Some good links on complexity
Roope Kaaronen’s: The Ecology of Design. A nice introduction to path dependancy, affordances and ecological psychology.
Alicia Juarrero being interviewed by Jim Hutt on her book Context Changes Everything and on how constraints create possibility landscape and constraint regimes.
The Vampire Problem is a thought experiment that demonstrates why it is so hard to act in uncertainty. Maria Popova does her usual brilliant job of unpacking it.
Martina Dimopoulou takes over then Cynefin blog with a fabulous post on salience and how we notice the world and the weak signals within it.
Brian Ponch Rivera takes a deep dive into John Boyd’s development of his thinking behind the OODA loop. It’s an interesting exposition of how a curious learner assembles a framework over time and worth a read for that reason, even if you know nothing about OODA.
Other good things to read and listen to.
The elephant in the room is a subject that never gets old. Cheyenne Coxon talks about how and why to make friends with the pachyderm: “The elephant affects everyone in the room, even if they’re not directly involved in the situation. After a certain point it all becomes so distracting and ridiculous to pretend and navigate around it that something has to give. There’s no real telling on the timeline there, but it becomes a volatile situation that ramps up everyone’s anxiety as they wait for an impending fallout. It actually takes a lot of energy to pretend something is fine when it’s not, and the dissonance it creates in our bodies is an insidious source of stress and poor health for people and organizations.”
Part Two continues the exploration with some reflections on living with the elephant, finding friends and when it’s time to leave the elephant enclosure.
Weak signals from the “breathing grounds.” That term is used by Ramon Kataquapit to describe the precious James Bay Lowlands, a bleak region of estuary and peat lands that ring the southern end of James Bay. It’s Ramon’s backyard and what he says as a youth leader about the future of these lowlands is a weak signal about the dangers of our current federal government’s major projects initiative.
A segment on CBC’s The Current about a new reality show on Netflix based on the Stanford Prison Experiment. I won’t be watching the show. But the segment today had an interview with psychology researcher Jay Van Bevel in which he shares some interesting insights that are relèvent to my triangle tool for understanding dialogic containers. Leadership matters, not just authority or design.