I am in Ottawa with Caitlin to do a little work and visit the place we lived from three years back in the early 1990s when we graduated and started our life together. This morning I find myself in a cafe on the edge of the Byward market, deeper into the historic French and Catholic neighbourhood boards the north end of Dalhousie Street. For all of it’s growth, Ottawa remains remarkably unchanged over the past 30+ years, especially in the downtown core which is partially protected by the work of the National Capital Commission and full of important and historical buildings. As a result even the neighbourhoods we lived in remain familiar and intact – the Golden Triangle and Sandy Hill. The apartment and duplex we lived in are still there, and in fact last night, out on a late walk home from a movie, we stopped in front of our old place on Frank Street and one of the residents asked what we were looking at. When we told him, he gave us a tour inside the building. Nothing had changed. Memories came flooding back.
I love that about visiting physical places in which I have lived. The same happened when I took my son to England in April and showed him the place where I lived as a pre-teen in the three years our family spent there. Things change, but also they don’t, and walking through places of forgotten memory wakes up deep FEELINGS, not just stories. I can tell you about the time we were introduced to chèvre at the Ritz on Elgin, or the nights we spent at the Bytown theatre, or the potato skins we ate at the Royal Oak, but visiting these places (or the locations of these places) evokes a feeling that is indescribable. It put me in mind of Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia, which, I discovered this morning, had its seminal scene filmed in the Bagno Vignoni, which I visited in May without making the connection. Funny what we miss.
It’s a thin time, All Souls Day. I can feel them here in the cold wind coming down the valley, the fall colours on the Gatineau Hills and the smell of leaf mold on the breeze. I love it.
Speaking of films, last night we ventured to Landsdowne Park, a place which HAS changed a lot since we lived here. It is the hoe of the TD Place stadium which hosts both of Ottawa’s professional soccer teams and its Canadian football team as well as the arena where the OHL Ottawa 67s play. A whole entertainment district has spring up around the stadia, and we headed there to watch Aziz Ansari’s new movie, Good Fortune, and then catch the end of game 6 of the World Series, which the Blue Jays lost 3-1 after a bizarre ninth inning in which Barger’s ground rule double due to a ball lodged perfectly in the left centre field wall prevented the Blue Jays from tying the game.
About that movie though. It’s not very good. Ansari plays a guy who supposedly makes documentaries, but who is working gig jobs in LA and living in his car. It’s a comedy, which is such a weird take for the struggle that lies just out of view of the film. Due to the errant actions of a guardian angel acting above his pay grade (Keanu Reeves), he ends up switching places with a tech bro (Seth Rogan). Ansari’s character gets comfortable and tries too steal that life. The angel says he can only switch back if he can find meaning and worth in his life as a poor homeless person. Ansari fakes memory loss after an accident and won’t give the tech bro his life back. Why would he?
Except, inexplicably, he does. I’m going to spoil it here, although you can see the ending coming a mile away, but Ansari eventually relents, the tech bro minimally atones for his experience by paying his gig drivers more, but the union drive at the hardware store fails again and everyone resolves to keep working to change the conditions over which they have no control. It’s actually pretty horrifying. The privileged white guy gets his fortune back, the brown guy ends up poor again but with a renewed sense of purpose and with his true love, a struggling colleague who tries unsuccessfully to organize her workplace, and the angel gets his wings back. A bunch of gig workers quite their jobs, but it’s not clear to me how they then make ends meet after walking out.
Tellingly at the end of the movie, Ansari’s character puts an ad on Craigslist asking for folks to take part in a documentary about the LA underclass and gig working. I walked out of the theatre wondering why Ansari chose to write a lighthearted comedy about these people rather than ACTUALLY MAKE THAT DOCUMENTARY. It smacked of a film made by people who heard about how bad stuff was from their delivery drivers and baristas, but no one involved has lived experience of this life and it shows.
Miss this one and go re-watch Tangerine instead.
Soon we will know if we are alone. A beautiful “Occasional Paper” from Doug Muir published at Crooked Timber about where we are in relation to the search for life on other planets. I love this description of the current moment:
What that means is that now, right now, we’re in a very special time. It’s a time when we’re actively looking for life out there — The Search is underway — but the question is still open.
For all of human history until the 1990s we couldn’t do anything but speculate. And at some point in the future — I suspect around 2100, but it could be 2150 or 2200 or 1500, whatever — we’ll know, or anyway we’ll be pretty sure we know. Right now is the only time in history when we’re able to actually Look, but we haven’t yet Found. This brief period is epistemologically unique. We are living through the short-lived Age Of The Search. And when it’s over, one way or another, it will be over forever.
I’ve been reading through Jen Briselli’s work both as an inspiration and a fresh take on much that I already know about what we both seem to love about complexity. One of the pieces that I’d recommend to others is this one on Stases Theory, a classical rhetorical technique for working with difference. Jen explores how difference works in complexity and offers these thoughts before moving in to a method and then a grounding in many streams of thinking from communication theory to complexity.
…disagreements are less like rungs on a ladder to be climbed stasis by stasis, and more like landscapes of unresolved questions and conflicting perspectives, overlapping and interconnected.
Crucially, when people are operating at different stases it isn’t always marked by overt disagreement or interpersonal conflict. Often, we don’t even realize we’re making sense of an issue differently, working at different stases, until we’re prompted to consider it. So, the question really isn’t “Where are we in the sequence?” as much as “Where is the crux of meaning making for each of us right now?”
Sometimes we don’t need to agree on the facts first, as long as we can still coordinate action around shared policies. Other times, coherence and collaboration absolutely depend on established facts and shared definitions before implications can be explored or decisions can be made. Knowing the difference isn’t just a matter for rhetoricians and laywers, but also one of collective diagnosis for teams trying to make complex decisions and take action together. It helps groups locate the friction so they can orient toward and navigate through it. In some ways, a stasis is less a blockage than a beacon — a signal where attention and understanding are most needed, and will provide the most leverage.
Oh the sports. I’ve been so busy lately, and travelling and working odd hours, that I haven’t had time to watch too many games. Nevertheless, I’ve jumped on the Blue Jays bandwagon for this World Series and, like much of Canada, become entranced with these loveable underdogs who continue their quest to become the absolute archetype of what can be accomplished with friendship, commitment to one another, and support. If they win the World Series tonight, you will never shut me up about how the intangibles are as crucial to quality work as the tangibles are. You can’t shut me up about that anyway.
It seems like the opposite also proves the case with the other two teams I devote much of my winter’s attention too. Both Tottenham Hotspur and the Toronto Maple Leafs are mailing it in at the moment, suffering periods of perplexing performance. Spurs are at least inconsistent, with wins like last weekend’s 3-0 v Everton coming at the same time as they get bundled from the League Cup or drop points in an anemic game against Monaco in the Champions League. They are also suffering an injury crisis again. The fact that the Premier League is so weird this season means that we currently sit third on 17 points, but if we lose to Chelsea tomorrow and Brentford beat Palace, the 11th place team can overtake us in one afternoon.
As for the Leafs, “discombobulated” is the word of the moment. They must be happy that the Jays are doing so well, because the Toronto fan base is ruthless when their team is underperforming. Heads will not yet roll at the Scotiabank Arena, but they are being feverishly scratched.
I stumbled on Jen Briselli’s work the other day. She’s a fantastic writer and communicator, distilling the complexity work that we both know and love and making it approachable and understandable to others. She asks great questions, and is introducing me to approaches and tools that are new and interesting and great process and facilitation debriefs to reflect on her practice.
And her Letter to a Young Systems Thinker speaks to me, drawing from poets, and artists and filmmakers and scientists to provide a really lovely set of thoughtfully articulated practices that are excellent advice for all of us. To wit:
Bruising
Some parts of a system only speak on impact: when you touch it, bump into it, crash through it. You can’t learn everything from a map. You can still trip over the rocks at your feet.
Deep knowing emerges when action and reflection collide, when ideas get tested against lived complexity, and when our models fall apart just enough to let something else poke through.
Consider this a form of gnosis: the type of knowing that arises not from detached observation, but from our own direct, lived experience. Unlike abstract knowledge (episteme) or belief (doxa), gnosis is intimate, situated, and relational.
The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot. — Werner Herzog
To know a system through gnosis is to enter the dialogue through participation and give credibility to intuition. It requires that we feel our way forward, and let our assumptions be reshaped in real time. This kind of knowing cannot be abstracted or outsourced. It is slow, iterative, and deeply personal. And it changes not just what we know, but how we identify the future outcomes we want to amplify.
Nice to meet you Jen.
Cedric Jamet and I together at the Art of Hosting Reimagining Education gathering a couple of weeks ago.
The other week we were sitting in the Queen’s University Biological Station in Elgin Ontario, opening our third annual Art of Hosting on Reimagining Education. Cedric Jamet was teaching about the chaordic path, the term we use for the leadership path that works with a dance of chaos and order. The chaordic space is the space of self-organization, where structure and form creates the conditions for otherwise chaotic spaces to produce direction, coherence, energy and engagement without top down control. It is a way of conceptualizing self-organization in groups, which is the kind of facilitation practice I specialize in.
The idea of self-organization, what it is, how it arises, what practices support it is been the single most important organizing question of my professional career. As Cedric put it in Elgin, this is what the world needs, to be hosted so that people can self-organize to improve their conditions, make beautiful and sustainable things and sustain good work with strong relationships. When we create the conditions that enable self-organization, we are creating places of “safe uncertainty” and relational connectivity. We create what I call “dialogic containers” which become places of meaning and sustainable connection. Strong dialogic containers can hold difference and conflict without rendering the relational field. They can provide spaces for meaning and depth and purpose. Sustained over time they can become “life-giving contexts.” As a facilitator and in my work leading and supporting leaders, everything we do points in this direction.
Over the past 20 years this inquiry has led me into two major areas of practice. I have studied and worked deeply with the Art of Hosting and the field of participatory process design and facilitation. Based around the “Four Fold Practice” – presence, participation, hosting contribution, and co-creation – the Art of Hosting is a simple framework for a practice that, as Cedric said, helps us enable self-organization. This is a well-established field of facilitation practice and I work with facilitation methods that are found in the fields of dialogic organizational development, collaborative change management, and anthro-complexity including those contained in the seminal collection of large groups methods, and small scale Liberating Structures, as well as the suite of methods from Participatory Narrative Inquiry.
The other area of practice I have explored is complexity, in an effort to understand the conditions by which self-organization arises. This has led me through the various threads of complexity in human and living systems initially through the work of Senge, Wheatley, Scharmer who came out of the system thinking world with new metaphors, models and understandings about how things worked. From there I dove deep into anthro-complexity, championed primarily by Dave Snowden who work on ontologies is a significant contribution to this field as it helps leaders, facilitators and process designers make good choices about the way they participate and intervene in different situations. I also read deeply and learned with other complexity-focused theorists and process designers like Cynthia Kurtz, whose work on story is especially important, and Glenda Eoyang, whose work on complexity and whose suite of methods and approaches called Human Systems Dynamics is accessible, simple, and extremely effective for the most part in seeing and working with complexity.
The two most significant academic works I’ve published reflected these two streams as I have written about and explored the ideas of dialogic containers as the key structures which enable self-organization and meaning-making. In Hosting and Holding Containers, I talk about the concept of a dialogic container and use the four-fold practice to describe how to work with these phenomena. In “Hosting Dialogic Containers: a key to working in complexity” I talk about containers from a more complexity-informed perspective and discuss the role of constraints in designing and hosting containers. A subsequent paper, published only in Japanese is actually closer to my current thinking on the constraints framework that I use.
This morning I am sitting in an Open Space meeting while all around this place a small team of folks are busy engaging in conversations that are necessary for creating their future. These people are interested in pedagogy and learning design, and I was struck by the fact that Open Space was a new experience for almost every single one of them. But I can hear the snippets of conversation and see the energy and attention in the work that is happening, and I continue to be astonished at how powerful self-organization is, given the right kind of container for it. We have an urgent question that is a deep attractor. We have connections and exchanges that are already strong in the team and made stronger by the visioning conversations we had yesterday. And we have important boundaries, including a threshold that was crossed with a new Director, a beautiful space that is full or opportunity and a timeline for the work that is both bounded and generous. There is urgency but not emergency, still room for excitement creativity and energy.
I have done many hundreds of Open Space events, large and small, and each one has delighted me as I watch groups of people self-organize and take responsibility for the issues that matter to them. I remained astonished by the powerful and generative nature of a life-giving dialogic container that emerges from a few enabling constraints thoughtfully applied and held. And I remain grateful for the immense body of work that underlies this approach to human organizations and communities and all those friends and teachers who guided and taught me along the way.
Christina Baldwin, in a lovely post remembering her father’s death:
We often pray to our ancestors and call upon the angelic/invisible realms for help. We attune ourselves, like this favorite quote from Willa Cather (in Death Comes for the Archbishop): “Miracles seem to rest not so much upon healing power coming near us from afar, but on our perceptions being made finer so that our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there around us always.” We look for signals, for morphed presence. A bee that hovers, a raven that follows us, a light but discernible hand on the shoulder, a voice that calls out warning or blessing.
Thirty years ago tomorrow, Back in 1995, Quebecers nearly voted to leave Canada. Paul Wells was at the Montreal Gazette during those days and wrote a great piece for The Walrus about his experience covering the campaign.
This week I’m in Calgary where Albertans are facing two Constitutional issues. Yesterday the provincial government used the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Constitution to end a legal teacher’s strike and unilaterally impose a contract settlement on teachers in the Province. This clause, which is a weird piece of Canadian law, allows governments to temporarily suspend some Constitutionally protected Charter rights for a fixed period of time. It has been used recently for populist causes, to suspend the rights of children in Saskatchewan, to order education support workers off the picket lines in Ontario, to ban the wearing of religious symbols in public by Quebec public servants and, yesterday, to end a teacher’s strike in Alberta teachers. Ironically, it is often the supporters of these governments that advocate for the sanctity of the Charter of Rights.
The other Constitutional issue Alberta is facing is a problem of the Premier, Danielle Smiths’s own making. Populists are fond of courting outrage and a nascent spark of a separatist movement has been fanned into a smouldering pile of angry incoherence by the Premier and her government as she tries to hold on to folks at the far right of her base. In a very clever effort to upend this movement, Thomas Lukaszuk, tabled a petition request to create a “Forever Canada” referendum and he secured hundreds of thousands more signatures than the referendum law required. By law, that referendum would have to be held first, before any separatist referendum takes place. Strange things happen in Alberta above the waterline, but deep down folks are both focused on making their communities and province better and also a lot more thoughtful about how to do so. The outrageous soundbites we hear from political leaders are just not what everyone is always talking about. Those signals are important to heed.