Detail from a quilt designed and made by the St. Andrews Anglican Church Women Quilter’s Guild. The quilt was made in 1967 in honour of Canada’s centennial year. Keen eyed observers will notice patterns in here that relate to that celebration. The quilt was on display at the Bowen Island Public Library earlier this year, on loan from Joyce Ganong whose mother, Isabel Faulks, was one of the quilters.
Another reflection from the Complexity Inside and Out course we taught yesterday…
Caitlin led us in a check in process that was about slowing down out seeing. Here’s a variation. Try it!
- Pick a view where there is some distance – looking out a window is best. If this is a familiar view, all the better.
- Notice the scene out there. Notice the colours, the landscape, the patterns. Notice movement and stillness. If the scene is familiar, look at what you know.
- You can close your eyes and remember what you see. How does that scene conjure itself up in your mind’s eye?
- Now open your eyes and look again at the scene. Try to notice something you’ve never noticed before or something that you’ve forgotten, or a change to the scene that you hadn’t noticed until now.
- Describe the scene now. Write down obersvations about what you see. What is the overall colour palette? What are the lines you see, of trees or buildings, horizon and sky. If you saw this scene in a flash, how would you recognize it?
You can add different variations to this exercise, but the point is to notice how we see things as patterns. Our mind conjures up a scene of large blocks in it and details aren’t always apparent. Sometimes we have to see things with new eyes, or a naive perspective.
I reflected yesterday that I was once walking through the forest here on my home island, following a path to the village with my brother who was visiting from Toronto. Bowen Island is very different from Toronto. He stopped us next to a very large Douglas-fir tree and said “Look at that! It’s huge!”
All the trees around here are huge, especially if you aren’t familiar with the forest. But I looked again at this tree – one I passed hundreds of times to and from the village – and noticed that it was actually an old growth tree. How could I tell? The pattern of bark is different, the branches are thicker and more gnarly and look like the trunks of younger trees. My brother’s eyes found anomalies in the pattern I had formed of my home forest, and I used my own pattern recognition skills to identify why the tree he spotted was an anomaly.
This, it turns out is an excellent thing to do when you are looking for other patterns in familiar contexts, like your business market or your team culture or the school system you work in or the services you offer to community. Be careful not to assume that the patterns you can see is the sum total of the reality available to you.
This isn’t new. But you can never over-practice awareness.
There is a neat game called Geoguesser that is based on the Google Street View database. You download the app and get started and it throws up an image from somewhere in the world and you have two minutes to guess where it is. The closer you get to the actual spot, the more points you get.
You’re not supposed to cheat by using Google maps to look up land marks. It entirely depends on the pattern recognition that you bring to the game. What language is that on the side of a truck? What does that street sign say? What kind of palm trees are these? Is that dirt road red or dark brown? Is that a white ring around the power pole?
Really good players of this game have thousands of details stored meaning that they can discern the location using macro clues first, and then narrow things down with decision trees, like how the shadows are cast, entire websites have sprung up devoted to these pattern markers that help people quickly identify the location. There are competitions culminating in the GeoGuesser World Championship. You can watch these competitions live. They are amazing.
And the kind if undisputed champion of this game is rainbolt, a man full of so many patterns, that his guesses are almost always pinpoint accurate.
Watch him host five great players finding obscure locations. They are engaged in constant pattern finding. It’s kind of amazing and it’s very cool to have them articulate the way they are seeing these landscapes. Specific knowledge helps them make generalizations and they connect what they know and use abductive reasoning to guess the location.
Back when I first experienced Open Space Technology, at a conference in 1995, the thing that immediately caught my attention about the process was how it was a perfect, simple set of constraints to enable self-organization. It sent me down a rabbit hole of learning about self-organization and complexity and I became captivated with the patterns I saw around me, and specifically with dissipative structures.
Ilya Prigogine coined the term dissipative structure. In layperson’s terms it refers to a structure that persists in time despite its components constantly changing. The classic example is a whirlpool. When you pull the plug on a bathtub full of water, the water forms a whirlpool as it head down the drain. The whirlpool is an emergent structure and a pattern that persists over time, held in place by constraints such as gravity, the size of the drain hole, and way bigger forces like air pressure and where you are on the planet.
If you just look at molecules of water, you would have no idea that they could form a whirlpool. The water molecules that drain out of your bathtub all participate temporarily in forming the whirlpool but none of them initiate it. When they leave, they have no memory that they were in it. You cannot take a random water molecule and discover whether it has ever gone down a drain. And yet, the pattern persists and is real. What gets dissipated is the energy and matter that travels through the structure.
In human systems, we see related kinds of structures everywhere too. Learning about these kinds of patterns, which I did initially through Fritjof Capra’s book The Web of Life, made me seek out analogues around me. The pattern of “dissipating structure” was interesting, and because I had focussed extensively on culture in my undergraduate studies, I finally had a useful way of looking at cultures and how they seemed to exhibit both stability and constant change. People, energy and material flow through the culture but they are entrained to behave in a larger scale structure that has some persistence, but which is also sensitive to changing. This was how I ended up coming to complexity theory, through my exploration of these ideas.
Cultures are not dissipative structures in the technical sense that Prigogine describes, and there seems to have been quite a bit of controversy over the years about whether social structures qualify as thermodynamic structures. Because I’m not a physicist I will say they are not, but this idea makes a good metaphor and helps me to explain how we work with emergent structures and persistent patterns in organizational and community life.
Seeing this pattern led me into the margins of participatory leadership work, facilitation, and ultimately dialogical organizational development. These ways of working were all concerned with creating the kinds of containers that enable emergent meaning. Sometimes these containers are temporary, like meetings, and sometimes they are persistent, like organizations, teams and communities. If you’ve ever tried to change an organizations culture you’ll recognize that it is very much like sticking your hand in a whirlpool. You’ll get some temporary disruption, but unless you change the enabling constraints, the whirlpool will reestablish itself the moment you stop interfering.
If you were popping around here on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) over the past couple of days, you might have remarked to folks that the weather seems a bit weird. We’ve had a volatile week of spring weather, with heavy rain, different kinds of winds, a front of thunderstorms and clear skies.
It is interesting to listen to people talk about the weather. The patterns are different. The air is warmer, but has a bit of a chill on the breeze. The wind is coming from different angles and the trees are moving differently. In fact southerly and westerly winds on our part of the island blow against the trees’ natural leaning direction, and yesterday on a late afternoon walk, we hear a couple fall in the forest. The thunderstorms that passed over Vancouver Island were a clue to the weirdness.
Today, in our complexity inside and out course we taught a module on pattern spotting and working with constraints. Complexity workers know that all patterns in complex situations are held by constraints. Change the constraints and the pattern changes. So weather wise, in the last couple of days we had a strange set of constraints in the upper atmosphere that resulted in a lot of convection, meaning that warm air at the surface was mixing with cold air aloft and that is what drives thunderstorms and other volatility including strange winds.
These aren’t uncommon kinds of atmospheric conditions on the coast, but they are uncommon enough that folks sense that the weather is “weird.” And its gets to the point now where I can tell you that there is a lot of convection in the atmosphere by how many people are confused by the weather pattern. Forecasting weather using a mass perception of how people make meaning of the situation is exactly how we work in complexity.
The weather is indeed strange. a few days ago I made bunch of posts on my blog “private.” I have done this once before, when people I worked with in another country were detained in part because of work we had done together. In that case the ruler of that country is a known autocrat who had survived a coup attempt and was taking it out on his enemies and anyone he thought was organizing against him.
Here in Canada we have entered into a short election campaign and although the parties have not yet released their platforms I have already decided who I am voting for, and it is a party I have never voted for in my life. This is an election between two conservative parties. One, the Conservative Party of Canada, is the legacy of the old Progressive Conservative Party which merged with the populist western-based Reform Party (and lost “progressive” from it’s name) and then lost its most lunatic fringe to the further right People’s Party of Canada. Still, they are led by the populist Pierre Poilievre who is a career political party wonk, who has made his living off of immature name calling (a la the man to the south) and slogans like “Axe the Tax” which sound good when you chant them once or twice and then they start to get boring. Plus they are just covering up terrible policy.
The other conservative party is the Liberal Party of Canada which really hasn’t changed over the past 5 decades or so. They occasionally drift to the left on social policy, and we have just come out of a period of ten years where Justin Trudeau brought a Gen X approach to social policy and swung the party left on those issues. Everyone got tired of him though and after a fall of running on fumes with a hobbled House of Commons, he stepped down at the beginning of the year and made space for a short Liberal leadership campaign. The victor was Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. He is an economist, a pension fund manager, a banker and a technocrat. His landslide leadership victory (more than 85% of the party members voted for him) instantly moved the Liberal back to their more traditional centre right position. They now have a banker in charge, with a fairly intact social conscience and a lot of experience leading government institutions and economies through rapidly changing crises. He was the BoE chair during Brexit. He knows how to play a bad hand.
One of these two men will be Prime Minister on May 1. Neither of them are true progressives; their campaigns both began with announcement of tax cuts. Carney has been prime minister for less than two weeks during which time he made a trip to Europe to shore up trading support and defence options against the unpredictable chaos coming from our south and then he came home and dropped the writ. Poilievre has continued to campaign against Justin Trudeau (who is long gone), he continues to rail against the consumer carbon tax (which Carney has effectively repealed) and he continues to promote a tax cut for the lowest tax bracket (which Carney also did, although at a lower rate and more tied to a policy decision to replace the carbon tax rebate, ANYWAY…).
Poilievre was standing 25 percentage points ahead in most polls until Carney was chosen as leader of the Liberal Party. He now sits 5 points behind Carney. The progressive conservatives who could never vote for Trudeau’s Liberals seem to have come home to the only conservative party will to occupy the centre of the political spectrum: Mark Carney’s Liberals.
So we have an election, but it is not to be one contested on progressive ideas. It will be one that will elect a party and a prime minister that can best respond to the unprecedented volatility and existential threat of this strange time. That is not the bellicose and sloganeering Conservatives. That party will be the Liberal Party of Canada. There is a lot at stake in this election and a lot of strange political weather happening now. Call it volatility in the upper atmosphere, but it is about to hail some.
The door of our local pharmacy, a couple of days after the COVID-19 health emergency was declared in March 2020.
Journal entries from March 12 and 13, 2020, remembering the first days of lock down and the day that the world changed. I started keeping a decisions journal to track the things I was doing and why. Here are the first two days of entries.
March 12, 2020 Newxlelexwm Bowen Island.
Cancellations. Of everything.
First coaching call with a client about how to bring their events online. Systems awareness helps us to bring our capacities on line.
Me. Feeling generally well. Slight dry cough, small sniffle. I am acting now as if I have COVID-19 and trying to be publically minded.
World is a swirling system of ephemeral attractors. Nothing has deepened yet. Seems like the potential is very open. Hoping it stays that way for a while.
March 13, 2020 Nexwlelexwm Bowen Island
Scenario planning helped me get ahead of travel decisions informed by reliable information with weak signals, incorporating all that into plausible decision making.
Dr. Hayley Wickenheiser: “control what you can, let go of what you can’t.”
Pattern entrainment: noticed that I kind of treated this like a storm – it will pass; do I just ride it out? Watching friends abroad thinking this way. But clinging to the possibility that things might shift in good ways.
Imposing constraints: acting as if you have it, changes behaviours. Found that way to make me more publically-minded.
There is grief. Small losses of timelines we have to let go of. There will be more grief coming.
Watching the application of constraints. Adopt good heuristics or external constraints with force action.
Adaptive action is a “choose your own adventure.”
Think broadly. Don’t do things that might require a hospital visit.
Symptoms chart is useful for monitoring self.
Seriousness from stories of sports leagues being cancelled.
Flattening the curve becomes the key way to think about it – wait as long as you can to get sick. Avoid crowds, wash hands, social distance.
Today – beauty – Italians singing, poems.
I think it was 1986-87 academic year that I truly fell in love with the idea of culture. That was the year I began my BA in Indigenous Studies at Trent University and it was during a time when Indigenous cultures in Canada were going through a generational resurgence after recovering from 100 years of state-sponsored cultural, physical and intellectual extinction. I was able to be a witness to communities and organizations recovering by growing deep into traditional practices, and younger generations receiving the teaching of Elders and using them to create new political movements, organizations, economies, governments, and health and well being in their communities. I loved the idea of culture as the ground for this work and loved watching people work with it, and indeed being a part of cultural shifts and and catalysis. Culture was like magic. It appeared bigger than all of us, it shifted and changed and it enabled things to happen. Or not.
I so fell in love with culture that I did an honours thesis in my fifth year that compared two national Indigenous organizations in their attempts to root their operations and structures in traditional cultures. One did it by using artifacts and trappings and firm structures that ended in arguments about orthodoxies and heartbreak, and the other did it by creating a relational, caring, and connected context in which a unique but thoroughly Indigenous way of being emerged.
So early on I learned that culture is emergent, that it transcends individuals and specific artifacts and practices, that it is a context that shapes relationships and behaviours and that it is the product of relationships and interactions over time. Norms of behaviour can’t be dictated, they can only arise.
Since then I would say that the heart of my work with organizations and communities has been working with culture. The sources of joy and the sources of pain are the multiples contexts in which we live our lives. I’ve worked in one-off settings and multi-year large scale systemic settings. I’ve worked with large teams and with little groups of change-makers. And we’ve tried it all, from magic methods to the “this will finally solve it” conference, to multi-year narrative sense-making projects. I’ve spent decades surfing the rise and fall of supporter culture around the soccer teams I’ve been a part of. I’ve spent nearly 25 years living on an island with its own unique slant on the world, creating social enterprises, supporting community economic development and making community through music and play.
About a year ago on the Art of Hosting Facebook group someone asked about changing culture in a very large organization and which methods are best. For some reason that post appeared in the feed that I rarely check, and I responded to it. But because I’m never going to send you to Facebook, I thought I would catch this sketchy set of insights and share them here. This is a back of the napkin kind of list, but these are truths that I will no longer doubt in my work with organizations and communities. So here’s what I’ve learned about “culture change.”
- It takes years.
- Your work will be non-linear and unpredictable.
- All states are temporary.
- If it is necessary for senior leaders champion and support change work, it will only be sustained as long as they don’t succumb to their anxiety and fear of uncertainty and unpredictability.
- You cannot change culture directly, but you can work to change the way people interact with one another and see what kind of culture emerges as a result.
- Learning together is often a good way to approach many different strategic and cultural issues in an oblique and open way.
- If change of any kind in the organization or sector is predicated on the people needing to transform and be different then you are colonizing people. Don’t do that.
- Whatever you think is happening is only ever a part of the full picture.
- Whatever you think you have accomplished is only ever a piece of what you have actually done.
- It will never go according to plan.
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