that scientists don’t know. They have documented the mechanical steps of DNA and proteins. But what triggers all of this to happen?

In a way, I am pleased that we don’t know and perhaps it is unknowable. I prefer for this to remain a mystery. What is important to me is that the creativity of nature in my living room inspired my own creativity. Nature does this all the time, life does this all the time, whether we notice it or not.

At the Art of Hosing retreat in Pembroke this year, a question kept recurring to me. The question first visited me during the opening “world cafe” discussion and it murmured and whispered to me throughout the event, finally shouting itself in my head when we had an opportunity to propose a question for discussion with others. The question was: How Can We Create Resilience in Our Systems (so that what we want to keep can survive)?

The question first stirred many months ago as I started to become aware, with alarm, that some of the institutions in our society that are starting to come undone. It doesn’t seem so important viewed in isolation; a Wheat Board here, a few Environment Canada scientists there (who happen to be monitoring climate change in the Arctic), a few National Archives Collections. But when a pattern emerges, it becomes alarming. So my question for our society is; “how can we build resilience so that we are not simply dismantled piece by piece, robbed penny by penny in a manner so that we hardly notice it?” Are we so easily disrobed? Are we that fragile?

The discussion at Art of Hosting took inspiration from Nature. “What creates resilience in living systems?”, we asked. We noted that in nature there is redundancy, diversity and ample interconnectedness. How could that be replicated in human society? What can bind us together so that we are strong, resistant, resilient? Actual relationships and lines of communication can be broken. Actual social institutions, particularly when dependent on a few donors or one decision-maker can be snipped at the umbilical cord. So what binds us beyond these temporary manifestations? I have been ruminating on this since the Art of Hosting conversation.

What we are blind to is the energetic pattern underlying resilience. We tend to see it as static – maintaining what is. In actual fact there is a dynamic equilibrium that holds the essence of things together. The dynamic equilibrium underlying resilience is always in flux, within certain parameters. Brian Swimme calls this Homeostasis, one of the powers of the universe. It manifests in all systems – from the pH level in our blood, to populations in ecosystems, to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, to super novas exploding in the galaxy.

Here is a poem from Rosemary Wahtola Tromer, beautifully describing this phenomena.

Things fall apart—
the road
the cup
all I think
I know—

and
something
holds together
all this breaking

So does this mean that when we see things we care about coming undone, that we passively stand by and wait for things to change, for homeostasis to work its magic and for the pendulum to swing the other way?

No. For it is the very energy we invest in to what we care about that causes the shift in the other direction. It is the accumulated effort of individuals and groups of people who are moved to react to what they don’t want to see happen which causes change.

And sometimes it is a deep swing away from what we want, away from the dynamic balance that keeps everything going as usual, which mobilizes energy for change. More of what we don’t want to live with wakes us up, helps us encounter what we care about rather than taking it for granted. Look at the fall of the Berlin Wall. Look at the Arab Awakening. In nascent form, the Occupy Wall Street movement.

This summer some dear friends got married and I was invited to MC. I met the invitation with mixed emotions. I was flattered. But mostly I was daunted. No, not daunted … burdened. This event I’d been looking forward to shape-shifted in my mind from one where I could be a happy butterfly moving about socializing with whomever, to one where I had a responsibility. The worst burden was my expectation that I’d have to be funny. Funny is not the first word that you’d use to describe me. Once in awhile I’ll say something that comes out of the blue and is met with guffaws. But it certainly isn’t a muse I conjure up with any regularity.

One way to resolve my stage fright was to insist that I have a co-MC. If I didn’t have to be solely responsible for being funny, entertaining and gracious, I’d then feel less burdened. (And I did have a lot more fun at the wedding, sharing the load).

Then I put my facilitator’s hat on and thought about how other people who are funny and talented in various ways could contribute to making the wedding dinner fun and memorable. At the reception, once everyone was settled at their dinner tables, I invited the guests to share their stories about the bride and groom or to sing a song (with the stipulation that it had to have the word “love” in it).

The result was astonishing. First was a lovely song, sung solo. Next a touching story from a burly man about the impact on his life of his friendship with the groom. Then we all laughed as we listened to the story of how the couple was brought together through a good deal of strategy and help from her friends on the bride’s part. Every few minutes someone or a group of people stood up to sing a song or tell a story. It was like releasing a flood of shared memories and offerings of emotions and well-wishing and love. Yet, I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t invited this in we would have all sat at our tables with our stories and songs and offerings caged inside of us.

Sometimes all we need is permission to share what is really in our hearts.

This past weekend I indulged in an experience that replenishes my soul; wilderness canoe-camping. There is something about being in a place where you see no evidence of humans, a place where the sounds are those of nature; water, wind, birds, that is exquisitely restorative.

My partner and I headed for a big lake I had last been to ten years ago. It was a location known to only a few and access was through a resident who allowed people to park on her land. My surprise was the morning of the first day, while swimming, when I heard voices and around the corner came a couple in a canoe. Next came a few people in a motor boat, the driver seemingly with driver attention-deficit disorder. He zipped all over the lake, looped around our island several times, and finally came close to our campsite, within yelling distance. “We are looking for site number 48” he yelled, wild-eyed. “Well, its not here, we said”. After he left we looked up and noticed there was a number on our campsite, 47.

The rest of the day brought a whole procession of canoes and motor boats. Quiet fishing boats put-putting along, couples paddling sedately by, a guy with his two kids, 6 canoes filled with boy scouts, a gaggle of ladies, and many motor boats with no seeming destination or purpose, racing up and down the lake. The secret of this lake was out. People had built roads and boat launches to it, cheap depth-finder technology allowed for high-speed boats to zip around without fear of submerged rocks or logs. This place was wilderness no longer.

Wilderness and contact with nature is important to us as humans. It connects us to something ancient and elemental in us. Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle, identifies 10 reasons why adults and children need nature in our lives. Included in his list is that we are hard-wired to love nature and we actually suffer when we are without it.

I reflected on the paradox: how can we have wilderness, how can people experience the wonder of it; when the more people who want to experience it, the less it is wilderness. Of course national parks provide rules and regulations that keep out the ADD motor boaters which, in my humble opinion, turn a peaceful lake into a personal theme park. The rules and regulations, on the other hand, where a place to put up your tent (often close to others) and when is designated, make it only a quasi wilderness experience to me, having experienced otherwise.

Perhaps wilderness is simply not wilderness with us there at all. I may selfishly think that just me being there is OK, but wilderness is for the other species to live their lives without our impact. It is there because nature needs it for herself. Perhaps we can only experience glimpses of it and I have to resign myself to lining up with everyone else who wants to feel a hint of it in a park, or else live with the motor boaters.

Most change efforts fail. This is a well-documented warning to all who embark on the path of organizational change. Often what’s missing is support for an organizational culture that will anchor the change and make it a part of the new normal. A transformative change such as the transition to a sustainability-driven organization requires intentionally developing a culture that supports this new vision.

A new study (Embedding Sustainability in Organizational Culture), sponsored by the Network for Business Sustainability, asks the question “what organizational practices build and support a culture of sustainability?” In this comprehensive review of practitioner and academic literature, researchers assessed 179 sources and identified 59 distinct practices, guided by the questions “what are they doing?”, “who is doing it?”, “what are they trying to accomplish?” and “how are they going about it?”. The result is a thorough collection of practices organizations can take to implement culture change to support a new ethos. Rather than a prescriptive “how to model”, the study encompasses a portfolio approach, identifying and categorizing organizational culture change practices.

The model emerging from this literature review is a useful handle for considering different approaches to culture change and ensuring that goal matches practice. The model spans practices across four quadrants: Practices that foster commitment incorporate informal approaches to shaping organizational values and fulfill on current sustainability initiatives. Practices that clarify expectations build on fulfilling current sustainability initiatives with formal practices that establish rules and procedures. Practices that install capacity for change go beyond rules and procedures to encourage innovation, moving the organization towards sustainability. Practices that build momentum for change engage innovation and tap into informal approaches to affecting values and behaviours. This is not a prescriptive process but a reinforcing wheel of possible activities to consider in engaging the whole organization towards deepening its commitment to sustainability.

A weak link in this study, I feel, is the definition used to describe a culture of sustainability. If we are looking at how to get there and how other organizations are going about it, it would be important to include in our catchment, those organizations that fulfill our goal. The definition used in the study is: “a culture of sustainability is one in which organizational members hold shared assumptions and beliefs about the importance of balancing economic efficiency and social equity and environmental accountability”. This seems a little vague and hard to measure. By the study’s own model, that is only a quarter of the picture. Using the model, a culture of sustainability should be one that holds shared values, adopts clear policies, fulfills on existing commitments and is actively adopting innovative new processes to balance economic efficiency, social equity and environmental accountability.

Another consideration: How is change for sustainability different from any other change – or is it? As change towards sustainability is relatively new, and therefore sparsely documented, the study draws from literature assessing other types of organization-wide ethos change (safety and ethics). However, the study describes two ways in which a sustainability culture change is different from other types of organizational culture change. First, this change must be society-wide. Drivers for sustainability can be external to the organization and therefore may not be seen, at least initially, as having inherent value to the organization. Second, achieving sustainability may involve paradigm-breaking business models and navigation into unchartered territory.

Personally, I think we are only at the very beginning of the journey. And that journey will involve a paradigm change that right now is difficult to imagine, given that we live and think within a non-sustainable paradigm right now. We can only start with where we are now, of course, but we should keep in mind as we travel this journey, that we are beating the path while we walk it.

The other day I read in the newspaper about the booming business of creativity. Creativity gurus having a field day with people striving to exercise their imagination muscles with workshops devoted to it. I cringed as I read about people walking around with little dots on their foreheads trying to find their “group”, or having to do something silly to get their meal at lunch time. Its stuff like that gives training workshops a bad name.

It reminded me of a creativity workshop I attended years ago, where I found myself, before even greeting anyone, being asked to do a free-form dance expression of myself. I did it, we all did. It was excruciatingly uncomfortable. And I felt myself about as far away from feeling creative as I ever have – it was more like being straight-jacketed in a role I was supposed to play.

Far from getting closer to creativity, this sort of thing sets up a new group norm to confirm to. The norm is a powerful unspoken group agreement that, despite the discomfort it may cause because of its deviation from what is acceptable outside the workshop, will cause people to behave in a way that is similar to others. Of course some people may be having the time of their lives, some may be feeling playful, others going along with it. But how many, when they got back to their lives, to their work, were able to apply that experience in any practical way? Or were more creative in their approach to things? Or could better solve problems or find solutions they were looking for? How many of the participants, I wonder, experienced creativity boot-camp hangover?

For creativity is not the same as play, not the same as being silly and outrageous. It may or may not include these ingredients. It does, however include discipline, mastery of a practice area and developing habits conducive to it. Creativity also comes in many mediums. Creativity exists in various art forms, in approaches to life, in business, in science. The creativity of a scientist may be a flash of insight that arrives after years of study and experimentation, like the dream August Kekule had in 1865 that lead to his correct model of the molecular formation of Benzene.

No matter what the field, there is an opportunity to improve upon it in some way. Creativity is the trying things out phase and innovation is the result of creative experimentation. Let’s say you have a practice area – an area of expertise, a profession or a hobby that you have devoted some time to developing ability in. You have developed mastery and upon that platform you can try out and ultimately incorporate new ways of thinking or acting. Or let’s say you are a manager in an organization and you need the many perspectives of your team to find a new way to achieve results and save resources. You can engage your team in creative thinking and trying new things until you find an innovation that fits.

Creativity involves a change of perception to uncollar the mind from the routine. The route to changing perceptions (thinking “out of the box”) is manifold and play is just one of many routes to that end.

My friend Jen is running as a candidate in the federal election in Canada. She told me this story, which I immediately identified as a great example of Catalyst Thinking.

A few days before the election was announced, Jen was at an outside event (not related to the election) on Parliament Hill. At the end of the event, as she was leaving, she tripped down the stairs. And landed on her face. She struggled up, dazed and hurt with a part of her wanting to cry and feel sorry for herself. Instead she did something else – and this is the brilliance of Catalyst Thinking on a personal scale.

Her internal voice was saying “What does this mean? How could I fall on my face on the eve of the election, at Parliament Hill of all places?” Now there are a whole lot of possible responses to this question – and the answer speaks volumes about a person’s ability to create his or her own meaning. One possible answer would be “This is an omen – I will do badly in the election” or “I’m not supposed to be here” or “This election is going to hurt me”. There are all kinds of possible negative reactions.

Instead this is what Jen said to herself: “OK, there goes my ego! For the next 29 days I will put my ego aside, as it won’t serve me during this time. It will be there for me to pick up again after the election.”

This is brilliant! She was able to take an event, one that seemed loaded with symbolism for her, and create meaning that served her, that would propel her towards her goal.

We create our own reality, in part by assigning meaning to the world we live in. We can choose to define events in ways that are empowering and affirming – or which limit us and make us fearful and small. Many of us, however, are completely unaware of this choice and allow events to define themselves through the accumulated voices from our childhoods, our current relationships and the media. If we mistakenly take an attitude of passive acceptance we may end up with negative self-sabotaging interpretations of our lives.

We have enormous power to make meaning in our lives. The meaning we make determines our behaviour, our confidence, our sense of self worth, our self esteem. Consider this: the meaning of what happens is the meaning you give to it.

Just after posting in February about the Middle East, my site got hacked. My posts all disappeared and in its place was a graphic. I was left with a message, only I can’t read it. (If you can read Arabic, please leave me a comment and translate it for me!)

My mind immediately started creating reasons for the hack. A wildly irrational one was that I’d posted something about Egypt and some hacker took offense and attacked my site (hence the Arabic message). This is quite unlikely because my site isn’t so visible or well trafficked that it would be found by irate hackers, intent on censoring random messages about Egypt.

This is a classic example of how the mind works to create a story with bits of incomplete data. We have an innate need to make sense of things. Rather than stay in the place of “I don’t know” we almost can’t help inventing a reason for the bits of data we collect or even notice.

The problem with this is that it gets us into trouble. First, the story we create puts us in a state of not being very receptive to other data which might change the story. We get attached to the story we invent because it makes us feel less defenceless against the unknown. Letting go and opening to new information, holding the space for ambiguity, isn’t in our nature.

The other, more serious thing that happens is that we come to believe the story. We may even forget that it is a story and confuse it with reality. In this case we have travelled a long way from random, confusing data to interpretation of reality. This is all framed by a mental model that we may or may not be aware of. The example of my website hack invented story is a simple one and easy to unpack. My mental model includes sparse data on the Arabic world so I put the two events (my post and the hack) in the same mental model bin.

In the case of my hacked site, a more logical explanation is that I installed a supposed hack-proofing plug-in. Perhaps it really provided access to the site so it could be hacked? But that is just another story I invented. I don’t know how or why it happened.