Just a picture of the ordinary full moon I took a few years ago through my binoculars.
The moon will rise tonight, about the same time the sun sets, hence tonight is a full moon. This happens every 28 days or so. It will be a “supermoon” because about three or four times a year, the moon’s orbit carries it to a point where it’s closest point to Earth coincides with a full moon – as it will tonight – making this full moon appear a little bigger in the sky than the 9 or 10 other full moons. And it will be a “blue moon” because in this case, it is the third full moon in a calendar season that contains four full moons, which is one of the two definitions of a blue moon, the other being “the second full moon in a calendar month,” which this one isn’t.
Take away the calendar and here is what happens. The moon rises every day at different times an in different phases. Every time the moon orbits the earth it does so in a little wobble that carries it between about 405,000 and 363,000 kms from us. The solar seasons also happen every year, as the earth tilts on its axis and oscillates between the June and December solstices and the March and September equinoxes.
So that’s what is happening, but it’s only when we import meaning on to these different events are colliding at the same time that we end up with some mild excitement about a “rare blue supermoon.“
So first, what is rare about the moonrise tonight? Well, this particular seasonal blue moon, actually happens about every 18-24 months. The next one after tonight will occur on May 20, 2027.
Supermoons occur about 3 or 4 times a year. Super seasonal blue moons occur on average about every 10 years, but the next one will happen in March 2037. So what is physically happening is pretty rare, in terms of human lifetimes. But unless you knew all this it’s unlikely you will notice anything different or care.
The whole origin of the term “blue moon” is worth diving into because it’s a mix of colloquial expressions, etymology, misheard and misunderstood words, and superstition. It is in fact this history of meaning that makes tonight’s moon exciting. All your news feeds today will be full of articles, like this one you’re reading, explaining what is happening. You’ll also come across lots of other meaning making, especially in the realms of astrology and other meaning-making endeavours that project all kinds of singular and special effects on this moment, making it a special time. The search for causality never rests!
Try a little experiment today. Get really excited with people about the super blue moon and see what happens. See who cares and who doesn’t. See what the different responses are. Notice your own reactions to people who have different reactions to what you are telling them.
As I was reflecting on the extremely mild delirium around this rare blue supermoon, it reinforced once again how much human behaviour is influenced more by the meaning we make of what is happening rather than the events that are actually happening. Understanding how we make meaning of things is critical to understanding why we behave in certain ways. The physical events will all coincide right now as I am writing this, at 11:26 Pacific Time. As the moment came and went I noticed nothing different happening in myself. I can’t even see the moon right now because it is midday. The only effect this whole thing has had is to make me think enough about why our sensemaking frameworks have such power over us to make meaning of things that are otherwise run of the mill physical events in the world in which we live. So I wrote a blog pots.
Humans impart meaning constantly. To understand our individual and collective behaviours, we need to understand that meaning making part of us. And then we need to go have a look at the beautiful moon.
I was going through some old emails today and found one from 2020 from my friend Susan Phillips in Minneapolis who shared a really moving message about the closing of an important Youth Leadership Initiative (YLI) back then. It relates to how to end a container.
If you’ve been with me in real life you know that I like to end a gathering in a crisp and decisive way. I think it’s important to know when you are done, when the work is complete and when the next thing happens. So for years I have used a practice that I learned from Tim Merry and which he learned in Soweto, South Africa at the Soweto Mountain of Hope Project. This little ritual to end a time together uses three sets of three claps as little blessings. The first set is to clap for ourselves. The second set is to clap for our communities. The third set is to clap for our work in the world.
Susan introduced this practice to the YLI and when the program closed one of the participants, Nou, led the final claps, and she framed it this way:
“We clap on the inside for ourselves – may we always remember our worth, that we are more that what people say, that we are brilliant, that our voices are powerful, that we have wisdom regardless of our age and that we come from a strong line of ancestors. As we all graduate from YLI tonight, may we walk into the world with courage, confidence, knowing our worth and perseverance through hard times. The world isn’t always kind but know that no matter what happens, no matter where we go, we will always have friends here who believe in the fullness, not of who we were yesterday, but of who we are today and who we will become tomorrow. We clap on the inside to remind ourselves that change starts with us. Let us use our personal power to shine bright, to create, to lead, to heal; and vow never to let anyone take that away from us.
We clap in the middle to celebrate the community we have build here over the last 7 months; to acknowledge each of your leadership journeys, your commitments til the end and the contributions you have made this year and to remember the power of coming together across difference. We also clap in the middle to honor the people in our community who are fighting for justice; and to also commit ourselves as leaders to doing what we can to making our neighborhoods and cities a better place for everyone. We are the ones we have been waiting for y’all.
As we clap on the outside, may the universe hear our dreams, our cries and desires for change and justice. May our actions inspire people around us to listen deeply, fight harder and love more. Lastly, we clap on the outside to send our collective energy rippling throughout the world.”
It’s been four years since I got that email, but Nou, wherever you are, your actions continue to inspire me.
One of our TSS Rovers Women’s team players, Sofia Farremo, signing an autograph for a young fan while standing in our supporters section at a TSS Rovers game this summer. Supporter culture at our club is HSL.
About 20 years ago, I first met Dr. Mark R. Jones. It was either at The Practice of Peace gathering or one of the Evolutionary Salons called at the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island, Washington. At any rate, Mark was an interesting presence. He sat in silence for most of the time near the room entrance as a kind of gatekeeper, watching the threshold and seeing what happened there. He occasionally played classical guitar and offered insights and reflections to anyone who sat and talked with him.
At some point, I heard the story about his work. He was a senior corporate executive, working in technology and defence-related companies for most of his career. He was also a long-time Tibetan Buddhist practitioner. He once visited the Dalai Lama and was challenged by him to build a practice of compassion based on the idea that “people need to be seen, heard, and loved, in that order.”
Mark took that work and built an approach to compassionate communication based on that heuristic. He called the work “hizzle” based on how he pronounced the acronym of heard, seen, and loved: HSL. I remember being taken by his description of what happens when people aren’t heard, seen or loved. If they are not heard, they shout and raise their voices. If they are not seen, they make a scene so you notice them, or they engage in bullying and toxic power dynamics. If they are not loved, they play a toxic game of approach and avoid that, which creates and then sabotages relationships and connections.
Mark’s insight was that these behaviours were signs of suffering and that when HSL was missing, “mischief occurs.” In this practice, he connected suffering to fear and offered the antidotes to these behaviours with a very simple and powerful way to let folks know they are heard, seen or loved.
To really hear, see, or love others, Mark insists that we have a practice in which we hear, see and love ourselves and become familiar with all of the ways we personally express fear and suffering when our own HSL is thwarted. It’s a practice.
I’ve used this insight for most of my career in situations where folks are exhibiting these fear-based behaviours. It has been a really useful shortcut and reminder for my own practice.
I was reminded again of how powerful this set of insights is when my friend and colleague Ashley Cooper shared some work she is doing to bring this work into the context of supporting parents of children, something at which she is incredibly gifted.
Mark’s work isn’t that easy to find online. His company, Sunyata Group is where you can find him as he is leading teams in creating Beloved Community. His HSL approach has been adopted and modified by the Liberating Structures crew (I believe Henri Lipmanowicz and Ashley were both at the same gathering I was at when we met Mark and learned about his work). Years ago, Phil Cubeta wrote a bit about Mark’s work and included a workshop handout that Mark must have provided him at some point.
A detail from a surf board on display at the Nazare Surf Museum, Nazare, Portugal.
If you have been working with me over the past five years or so you will have heard me reference and use the work of Cynthia Kurtz in the work we are doing. Among other things Cynthia is the originator of NarraFirma, the software I most often use for narrative work on complex topics. She is the author of one of my favourite papers on Cynefin, The New Dynamics of Strategy which she wrote with Dave Snowden back in 2003. She wrote her own books on Working With Stories and Confluence a brilliant book about her own approach to working with complexity. Last month she posted some news about her current work and life. She is in the process of downloading her work into four different versions of Working with Stories, and thinking deeply about a transition in her life and work. I encourage to read her post.
Cynthia has been a key mentor in my own life and work, especially as the pandemic changed our approach from in person to online. Last year I took her practicum course on PNI which deepened my appreciation for the depth of these tools that she shares. NarraFirma in particular has been a godsend as a tool for me to work with my clients. Because it is open source and Cynthia and her husband Paul have their hands on the code, any updates or bugs I have experienced with the software get corrected right away.
So I thought I would take a moment to offer folks an introduction to her work and point you to the resources that she has shared. Cynthia is an incredibly deep and generous thinker and has made it her life’s work to provide accessible tools to people struggling with complex challenges because at the core of human community should be the delight in the way we work with our stories.
Her work on complexity
Cynthia began her work in the world as a biologist studying social behaviour in animals until an injury in the field prompted a career change. Already pre-disposed to curiosity about complexity and with some skills as a programmer, she teamed up with her husband Paul Fernout to write environmental simulation software to help people learn more about the natural world. Later, seeking more security, Paul took a contract job at IBM and showed Cynthia a job posting relating to organizational storytelling and she applied. Her skills as a researcher, and knowledge of social dynamics through her science background quickly became the foundation of her work.
Cynthia worked at IBM as the company was discovering complexity and the role of storytelling and her ideas found a rich ground alongside many other researchers and thinkers who were helping to explore and develop the field. The paper she wrote with Dave Snowden from this time, The New Dynamics of Strategy, starts with a deep dive into theory and why complexity challenges conventional forms of decision making. It then goes on to describe the Cynefin framework in detail and discusses how to use it with a series of practices and applications. Together this represents a pretty comprehensive foundation for understanding the role of Cynefin and the methods for using it when it comes to strategy and decision making. The paper itself contains Cynthia’s ideas on control and connection which are key aspects of her own sense making framework
Although her work is deeply informed by theory, it wasn’t until 2021 that she finally published a book that describes her approach to understanding complexity, or more precisely, the relations between self-organization and intentional organization. The book is called Confluence and it describes a set of tools and approaches for thinking about the intersection of organizational planning in a self-organizing world. True to form, it is not just a theory book, but a book of well-documented thinking tools illustrated by stories and knowledge gleaned from a wide swath of human experience. It’s a delicious and lingering read. It cuts close to the bone. The last section addressing conspiracy theories might be one of those things that saves democracy. (It also helpfully addresses jargon and complexity theory in an incredibly thought provoking way!)
While it took her a long time write Confluence, she has been a productive and generous blogger for decades and her thoughts, ideas, ramblings and clear gems of wisdom are collected at her blog, Story Colored Glasses.
Working with stories
Cynthia’s focus in the world has been consistently on the role of stories and narrative and so her work has been driven towards the deeply practical. She has created, co-created or piloted dozens of methods for working with stories in groups, many of which are standard practice in our field now. Her magnum opus is Working with Stories in your community or organization and is a comprehensive introduction to her own research method, Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI). Working With Stories (WWS) has a whole website devoted to this book and some of her latest iterations, which include a simplified version and an advanced version, a collection of story forms and will soon also include the fourth edition, which she is currently preparing.
WWS is a constant companion on my desk and there is a lifetime of learning in this book. I’m astounded at Cynthia’s capacity to document her own process and her knowledge and present it in accessible ways. That isn’t to say that the material isn’t dense and rich. This approach is not simple to understand or work with until you have unschooled yourself a bit in research methods, epistemology and facilitation. But as a body of work it is immensely transformative for research, engagement and strategy.
WWS is a worthy investment of time and money and is a useful guide to anybody seriously working with story, social patterns and change making in complex settings.
Software for working with stories
Cynthia’s interest in uncovering patterns and connection in stories along with her training in statistics and her experience in programming led her to create the early programming behind Sensemaker Explorer while she was at Cognitive Edge. Later she and Paul Fernout created their own software for gathering stories and discovering patterns. Eventually their efforts became NarraFirma, an open source software package that is really a project management tool. NarraFirma includes hundreds of screens and tools to plan and carry out a PNI project, including the ability to create story gathering surveys, perform catalysis on the results, prepare materials for sense making sessions, and reflect on and report on projects. One of the best features of NarraFirma is the context specific help screens that enable users to not only navigate the software but learn about the practice as they are doing so. I’ve never seen anything quite like NarraFirma.
Although the software is free to use and requires only a WordPress site to install as a plug in (my preferred option) it takes several days to really learn how to use properly and years of experience to use well. When you use NarraFirma you are not just building a survey tool for story collection, but you are immersing yourself in Participatory Narrative Inquiry. I have done probably thirty or more projects, from one time story collections for strategic planning or engagement around complex issues like opioid use and crisis response to a four year long inquiry into changing workplace culture. Every time I dive in I learn more about how to work with this approach. The software not only helps me run my project, it makes me a better practitioner as I’m doing so.
I’m immensely grateful to Cynthia for putting her work out in the world and I highly recommend anyone interested in this field explore her thinking, offering and tools.
I was in a call with a colleague yesterday and we were discussing Founder’s Syndrome. Over the years, it’s one of the more persistent patterns I have seen in non-profits and social enterprises. There are a lot of similar aspects to this pattern, and it generally unfolds like this:
A person or small group of people start something. Usually, they come from the front line and have experience working directly with people, delivering services, restoring landscapes, organizing campaigns, etc. With a little bit of success, these folks start thinking about growing their operations and stabilizing them over time. This means bringing in staff, board members, and funders who believe in them and want to support the vision. Some staff may be the same kind of front-line folks that the founder was. Still, many will be experts in another aspect of growing and operating an organization: managers, board members, marketers, finance people and so on. While these folks are all crucial to running an organization well, they don’t always share the founder’s experience with grassroots or front-line work.
Often, as the organization grows, the founder realizes that their role can no longer be directly involved in the front-line operations of the organization. They retreat to a more visionary role, and, as the holder of the core story and vision of the organization, they become an ambassador for the work, obtaining funding and support and good board members who can oversee the organization. This sounds good, but it can often generate many issues, especially as the founder begins to sense the end of their involvement with their organization.
At this stage a number of inevitable patterns begin to emerge. They don’t always work like this, but these are common enough that I see them over and over in organizations that have been around for a couple of decades, sometimes less.
The founder begins to feel irrelevant and starts getting nosy. If your whole life has been spent creating programs for vulnerable youth, you might not find yourself relishing leading an organization set up to do this. Founders often have a hard time removing themselves from the day-to-day operations because their heart lies with the activism and the work of change-making, not organizational sustaining. Sometimes founders will involve themselves too much in the front-line work, micro-managing and being unaware of their power and influence. This can lead to trust issues, where newer hires don’t feel like they can learn and grow in their jobs. The antidote to this is to establish good governance structures and good roles and for the founder to transition into a new role through learning and cultivating leadership.
Hardly anyone thinks of succession until it’s too late. This controlling dynamic affects the ability of a founder to plan well for succession. Very few founders give much thought to their own disappearance from their life’s work, especially when building and growing an organization which relies so heavily on them. If an organization successfully survives over the long term, there will always come a time when the founder will step back. I have talked with founders who occupy all points of the spectrum that range from “I can’t leave because the organization will collapse without me” to “if the organization dies when I’m gone, I’m okay with that.” Once you’ve created a structure and moved into a leadership role, it is time to think ahead about how you will get out of it. Even if that is 20 years ahead, it shapes your approach to mentorship and shared leadership. Building shared leadership early will help folks move into roles and create mutual support relationships that allow people in the organization to grow into these roles, increasing organizational resiliency over time.
Resisting change. Organizations that grow their stability also become less able to change. Board members appointed to support the founder’s vision often govern to a rigid version of what that looks like, and Boards like this are always more risk-averse than a swashbuckling social entrepreneur. Funders can enforce a kind of rigidity of approach too as funding grants can bend an organization’s operations to the funder’s theory of change rather than create the ongoing ability of social enterprises to grow and adapt. Stability is a polarity, and from the beginning, organizations need to develop resiliency rather than robustness. They must survive by being changed rather than stand as a bulwark against change. This is hard when you deliver services because clients require a continuity of care, and there are no easy answers to these questions. Managing this polarity is crucial for overcoming a founder’s syndrome, where the governance and funding are tied to an original vision and are not allowed to grow beyond the founder.
Splits between board and staff. In the early days of an organization, everyone is moving in the same direction, doing the same things and pitching in wherever they need to. However, as organizations become larger and more stable, roles become highly differentiated. Board members are often chosen more because of their connections to funding and power than to the front-line work. Staff are learning and adapting at the coal face of the work. The two groups often develop a distance between them, making it hard for them to be mutually supportive. When organizations ask me to help them with strategic planning, I always ask them to do it jointly with the board and staff and even clients and other stakeholders. Organizations that set their mandates and future plans through closed board sessions tend to suffer from a deep lack of situational awareness about the organization’s context. This can exacerbate founder’s syndrome even after the founder has left, as they will often invoke the founder’s intentions in their role as stewards and guardians of that vision. Ignoring the needs, concerns, creativity and awareness of staff and partners is a good way to dig a hole of irrelevancy for an organization.
This is just a bit of the ground I covered with my colleague yesterday. What patterns and responses do you notice?
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