We’re getting soaked with a prime October Pineapple Express, an atmospheric river that is delivering wind and rain from down near Hawaii all the way to our coast, filling the streams, dusting the mountains with snow and welcoming the salmon home. I absolutely love this weather and this morning I’m sitting in my favourite cafe, window wide open and the full force of the rain falling on the pier and the sea. Ahhh.
Complexity delivers mind-blowing things all the time. In addition to, well, everything, the evolution of the universe has created both more entropy and more forms of order. When Margaret Wheatley wrote “Leadership and the New Science” she implored us to move on from the Newtonian model of the universe – linear, knowable, predictable – to embrace the quantum physics and living systems approaches that were the philosophical legacy of the 20th century. Using these big frames of how scientists understand reality as stories and metaphors for the systems that operate all around us is an all consuming cultural project as we seek to make sense of realities. In this video from Quanta Magazine, Robert Hazan and Michael Wong discuss their theory of information as they try to explain how evolution seeks to fill every possibility space that it creates. There are multiple stories that flow from this work including the idea that functional information is what powers evolution and increases the number of ways things can be organized, and that in turn increases resourcefulness and possibility. This flows from diversity and capacity and from life working to fill every affordance it encounters. I picture a vine probing every crack in a wall and finding new pathways to get a foothold, new creatures to evolve, new ways to combine the basic building blocks of the universe, even as it all happens with a stability of constrained possibility. Anyway, watch the video.
The most complex things I have ever encountered are my own toddlers. If you have parented a toddler, Tim Urban has your back. He perfectly describes the utter mystification of parenting a two year old. Read it in the rain.
Have s good weekend. Go Blue Jays.
Some politicians in BC are stirring up some pretty alarming notions about a false threat to private property stemming from a recent Court decision affirming the Cowichan Tribes’ Aboriginal title. As a person involved in the field for decades, it’s terrible to watch the lies and racism spread fear to people that are under no threat at all. Horribly irresponsible politicians who know better are smirking through their faux serious stances as they watch the chaos they are sowing spread across the land. If doing your job is predicated on messing stuff up so much that you benefit from the destruction leaving everyone else to clean it up, then I might say your social worth is near zero. Stand down. For more, read this thread on Bluesky which includes a link to Khelsilem’s excellent post on the situation.
Joy! A new song from Jane Siberry. And double joy for me as we are going to see her in Ottawa in a couple of weeks. This song, like much of her music, is an antidote to the above foolishness.
Not so joy. Tottenham’s performance in the Champions League last night against Monaco. If it hadn’t been for Vicario’s stunning performance in net, with a handful of point blank reaction stops, we would have lost 4-0 instead of limping out of there with a 0-0 draw. Spurs’ finishing was woeful, and despite the best efforts of Kudus and Odobert to take on defenders and create some space, shots were ballooned wide, crosses were hopeful reminders of a bygone era (I’m looking at you Pedro Porro) and Monaco’s press forced several turnovers. Although Spurs is still undefeated in the competition, 5 points from three games is only good enough for 15th, towards the bottom of the seeded playoff places. We have a few big chances to make up for lost wins, but in reality, Monaco, with a slew of injuries and poor form, should have been a better performance. Football doesn’t always cure the world’s ills.
The above is a photo of a great campfire that happened on Saturday night in the forest by a lake in Eastern Ontario. You had to be there. But if you want to do an interesting exercise, take a moment before reading on and make a list of things that you should do to create a great campfire experience.
I’m working away writing a book on dialogic containers and reflecting on the remarkable phenomenon of stability in the midst of change. I remember years ago Dave Snowden sharing a pithy description of the the difference between robust and resilient structures. Using the examples of a sea wall and a salt marsh, he says, essentially, that a robust system is one that survives by not being changed and a resilient system is one that survives by being changed. That description has always stuck with me and as I look at the nature of dialogic containers, ephemeral spaces which produce meaning between people, it’s interesting to me to think about what contributes to their relative stability in the face of change.
This was brought home to me again today while listening to a talk by Gil Fronsdel on the Buddhist practice of “Right View,” (he calls is “Wholesome View”) the first discipline of the Noble Eightfold Path. Fronsdel uses the example of standing in a rive to discuss what mental and spiritual stability looks like, even as a current flow all around you, carry the river over a waterfall. The way to address your fear of floating over a waterfall is to stand up and take a stable stance:
I’ve been in somewhat shallow rivers, maybe that the river was up to my mid?thigh, and I could lay down flat on the surface of the river, and it had a nice current that carried me beautifully down the river.And it was kind of fun and nice to be floating along. It feels really nice until you realize that the river is going right over a waterfall, a big waterfall. So then it’s not so nice anymore.
And so… you turn around, try to swim upstream, but…the river is pulling you down the stream faster than you can swim up. The waterfall is coming, you can hear the roar. And so all you have to do, though, is stand up in the river. Because it’s shallow… it’s just courage, it’s only up to your mid?thigh. And if you stand there, then the current of the river continues. It flows right by you. But you’re still.
You’re not separated from the current, but now you’re free of the current because you have the stability, the strength of standing there, and you’re far from any danger of going over the waterfall. It’s relatively easy now to walk to the shore or walk up river. And so we get swept away sometimes by our thoughts, swept away by our emotions, swept away by the world and concerns that are going on. And we don’t realize how much we’re being carried along, swept away by the current of this momentum of thoughts, momentum of desires, momentum of aversion. We don’t even see the waterfalls that’s going to take us over sometimes. But what mindfulness teaches us is that we could always have the ability to stand up in the current and kind of wake up and kind of be stable and strong.
In dialogue, containers offer a kind of stability to hold emotions and thoughts. Human beings thrive when there is a container in which we can fully participate, be fully human, and be. And they require us to have that overview of process and context, to see that we are in something that is meaningful, or not, and to notice what is contributing to that state of affairs. From there, we might even be able to catch ourselves and offering a slight shift, a slight move, a slight contribution that might catalyze more or less stability. It is a subtle art.
The way a conversation unfolds around a table and deepens and becomes sticky – you don;t want to leave it – is a kind of stability. When it breaks it’s hard to get it back again, and nif you weren’t a part of it “you had to be there” to understand what it is like. Other forms of stability for dialogue are held through rigid physical or protocol constraints so that deliberative chambers like court rooms and legislatures are designed for rational, non-emotional discourse. When feelings erupt in those chambers, the integrity of container fails, and chaos ensues, because those who are responsible for this spaces have no way to cope with the events of the moment but to shut it all down (don’t perform a haka in the New Zealand Parliament!). That can be a form of liberation, but in the end some form of stable container needs to arise in order for human relationships and conversations to unfold. Places like Parliaments and court rooms are structured to assert a particular kind of power relationship, so the physical and procedural stability of those containers is designed to re-establish that state of affairs “once every one has calmed down” and the dour business at hand can be considered again in the desired modality of the system, in these cases, predicated on notions of reason and civility.
But even in highly structured and constrained places, dialogic containers are emergent. You cannot force meaningful dialogue. You can only set some initial conditions and monitor what unfolds. Even though a room may have robust physical restrictions, adjustments to the constraints of the container can still offer a chance at something meaningful happening. I bristle from the idea that a dialogue facilitator’s role is “to create and hold the container.” I prefer instead to think of that role as one of using constraints to increase the probability that a a dialogic container will emerge. The way I have learned to practice facilitation is to be a witness to the capacity of a group to self-organize and manage itself with minimal intervention from a “facilitator.” Instead we work hard to design initial conditions, and pay attention to threshold practices like beginnings and endings to invite human beings into a place in which meaningful work gets done.
For my whole career I’ve been consumed with the mystery of the emergence and stability of dialogic containers, how something so ephemeral can create deeply meaningful experiences, and how we might find the ways to work with containers – through constraints of connection, exchange, attractors and boundaries – to increase the chances for powerful dialogue and meaning making. Everywhere I look, there are examples and lessons to be learned about this.
So, back to that campfire that is pictured above. If you took the time to make the list, think about whether that list will guarantee a great campfire every single time, from the get go. If not, what do you think you will have to do to make that more likely to happen? The answer to that question might be a good way to think about your approach to facilitation.
Auroras seen last month above the Hecate Strait from Tllaal, Haida Gwaii.
There is so much going on in the darkening northern night sky these days. The chances to see auroras in unusual places are still very high as we come off the peak of the sun’s 11 year cycle of activity. And there are all kinds of other phenomena above and around us including comets, and SARs. This is when having the Spaceweather App is so great, and why a regular check of the Spaceweather.com website will do you good.
Also up there are the feverish dreams of the hyper inflated egos of tech and finance bros who care only about implementing their one big idea and damn the consequences. Reflecting sunlight back to earth at night to power solar panels without any consideration for how life on earth depends on darkness is just one more example of why this might might be the darkest of ages wrapped in a naive, pollyanish techno optimism aimed at just making money.
So let’s slow down and take Tochi Onyebuchi’s advice: move slow and make things. Enjoy the darkness. Create beautiful things using time and effort. Disconnect from the tools that substitute for mentorship and genuine support. Enjoy everything space offers.
My work with organizations these days seems to start from Open Space, scenario planning or polarities. Open Space allows us to source the most pressing issues of the moment and do something about them. Scenario planning invites us to think about the future in a bunch of different plausible ways, examining who we might be as the macro context evolves around us. And polarities invite us to engage with the paradoxes that often underscore conflict and render us disempowered. Peter Levine – to whom I often link these days – has a great post on the polarities part of this. He is using polarities to create constrained design processes for educators who are teaching civics. Worth a read
Adrian Segar is always an enthusiastic light and advocate for participatory gatherings. He’s been at an industry conference this week and blogging about some really great people and thoughtful ideas about the future pf participation in conferencing. This post and its rabbit hole of links, fills me up.
Such as this one, a summary of the Freeman Report that measures conference experiences. It talks about how the conference industry’s assumption that performance is the peak has died on the floor. Participants want meaningful connections, either facilitated or by chance. They want to share what they have experienced in short bursts of content. It’s a hyper-individualized approach to gathering, but it does meant that arguing for participation in gathering design has a leg to stand on.
Experience is everything I think. Simon Goland has a marvellous post up that charts his own long journey of building more deeply experiential containers for his coaching practice. Our lives are lived in bodies that live in the world. Good to remember that.