Corina Enache îs fast become one of my "must read" writers. Her perspective and reflective capacity as practitioner is inspiring. Her deep understanding of story and narrative and her wealth of experience gives her lots of material from which to generate beautiful essays. And her generous engagement with commentators and connections is exemplary.
Her latest post is about "making rules you are willing to be bound by" and has a number of gems. I encourage you to read the full thing, because among other things it will probably change your mind about pirates. But if you are a person who works with groups, this story will land with you:
…the alarm rings, and the anxiety arrives on top of me before my feet are on the floor. Did I account for everything in the design? Is there enough time for all the topics? Can I do a good job?
And then we are in the conference room and it is about to start, serious men in a serious room, a tidy little chess game, and Anansi is somewhere at the back of my mind smiling, and I hear myself say, before we begin I want to draw your attention to this chair. A red plush chair at the back with a small bell on it, and it had taken me some time to find one. I want one of you to be our disrupter for the day. Your only job is to watch us, and any time you feel something is missing, that the energy has gone, that we are too boring or too structured, or you just feel we need disrupting, go and sit in that chair and ring the bell, and all of us will stop whatever we are doing and look at it and change it.
My colleague Jen Williams and I decided that we were going to try this. But it requires this of the host:
I could not free those men, dear reader, I could not make them pirates, nobody has ever freed anybody. What I could do was write one new obligation into the room and put it where I could not reach it. A chair, a bell, a named role, and a rule with teeth, which is that when it rings we stop, agreed in advance and binding on all of us including me. I could have built a hundred other things into that room. I could have kept the disruption in my own hands where it was safe and deployed it when I judged the moment right, and I did not, because smuggled freedom belongs to the smuggler, and a disruption I kept in my own hands and deployed at the clever moment would have been one more thing I was doing to them. The bell was for somebody else to ring and I put it at the back of the room in a red chair and gave it away before the day started. The agenda I had worked on for a week, the timing I was anxious about at six that morning, the whole careful structure that was the only thing standing between me and a room full of serious men deciding I was a strange woman, all of it surrendered in advance to whoever felt like walking to the back of the room. Written into the agreements, it was theirs, and I was under it with them…
Then I stopped caring whether anyone rang it, because the point was that for one day the room contained a thing a person could be, someone who stands up in front of his superiors and rings it, and that whoever saw that done would know it was survivable.
That, dear reader, is really what is asked of us.
We don’t actually “host emergence.” We host interactions and work with constraints that change what is possible. In human systems, interpretation matters too: how people, including facilitators, make sense of what is happening changes what happens next.
A group’s capability is related to its internal differences. Work with those and all kinds of capabilities can be revealed.
Dave Snowden publishes a post today thick with some interesting brain research and some musing about how we might structure organizations along the lines of what we know about how brains work:
What would be different is an organisational design practice that treats cognitive profile distribution as an analogue substrate to maintain, not individual variation to manage toward a norm. It would assess tools, processes, and frameworks for their effect on that substrate — asking, in Clark’s terms, whether each is scaffolding or substituting, rather than measuring only their effect on output. It would recognise that anything enforcing cognitive convergence at scale- process environments, competency frameworks, uniform AI policy- is making a trade on behalf of the collective that the collective has not been asked to consent to, and may not be able to reverse.
I spent a few hours this morning reading about the Oxford Praxis Lab. I know of Rob Poynton who is the director of the Lab, and whose book, Everything’s An Offer was one of the seminal books I read 15-20 years ago as I was exploring improv and embodied exercises and the teaching and hosting practices that I was developing.
Praxis Lab is an interesting place where a number of the questions I have recently been in seem to have a good home, where they are watered and fed and well cared for.
Each of us are entangled in a series of systems – personal, familial, organisational, professional, societal and ecological – that are themselves interconnected. But the only point of view you have on any of those systems is your own – a point of view which has, built into it, a series of assumptions, values, beliefs, measures and metrics that you take for granted (if you even see them at all).
Grappling with such systems, seeking to understand them (so that you can disturb them in an intelligent way) requires you to look at yourself, in the context of that system. You have to understand how your own history, perspective, personality and so on, affect how you see and how you act.
This is not navel gazing. It is simply to recognise that we are all, always, in some measure, participant-observers. There is nowhere to stand that is neutral and no privileged or ‘correct’ level of analysis. Whichever perspective you adopt, it is always one of many.
Acknowledging that and learning from it means knowing yourself and your own predilections – which is also a valuable outcome in itself.
They are currently beginning a research project called “Pause Pairs” which I’m going to do with my friend Tenneson Woolf.
Following one of Rob’s links brought me to Nick Askew’s video page, which is another place to lose oneself in these questions and experiments. His collection includes a playlist of interviews with Complexity Facilitators as well as some interviews with my friend Ria Baeck.