
Interesting links that crossed my path this month. You can find these in real time at my Mastodon site, which is also mirrored on Bluesky.
- One of the most significant pieces of work I am currently doing is helping the Squamish Nation develop their Constitution by supporting large in-person and online community gatherings. It’s hard work and important work for the Nation, and I’m really happy to be a part of it. I get to work with the inimitable Amanda Fenton who supports the online work and Squamish Nation member Tyler Baker, who is my in person partner when we work at two different sites simultaneously.
- BC Child Poverty Rate Climbs as Income Inequality Grows: Policy Note. Child poverty is unacceptable, especially as we learned it can be nearly eliminated by a small universal basic income. The pandemic supports helped us to see something I will never be able to unsee: this challenge is possible to address, and quickly.
- The science and natural history of the fault zones of the west coast of North America. We live in a very active landscape.
- If you want to understand the complexities and nuances of life in British Columbia in 2024, this collection of books from The Tyee is a grand place to start.
- I met Lightning Bill Austin selling his art in the Pybus Market in Wenatchee, Washington this month. An absolute legend. Here’s his story.
- Contemporary Poets Respond (in Verse) to Taylor Swift: Perhaps the most inventive way to celebrate and honour Taylor Swift’s work and her impact on the world.
- This is the year-end summary of the highlights from EV Nautilus, a research vessel that explores and studies the geology and fauna of deep-water sea mounts. I love this channel because it is populated with scientists who show nothing but utter delight in seeing the creatures that they love. I’ve shared this link on my out of office responder this month.
- There’s No Place Like Home: Humanity and the Housing Crisis from CBC Ideas. Calling for housing to be a human right should not feel like the Quixotic quest that it appears to be. This is a fantastic lecture even if it leaves me deflated by the challenge.
- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The whole thing. Online and searchable.
- Dave Pollard writes a great piece on “What We Don’t Know.” The undermining of expertise by folks who think they can hold their weight with people who have devoted their lives to fields of study and practice is ridiculous and dangerous.
- The Cosmos Teems with Complex Organic Molecules.Reading Stuart Kauffman’s work (especially Reinventing the Sacred) will also make it clear how inevitable organic chemistry is and how easy it is for the processes of life to get started.
- Narrative jailbreaking for fun and profit! Matt Webb and a chatbot hallucinate together. (And I suspect the chatbot has discovered Matt’s blog!)
- Tangerine is my new favourite Christmas movie.
- There is a reason that we don’t do icebreakers in meetings. Check-ins, yes, but disconnected icebreakers? No. McSweeney’s gets it.
Happy New Year to all.
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Confirmed yet again that the way to build community, and indeed strengthen participatory and democratic societies is to do work together.
Peter Levine, who I feel like everyone should read, has a nice little blog post today that serves as a bit of a gateway to his own research and thoughts on this topic. Here’s his basic thesis:
People are more likely to trust institutions if they are involved in diverse, participatory groups, because such participation gives them a feeling of agency, teaches them that compromise is necessary (it’s not a sign that leaders are corrupt), and encourages them to share and critically assess information.
A few times this past year I have been in situations that have borne out this reality, for better or worse. For example working with folks in different places on the opioid crisis, for example, it is clear to me that folks can come together across all kinds of ideological differences if there is actual work in the centre to do. Grappling with the realities of governance, community building, the provision of services and policy making is edifying work. It’s hard, and requires relationship and commitment. Everyone has opinions about things, but rolling your sleeves up and getting to work is where relationships and therefore community is built.
It has been true for a while, but community engagement – the traditional “ask the people what they think” kind – is now clearly a dead end way to make things happen. Polling drives policy and as a result you get truly stupid decisions that don’t at all improve life for people but rather just keep the voters electing populists to power. Simplify problems, seed the population with simple platitudes and memes, convince them that “your guy” has the answers and then poll them on the results.
Trust in democratic institutions, a key theme of Peter’s work, is undermined by this approach to community. People don’t believe polls (except the analytics folks working for parties that shape narrative as keenly as marketers working with personalized market segmentations – see what I mean?) and people don;t believe in surveys either. A recent survey in my home community of 5000 people had 250 returns, to which a suspicious refrain of Facebook amongst folks with zero statsitics backgrounds was “That’s all? How can they make decisions based on such a paltry sample.”
The exercise of engagement is often window dressing. It can result in hundreds and hundreds of text answers on qualitative surveys that have no rhyme nor reason to them. Comments like “fix the potholes on Elm Street” don’t mean anything without context, even if a bunch of people say them. And worse still when you ask people how to make the neighbourhood safer, you will be stuck with all manner of opinion and regurgitated talking points fed to folks who know nothing about sociology, criminology, policing or urban design. The value of the content is nil. The value of the exercise is “we consulted with the community and decided to fix the pot holes on Elm Street as a way of solving the problem of community safety.” And so leaders do what they want.
Election success now is about saying you will do a thing, then doing something and successfully externalizing all the bits that didn’t work so you can take credit for the small thing you did. If people buy what you are selling, you will get re-elected. It’s easier just to say vacuous things like “Axe the Tax, Build the Homes and Bring it on Home” over and over and over and over again until people get so sick of you that they elect you to office just to shut you up. From there, you meet the realities of governing, and memes and slogans won;t get you through.
But there are ways out of this state of affairs. On the decision-making side I think we should be investing heavily in citizen assemblies, such as the one currently underway in Saanich and Victoria which is exploring how to merge two cities. These bodies, in which citizens are chosen at random and enter into a learning journey together to understand the issues at play and recommend courses of action. My friend and colleague Aftab Erfan has recently written about the results and potential of citizen assemblies to do proper engagement which honours democratic and participatory principles and generates meaningful accountability for elected leaders in using their power.
And, back to Peter Levine’s work, I believe there is a tremendous potential in the approach of shared work that he advocates above. Some of the most engaging work I have done has included Participatory Narrative Inquiry approaches, which help people gather, listen to and make sense of each other’s stories as they seek openings and affordances for taking action on complex topics. The process itself builds the social connectivity that builds the basis for collaboration and community. It complexities the work of building things like justice (which Peter has a lot to say on) and helps us to understand that there is no single authority that can deliver the perfect outcome in a society.
Democratic societies thrive where there are democratic institutions that help stabilize the conditions that create freedom and diversity of association, participation and contribution. We are entering a period of dire outlook for this kind of rich ecosystem of collaboration. Get out there and make things together with others.
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Context changes everything. This used to be a forest.
Alicia Juarrero is the source of so much great thinking on the role of constraints in complex systems. Her two books, Dynamics In Action and Context Changes Everything are brilliant discussions of the role of intention and how constraints shape complex phenomena. They are philosophical texts, and so are slow reads, but well worth the effort. You can find many videos of her sharing her insights on You Tube and elsewhere. She is generous with her time and enthusiastic about her work.
Last week I sat in on a seminar she gave for The Prometheus Project. I expect the video will be up on their “Past Voices” page soon. Here are a few thoughts that struck me from that session.
Dr. Juarrero’s work has been deeply concerned with how intention works as a constraint on action in complex systems. Her thinking underpins much of the way I have learned to think about complexity through Dave Snowden’s work, and most of us who are not philosophers have likely come to her work through Dave.
She used a term in the seminar which I have overlooked in her writings to described stable or coherent phenomena in complex systems: a “constraint regime.” Constraint regimes are phenomena which display coherence even in a dynamic and changing system. Disspative structures like whirlpools are good examples. There is a higher level order imposed on all the water molecules that enter the constraint regime of a whirlpool and they are entrained into becoming a part of that shape. There is nothing inherent about the shape of a water molecule that determines that it would eventually become a part of a whirlpool. This high level order is imposed by constraints on the system that cause the molecules to create a whirlpool shape until they flow through the constraint regime and down the drain. The whirlpool maintains a stable presence until all the water is gone, despite the parts of the system being in constant exchange. Watch some videos of laminar flow to see this stability in astonishing clarity.
This is not a new observation, but Dr. Juarrero’s contributions to this field place the influence of context on constraint regimes into the order of causes for behaviour in a complex system, which bucks the general trend in sciences that only forces between external bodies can cause action. Constraints create coherence in complex systems. Coherence can also look like identity. We are different people in different places. I’ve often used the example that, when gathered with our families, we are very different people than when we are in a business setting or a social setting with friends. There are actions available to us in one context that are not available in another. So context changes everything.
My own work with dialogic containers seeks to understand these phenomena as essentially constrain regimes that emerge out of encounters between people who are making meaning together. When those containers become stable over time – such as in a family for example – they can create dynamics in which our behaviour is highly path dependant, and the paths on which it depends can include the neurological pathways that are activated when we are in a particular context. What we are learning about the neurology of trauma and epigenetics confirms this. Our brain is wired by trauma and influenced by its interactions with environments to produce an identity that has a particular coherence, if not static stability, in particular contexts. When my father was alive and I was in his presence, I was the son of a father, in a relationship that grew and changed over time but had a certain stability. When my father died, I found myself at a loss as the son as a father. Who am I now? And who am I in a teaching environment, singing in a choir, sitting on my own, in the supporter section of my football team? All of these are different containers – constraint regimes – and when we are meaning-making in these places with others I call those dialogic containers.
I like the idea of constrain regimes to describe the class of structures that impart top down causality on a complex system. Dialogic containers are one kind of constrain regime.
In the seminar last week Dr. Juarrero talked about how we make change in complex systems by working with constraints. She had a few great answers to questions about working with constraints. She avoided going down the rabbit hole of working with a definition of complexity, because there simply isn’t one that works all the time, but she did say that the way to work with emergence is through FEEL. We feel when something isn’t right or needs changing and we take action on what feels better. Her pithy advice for leaders is helpful: if things are stable you need to stay in the centre and maintain stability with fail-safe processes. But fail-safe process DO fail, and when they do it is a catastrophic failure, as Dave Snowden says. So when things grow turbulent and more complex (or indeed chaotic) you need to move to the edges and manage in a safe-to-fail way from there, looking for what is coming, working from principles rather than procedures, and attending to the uncertainty. Leadership is context dependant. This is the great lesson of Cynefin as well.
Dr. Juarrero addressed the urge to map systems and try to understand root causes. When presented with a systems diagram – a picture of nodes connected by arrows – she said that such diagrams have some very limited usefulness but they have to be actively interrogated with questions such as:
- What is in the white space in which the diagram is situated?
- What is NOT mapped?
- What is the nature of any given connection between the nodes?
- What are the nodes? Do they change? How?
- Is everything I am looking at stable?
Such diagrams also have a very short time limit. Try mapping the traffic on the street in front of you, or a given moment in a soccer game and then drawing certain conclusions from that.
The advice for dealing with turbulence in stability is to develop relational safe-to-fail practice into your system. That makes you better equipped to sense and notice what is happening in the context that surrounds you. The context is so important to the system in which you are working. If things are collapsing inside your system, but the context is stable, you might bring stability to your system from the high order. For example, emergency response relies on stable and predictable interventions being imposed from outside the place of immediate collapse. If your system is stable and the context is unstable, you may find yourself losing your stability quickly and in surprising ways. The fall of the Assad government this week is an example of that. No amount of order and control could overcome the contextual turbulence that caused his family’s regime to fall. Establishing institutional order in Syria is now the challenge facing that country and the region as a whole, because instability exists at nearly every scale in the Middle East at the moment.
If you are working in a stable system that is embedded in a stable context, making change is going to be very hard. Change needs to proceed along the vectors of rule and policy making. Financial systems are an example of this. A chartered bank in Canada operating inside of a well regulated legislative regime, which itself is embedded within a global financial order is essential for the stable smooth functioning of financial systems. Making changes to that system are very difficult and they are highly ordered. Catastrophic change is held at bay by this incredibly stable set of constrains regimes, but when it comes, it comes like a tsunami.
Finally change making in a turbulent system held within a turbulent context is hard, because what you are probably trying to do is seek some order and predictability and it isn’t available. The lives of refugees and migrants and chronically homeless folks who are in motion are like this. With no power to create order, they are at the whims of those that do have the ability to impose order and control. For them, life is a constant state of chaos, sustained that way by a constraint regime that constantly undermines their stability, in some cases out of pure cruelty.
Some of this is new to me, some of it is stuff I know, but am just being reminded of. People like Alicia Juarerro continually keep me learning.
I have time to integrate think about this stuff and will be bringing it into our course on Working in Complexity Inside and Out, where we introduce new material as we learn, test and stabilize ideas about how to work with complexity. The next offering of that course starts in February.
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Anne-Marie Lemay, Anne-Marie Edward, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Daigneault, Barbara Klucznik, Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Michèle Richard, Nathalie Croteau, and Sonia Pelletier.
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if you are a non-profit/social services leader in BC, then we would love to have you at a free workshop we’re offering in the new year! It’s about using complexity practices to prepare for and navigate crisis and disruption in our organizations and communities. You can learn more and register at this link.
This work has its roots all the way back in 2020 when Ciaran and I ran a Participatory Narrative Inquiry project for a group of organizations serving people with disabilities about how folks were coping during the early days of the pandemic. We learned a lot from that project it still feels relevant and necessary five years later. This work is being supported by our non-profit partners who want to see more resources and support available to leaders in this sector to find paths through the turbulence of crisis, no matter where it comes from. We’ve created a mini-guide which uses Cynefin as a decision making framework for working in crisis. The mini0guide is available to everyone, and we’re hosting two afternoon workshops in January and February next year (more if there’s interest!) aimed at non-profit leaders in BC to provide a more hands-on introduction to the content and explore practical application together.
Our goal is to build community and provide meaningful, practical, accessible tools that bridge the gap between theory and practice. The workshop is free, but space is limited. If you can’t make those dates/times, click this form where you can sign up for updates about future offerings and future versions of the guide as well. Feel free to comment here with any questions.
Please share this invitation!
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