Finished a lovely week with my brother and niece visiting from Ontario. We’ve been in a wicked heat wave here, with temperatures in the mid to high thirties and the humidity increasing every day. It’s still not Ontario muggy and the sea is lovely for swimming in, but in a place where air conditioning is less common and extreme heat is usually unplanned for, it’s been a lugubrious week for sure.
The smog from the city and some small traces of wildfire smoke filter the light so there is some ironic beauty in it all.
My friend Marcus Jenal published his latest weekly newsletter in which he muses over a few questions related to complexity, strategy and taking a stance. He doesn’t have a comments section enabled on his blog (hint! hint!) so I’m going to respond a bit to what he wrote here and we can have a conversation in this space.
Too often, I fall into the trap of questioning every new insight I have and asking myself if that insight goes deep enough. Every insight is still biased through my cultural coding, my upbringing, my context, etc. Yet by the very nature of being human we will never reach a place of ‘pure’ unbiased understanding. So we need to strike a balance between self-critical reflection and believing that we found some ground that is solid enough to step on and move forward.
It’s like the metaphor of crossing a river on foot. We make a careful step to check if the next stone is stable enough to step on or not. If it is, we make the step and then check which direction we can go from there. If we get stuck, we move a few steps back. But if we never trust the stability of the next stone, we will not move at all. And yes, sometimes we might fall into the water but that’s ok. We can pick ourselves up and start again.
This is one of the biggest blocks I see with folks who are new to complexity work. There is a tension – a polarity even – between needing to move and needing to know. I think that tension is generated by standard problems solving practices that begin with the Cynefin framework’s Ordered Systems formula of “SENSE – ANALYSE – RESPOND.” You start by gathering information you can about the system, have an expert analyse the data and tell you what to do, chart out a path forward and then execute. That is what most problem solving in business and organizational life looks like and it permeates design thinking and action practice.
When I’m teaching people to work in complexity, it’s good to use tools and metaphors that draw on their own experiences in the rest of their life. I am firmly of the belief that human beings are innate complexity workers but our organizational life squishes those capacities out of us, or relegates them to the sidelines of our non-work lives, to hobbies, games, parenting, gardening, cooking, art, and other activities of daily life. In places where we are safe to fail, we can try all kinds of things at our own pace and comfort. We are not paralysed by the fear that someone will yell at us for getting it wrong, or worse, we will be fired, demoted, or thought less of. So many organizations and leaders I work with are paralysed by fear. Ofet they figure out how to download that fear on to their teams and always have someone else to blame if things go wrong. That’s a lot of the work we do when trying to open up leadership practice.
“Why are we stuck?” ask many leaders. “How do you reward failure?” I ask in return. And thus begins the conversation.
These days I just point people to this EXCELLENT Liz and Mollie cartoon to illustrate this:
So yes. We need to act without information. We take up some, have a sense of where we want to go, and then move and the cycle begins.
That leads to the second part of Marcus’s post:
I am re-watching the two conversations between Nora Bateson and Dave Snowden on ‘When meaning looses its meaning’ (Session 1, Session 2) together with a group of friends who are both interested in Nora’s and Dave’s work. We are having fabulous discussions after watching bits of the conversations. While Nora and Dave try hard to agree with each other, of course they have their differences. And these differences are somehow reflected in my own thinking about how to be and act in the world, which I’m expressing in my weekly emails – particularly the dilemma of if/when/how to act. In very strongly simplified terms, Nora advocates for broad, open, purposeless spaces to make connections and relationships that will then sprout into change in whatever way, while Dave sees the possibility of catalysing certain attractors and shifting certain constraints in a more intentional / purposeful way so that new, more desirable things emerge (he calls this ‘nudging’ the system). While it is more obvious with Dave, both have an idea of how a more desirable world would look like: more people would accept that ecological and complexity thinking are better ways to engage with the world than industrial linear thinking. Both, Nora and Dave, take a stance, which allows them to become thought leaders.
It has been lovely watching Nora and Dave dance together and as Marcus rightly identifies, the differences, held in a generative tension, are the interesting bits. I think the tension about direction of travel that Marcus has seized on here is an important polarity to navigate in complexity work.
Direction of travel matters. Call it a moral compass, call it a shared purpose, a shared vision, or a sense of what is right and good, but INTENTION, as Alicia Juarerro will tell you, matters. It serves as an attractor for action and so if you are planning to move, you better be aware of your intention, especially if you think you are just hanging out in a purposeless space. In complexity, there is no space that is free from context. If I am just hanging around with a soft gaze waiting to explore something, that is not an empty space of thinking. My eyes and ears and heart are conditioned and constrained by my history. And that is why Nora’s ideas of “warm data,” as I understand them, are helpful. It helps to populate the purposeless space with enough diversity and possibility that it can be intentionally purposeless.
I learned that a long time ago when I was thinking about Bohmian dialogue in the context of alos developing my practices of invitation. Bohmian dialogue is intentionally open, and, as Harrison Owen once said, “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.” That is true and it is alos true that there is always intention in the invitation, and whoever comes has arrived there by virtue of the history of connections that led them to discovering and responding the the invitation. Spaces can be open, but they are never unbounded. Awareness of the boundary conditions is helpful for understanding what is possible and why what happened was “the only thing that could have.” Complex systems have history and that history matters.
So I think this difference that Marcus has found presents us with a nice space to manage within when we are working in complex systems. A range of openness of direction of travel from broad to narrow. At a certain point if you treat the direction of travel like a target you have drifted into the complicated domain in Cynefin, which is fine, if that is truly what you are doing. But targets are not the same as vectors and they inspire very different patterns of behaviour.
Oh and on Marcus’ last question…
PS: I’m not 100% sure what the difference is between ‘taking a stance’ and ‘taking a stand’. Even English native speakers could not really explain it to me consistently.
…I answered him by email saying essentially that a “taking a stance” is a position that you take to prepare for action, and you optimize your ability to engage well to whatever is coming. It’s preparing to move. “Taking a stand” is getting ready not to be moved, to dig in and resist whatever is coming. One could even say it’s another way of thinking about the resilient vs. robust form of dealing with change.
… i search for a form of reconciliation ecology … inventing, establishing and maintaining a new habitat designed for a diversity of living, working and playing … a place which possesses anima meaning breath, spirit and soul … at first, in the leaving, i imagined a radical break … on arrival have learned to accept a certain amount of conservation of the past needs preservation … perhaps even restoration … the challenge is to generate a creative coexistence between the old and new territories … to comprehend the mysteries of place a cultivation of morals & purpose are required … i consciously accept the self-organizing complexity of this odyssey …
… i once dreamed of a place for a vibrant exchange of active creation and researching ingenuity … my formative experiences in Wroclaw & Vienna helped grow roots in my beloved prairie … the dream was transformed in a beautiful way yet in time a restless disquiet emerged … even discontent & disconnect … rootlessly committed to this place accompanied with my dearest companion i wander the communities …
He is writing here on a reflection about moving to Korea. And his reflections prompted some reflections from me too, about what is essential to preserve, what we see, what choices we make.
Here in Canada there is an interesting phenomena of preserving “heritage” buildings for some level of posterity. It’s interesting to think about what “heritage” means, and whose heritage we are talking about. In the urban environment it usually refers to examples of historical architecture but, as is the case here in Vancouver, that is largely settler architecture from a certain time period, usually between 100 and 150 years ago. There is an underlying assumption that we should protect these buildings, which means really restricting their uses. There is an underlying assumption about what “heritage” means and whose heritage we are talking about.
Where I live, on a small island, there is a heritage group that works to protect structures and the character of the place dating back to the period of the early 1900-1960s. This is a period folks call “the Union SteamShip Company era” in which the Union SteamShip Company not only serviced the island, but owned a resort and delivered hundreds of tourists and cottagers on the summer to what was known as “The Happy Isle.” There are a few structures and an orchard preserved from that time including our magnificent library building and a number of cottages that were used by families and later by a vibrant community of hippies and squatters in the 1960 and 70’s before they were all finally evicted in the 1980s. Following the end of the USSC era, the island fell very quiet and was just a bit too far away for a regular commuter community. A few hundred people were left, working hard to preserve the school and the post office. Many of them were formerly residents of the now abandoned cottages and they were the ones that seeded what has become the most recent era of Bowen Island history that began with a concerted effort to save the island from rapacious growth and then bring in essential services and finally incorporate as a municipality, which happened in 1999.
How does heritage act as a mirror? What image does it return to me when I gaze into it? What parts of it are relevant to my life today?
There are no permanent Squamish villages here today, but there are some unmarked and unprotected architectural sites on the island. A few descendants of some of the original settler families still live here, but for most of us our “heritage” is really an experience of gazing into a past we were never a part of. It’s not a mirror of my personal history but it is a reminder of the layers of history upon which I am living and from which I derive my life. I have only been here 21 years. What I have done is lived atop the infrastructure and history that has preceded me in this place and that includes the outright theft of the land from the original owners who were sustained completely by this land and sea for more than 10,000 years, and the establishment and building of infrastructure by settlers to eek out a living which feels now like it may actually become too much for us to afford, being a small population of 4200 living in a serviced community that is about the same area as Vancouver, with pipes and systems that were haywired together 50 years ago.
So as a settler, it’s important to me that we acknowledge the historical Squamish presence and continued contested ownership of this island. They have never sold it, ceded it, given it away, lost it in a war or otherwise allowed another people to claim it. In that sense, the history of squatting here is pretty interesting!
In places I have travelled to and lived in like the UK and Estonia, heritage of the everyday is about the continued use of a place. In the UK as a kid I lived in a 400 year old cottage (pictured above) that had been added to and renovated at least four times, including the complete incorporation of the hayloft on the adjacent barn in the 1970s as a master bedroom. The structure just grew along the lot adding indoor bathrooms, a few extra bedrooms, a modern kitchen and a garden. In other places, like Estonia, where the medieval city in Tallinn is intact at 800 years old, every building is used and changed. Coffee shops punch holes through walls to expand their space, the apothecary still exists, but with modern technology in place, and the medieval feast hall is an overpriced tourist restaurant that operates within the bones of the old structure with up to date kitchen equipment.
Conservation is a question of morals and ethics. Here in Squamish territory, I think the restoration of Howe Sound’s natural environment is a powerful statement that shows that we have a choice in what we declare “heritage” and worth of conservation. There is a contested view that says that Howe Sound was an industrial area and should remain so, by building an LNG plant or a gravel quarry at the mouth of a critical salmon stream, for example. And there are those of us who feel like not everything should be preserved. The mine at Britannia Beach almost completely destroyed the ecosystems of this place and it took decades of citizen action with occasional government support (and complete neglect by the companies that were just allowed to pollute take the profits and leave) to restore healthy marine ecosystems here.
Conservation and preservation is first and foremost, as Raymon says, “is to generate a creative coexistence between the old and new territories … to comprehend the mysteries of place a cultivation of morals & purpose are required …” We have to answer questions about whether preserving is about stability of structure or continuation of use and by whom ein what way. These questions never leave us, and the choices we make reflect how we see who we are and who we will become, based on the history we choose to preserve or transform.
Lots of good stuff coming through the pipe lately. Here are some links for your attention:
AI is running our lives and we need to find ways to deal with it.
- A conversation with LamDa, an artificial intelligence, and the implications of this transcript. The stuff seems like science fiction, but so much of our lives are starting to be mediated through AI bots. We are heading for a reckoning with our ethics, and I’m not entirely sure that the folks with their hands on the technology levers of power are equipped for the job. Make philosophy and ethics a required part of STEM curricula? Please?
- Perhaps as an antidote, or a vision of what could be, Harold has a nice piece about managing in complexity and the need for what he brilliantly calls “permanent skills.”
- And because Harold is such a must-read much of the time, here’s another piece on how he navigated information wars and expertise during the first two years of the pandemic. Paying attention to signals and having well curated streams for receiving good information is very very difficult, and not something that most of us have the time and experience to do. And so we are preyed upon by single viewpoints that have a lock on our dopamine production, feeding confirmation bias and disconnection. Harold’s writing, as always, seeks to bring the most brilliant human capacity of sensemaking into this work.
Being a better facilitator
- Nadia and Corinne remind us of the power of invitation. I have blogged about this stuff for decades, but I never tire of reading simple,well thought out pieces on this. Share them with your clients and groups you are working with, because they help to spark the conversation that will lead to designing good group process.
- Beth Cougler Blom dusts off her preparation protocol for in person meetings and finds that it needs an upgrade. Useful to me as I have been quite slow to return to in person work, and I’m mostly okay with that. So that means I need to be really conscious when preparing space for in person meetings, and reports from the front line are welcome!
Geek out on some sports and complexity theory
- Some of the most exciting work to me in applied complexity is happening in the sports world. This is a truly OUTSTANDING twitter thread from Phillip O Callaghan charting hours worth of reading on nonlinear pedagogy and constraints led approaches to sport, which has implications for all the ways in which we teach complexity in complex settings. Honestly, this is a course syllabus.
- Here is a really good piece on how the former Australian cricketer Greg Chapelle managed his cognitive load and attention to enable himself to make decisions in a environment that required both hear and wide situational awareness. Fascinating discussion on how we find strategies for managing ourselves in novel cognitive environments, and how so much of the tools we need are already available to us, to be exapted from other parts of our evolutionary journey.
And I leave you with a lovely quote shared by Euan:
[People] go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
– St. Augustine
That’s probably enough for you to get stuck in for a few weeks.
This is a good twitter thread from Kay Whitlock:
There is an interesting set of narratives that underpins the populist project in North America. Wedge politics has always been about stoking fear in an unreal other (there is a campaign ad for a Black Republican running for Congress that shows him holding an AR-15 rifle and threatening to empty the clip at 5 “Democrats in white hoods” as Ku Klux Klan members run through his back yard. I’m obviously not linking to it, but there you go.)
The reason for this is that a wedge issue like abortion or gay rights or immigration is easy to paint with the brush of “someone is coming to get you” and it gets people out to the polls to pull a lever or vote against a policy proposal and also elect the ones who support the populist position. This is an old game, perfected in the early 2000s by Karl Rove in the US and aided by Big Data and polling analytics and now Facebook and twitter algorithms that can delivered hand crafted artisnal and bespoke fear, right to your eyes.
But any time there is a “boogy man” we know that the cipher itself is a screen for projection and what is interesting is that North American populists project a very interesting set of fears onto their boogeymen.
Consider:
- “Immigrants are invading”
- “Our way of life is under attack”
- “Your children are not safe”
- “The government will seize your property”
- “The elites are sexual predators”
- “They want to outlaw our religion.”
- “Your freedom of movement is being taken away”
- There is even talk on the extreme right of “white genocide”
Let’s be clear. These are projections and deliberately provocative statements. We see these sentiments in the populist right in both Canada and the United States and these fears are constantly stoked, providing a toxic breeding ground for draconian policy that, contrary to the calls for freedom, are beginning to issue draconian laws. I think they land with people, because they recognize that these statements mirror the realities of what colonial practice has been here. These statements are a deep and complicated truth about white supremacy culture that are used to deflect responsibility for colonization and direct them at “the other.”
Now North American culture has a very hard time coming nto terms with the broken treaties, genocide and theft of land that has enabled the countries of this hemisphere to be established and have allowed settler cultures in many places to amass tremendous wealth and prosperity. But every one of the wedge issue tropes above has been, or still is, colonial government policy in this place. In fact, just last week the Supreme Court of the United States issued a shocking decision on Tribal sovereignty.
We have to come to terms with colonization. Until we do, it will continue to infect our cultural veins with guilt fear and shame that will continue to drive a toxic mix of fascism and white supremacy in policy and in the civic sphere.
1 2