I read a couple of Peter Levine’s posts that resonated strongly this morning about undoing reckless damage to important government and democratic institutions and redefining the call to service for public servants. I don’t know very many other people that publish so widely and so freely on the topics of civic life and democracy, but Peter is one of the ones with whom I find myself nodding in agreement over almost everything. I think I retain an enduring love/hate relationship with government, but my years as a public servant were rewarding and I would recommend it to anyone, even with all of the attendant frustrations. Institutions are essential to democracy.
If you are in the public service and need some inspiration, Thea Snow has shared some resources she likes from a systems thinking lens; (h/t Benjamin) and if you are more inclined to work within the public service as a complex system, Chris Mowles reports on a talk by Carolyn Pedwell that does just that.
Service, of course, knows no bounds, and today Peter Rukavina paid tribute to his friend Stephen Southall’s mom Carol and family and Stephen’s incredible service to his mom through her long illness and death. I knew Stephen 35 years ago in Peterborough where we would often jam blues songs, him on his harmonica and me on the guitar and us making up nonsense lyrics. Facebook kept us in proximity in recent years. The whole post from Peter is a beautiful read and ends with this quote: “I hope death is like being carried to a bedroom when you were a child and fell asleep on a couch during a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room.” I think that was a quote was from Carol. Worth remembering.
Tenneson Woolf reminds us that we can always start again: “We learn, we humans. I’m so impressed by the courage that people have. To stay the course. To let go the course that doesn’t serve. To nuance the daily. To trust the simple. To open to love. To be unflinching.”
It reminds me of something I once heard Thanissaro Bhikku say. Something to the effect that when you are first learning to meditate, you catch yourself again and again drifting away from the breath. You can catch yourself 50 times in a 20 minute setting, but each time is a practice of waking up. Practicing waking up 50 times is excellent. Start again.
Starting again is a key skill. If you don’t get it right the first time, you start over, with collaborations, with ideas, with commitments. It’s a complex world. We don’t live in it perfectly. It requires humility. It requires grace. It needs a breath, a second chance, a sacrifice of some resources. It helps to be able to frame it as a learning, but not to hold on to it as a lesson. You see that difference?
“Human perception excels at detecting subtle pattern breaks” writes Cameron Norman over at Censemaking. Spotting the exception to the pattern can reveal the pattern. It can also reveal the hint of an affordances that can take you elsewhere. That boring staff meeting that happens every week? Think about the delightful surprise that comes when something interesting actually happens. And then the insight “oh wow…I dion;t realize how humourless this whole enterprise had become…” A key question for querying the patterns we are trying to understand is “what the hell was that?” Dissonance and novelty shocks us into seeing the mundane and normal.
Starting over is essential to reconciliation. Not slightly-embarrassing-land-acknowledgement “reconciliation” but the real deal, where lands and material resources are returned to Indigenous Nations so that we can all start again. Like the Yurok have a chance to do in California. Remove dams, invite the salmon back home, restore health and stewardship and start the relationship over. These are not about us and them. They are about the potential of we together, starting with the first people and the first principles and the land’s own direction about how to build and maintain health and stability and relationship.
Let’s go. The land welcomes you to try.
And in the doing over, you discover. I’ve been at it for a couple of days, but these little notes posts, based on my daily reading, seem to gather around themes. Perhaps I’ll post a summary of the themes each week or so.
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A convincing 6-0 win last night for the Canadian Men’s National Soccer Team over Honduras in the first match of the 2025 Gold Cup. This biennial tournament is our de facto continental championship, held between 16 teams in the CONCACAF Region, plus a guest, in this case the soccer-washing national eam from Saudia Arabia. The tournament is held mostly in the US, although last night’s match was played in Vancouver. Canada last won this trophy in 2000. This year’s edition also serves as the qualification tournament for the 2026 World Cup, which we are also hosting along with the USA and Mexico.
Last night’s match was sweet for a number of reasons. Those of us that have watched our national team for a while will remember an 8-1 humiliation at the hands of Honduras in 2012 which ended our qualification run for the 2014 World Cup. It was perhaps the low point in the men’s team fortunes and since then we have risen through the ranks of world football, eventually qualifying for the 2022 World Cup. Every time we play Honduras, I pray for a smackdown and last night was the biggest loss we ever handed them. Our team looked fantastic. With several key starters injured, we nevertheless showed up strong, commanded possession,polayed unafraid of Honduras’ physical play in the middle and used our speed and creativity on the wings to shred the Honduras defence. It was a thing of beauty to watch.
It was also a beautiful chance to see two British Columbia based players come into their own. Joel Waterman, of Langley BC, played at centre back and almost scored in the opening moments of the game. Joel played for our TSS Rovers back in 2017. He later moved to Calgary Foothills and eventually into the Cavalry side of the new Canadian Premier League. In 2020 he became the first CPL player sold to Major League Soccer when he signed with CF Montreal. He has remained there ever since, helping the team through some ups and many downs, and often appearing as their captain.
While Joel is always a player I watch, having stopped off at our club for a season, another BC player made his mark last night. Niko Sigur, from Burnaby BC, and a player who plays for Hejduk Split in Croatia, scored his first goal as a national team member. It was the first goal from a BC raised player for Canada in ages. Marcus Haber scored one in a friendly against Mauritania in 2016, but none of us could remember the last BC player to score a goal in a meaningful competition. This lack of BC players on our national team has been an abiding concern for us at TSS Rovers and was one of the motivations for starting the team in 2017.
In other sports news the Stanley Cup was decided last night. I have followed the Toronto Maple Leafs since I was a boy, born the year after the last won a Stanley Cup in 1967. My kids, born on the west coast, don’t share my love of the Leafs, and they have developed attachments to Vancouver and, in my daughter’s case, Edmonton. Last year, the Oilers took the Florida Panthers to the seventh game of the finals and lost. This year they only lasted six games. Florida – the team that has also knocked Toronto out of the playoffs in recent years – is a very, very good hockey team. In our heightened state of cross-border anxiety, this series between a Canadian team and an American one had added significance. I feel for my friends who are Oilers fans. Losing the final to the same team two years in a row stings. It is said that the Stanley Cup is one of the hardest trophies to win in sports. You need to survive an 82 game regular season lasting 6 months and play four best-of-seven rounds of playoffs for another two months. That can include 4800 kilometer trips diagonally across North America as it did in this series, which plays havoc with bodies beaten and bruised from 60 minutes or more of playoff hockey. Florida played 105 games between October and now.
Now one of the greatest traditions in sports begins. Every player on the Florida roster will get to spend one day with the trophy, and the stories of what happens on that day are NHL legends, as the Cup makes it’s way around the world to celebrations, commemorations and all manner of hi-jinx.
Even if you are only peripherally interested in hockey, as a Canadian it gets into your blood, it becomes a cultural reference and a shibboleth around which we rally, becomes the central part of quintessentially Canadian TV shows and is taken up in spades by immigrants to Canada, even as they also bring their love of soccer to this place.
From the spring 2025 edition of Geist comes an amazing piece of writing from essayist Soraya Roberts, who documents a trip on the The Canadian, Canada’s only mostly trans-national train.
“This is about a transcontinental train, established 70 years ago, using the same cars to this day. It is about how trains became a relic in our national mind, which is how they came to be visibly trundling across the country, slowly connecting products rather than people, as the rest of the world surpasses us with better versions of what we left behind… This is about a vast country of people yearning for connection. But Canada has never, in its infinite practicality, accommodated yearning.”
You can read the full essay only in the print edition, so go buy one or grab it from your nearest Canadian library.
One of the my favourite blogs of all time was the daily commonplace book whiskey river. Whoever was behind that blog seems to have stopped posting in December. the last post was a quote from Louise Erdrich:
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book –
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.
I have no idea who was behind this blog. It was a reliable and seasonable daily dose of incredible insight from a person who was extremely well read. The blog itself remains online and a collection of posts has been published as “whiskey river’s commonplace book.” The blog published from 2001 to 2024. The author remains deeply anonymous.
Early on in the blogging era many folks figured out this recipe: blogs as commonplace books. Mark Woods who lived in Perth, Ontario published “wood s lot: the fitful tracing of a portal.” Sadly, he died in 2017 but back in 2002 when he was struggling to find the money for a new computer so he could keep writing, Euan Semple all the way over in the UK sent him the money to buy a new PC. It was a lovely act, and reaffirmed what blogging always had been: generosity and connection. Another who blogged in the manner of whiskey river included Steve Laidlaw from Kamloops BC, who published the long gone “riley dog.”
I parked my car this morning in the village and walked down to my favourite coffee place for an espresso. Every one of the three conversations I overheard was about people discussing the pros and cons of ChatGPT. Pros seem to be that “it helped me to know what to ask for when I talked to my car insurance company” and cons are mostly “how do we know that any of this is real?” More seriously I’m sitting near folks who work in the arts and the looks on their faces are of the deepest concern. They use it. For ideas, for a writing prompt, but the times they have used it to write dialogue, they can spot how crappy it is. At the moment.
My earliest post about was Google was from 2002 when it was an insanely useful tool for searching the web. “Google cooking” was a simple game where one entered in a list of ingredients and it returned a list recipes. It was novel at the time. Great for weeknight dinners. Another game was called “Googlewhack” whereby one would try to construct a two word search term that resulted in only one result. You can’t play that one anymore.
The complete enshittification of search engines, combined with web content that has been generated by robots in order to sell stuff is increasing turning web-search an absolutely useless activity. I just use my search engine (DuckDuckGo) as a collection of bookmarks now. It is hard to do any meaningful research anymore, and so we turn to ChatGPT for answers. And ChatGPT is out there learning the questions we ask. Something sits weird with me when I think about how while Google learned the answers we like, and AI is learning the questions we ask.
The questions are important, as is the way we ask them and to whom we ask them. Sonja today writes about the questions that help us discern a direction, which is different from finding a way. Sometimes we don’t even know what the direction is although we can discern that wherever we are right now, somewhere else is better. Thinking about that and talking about it together is an essential human capacity and it’s a pretty fundamental part of how we work with teams facing complexity. There is an art to asking to right kinds of questions and thinking about them together that reveals a deeper level at which affordances and opportunities might exist. Sometimes getting unstuck means drilling down and not reaching out.
Collaborative outcomes are emergent properties of discrete human systems of encounter and meaning-making – “dialogic containers” I call them. If you are a leader seeking a course of action, you might get some good ideas by submitting notes and documents and harvests into a large language model to suggest possibilities. In fact, you could even have your team members do that on their own and bring the output to a meeting to talk about what they have found. My hypothesis is if you continue to do that without involving humans you will end up with an endless set of ideas and possibilities, but you will miss the co-creationi and co-ownership that makes sustained effort possible in a particular direction. I can’t yet see how large language models can surface a consensus that will inspire collaborative action. Deep meaning and commitment to one another is produced by the people within the container who discover something between them that is worth trying, worth pursuing together. Calls to action are far less sustainable than co-creation of a direction. Even if, and perhaps especially if, such a direction is deeply flawed to begin with. There is nothing better than failing together and then finding a way forward to build cohesion.
I might be wrong in the future but in this moment, systems-complexity and anthro-complexity are different and humans experience emergence differently from mechanical systems, even those that are capable of learning. Dialogue practitioners base their practice on this idea; that no matter how great the ideas are, nothing gets sustained in human systems without the intangibles of co-ownership, meaningful engagement, and dare I say, at some level, love.