Dave continues and concludes his posts on anthro-complexity, with an important post that captures my feelings exactly about the role of the facilitator-host-practitioner*:
When the practitioner’s contribution is methodological rather than interpretive, the basis of their authority shifts. They are not authoritative because they can see what participants cannot; they are useful because they can design conditions that the system itself cannot easily design from within its existing patterns. That is a more modest and more honest claim, and it is one that can, in principle, be contested and revised by participants rather than being grounded in a theoretical framework that participants are not trained to evaluate. The mandate question remains: who commissions the work, on what terms, accountable to whom, but at least the answer is no longer occluded by the mystique of expert interpretation.
The whole post is an important read – as is the whole series. It offers a very important set of observations about the work of the complexity practitioner and should spark discussion in the facilitation community amongst thoughtful practitioners around the areas where their roles and work still sit uncomfortably with themselves.
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* I use this hyphenated term because in conversations with Dave about this thinking over the past few weeks, and with others, I recognize that what we call ourselves, and how we are viewed as “facilitators” or “hosts,” has much to do with the assumptions we all make about each other’s practice. Most facilitators don’t have much experience seeing other facilitators in action. Certainly almost all of my clients have seen far more facilitation approaches and actions than I have. So I find it important to try to tell people HOW I work rather than what title I use for myself, especially if we are contracting for work. Nevertheless, I’m appreciating Dave’s “practitioner” label as it is a neutral enough term that avoids a named role that comes with so much baggage. Me, I frequently use the terms ‘”host” and “facilitator” interchangeably and loosely, because I am trying to reach people and communities that describe themselves this way, so we can be in a much more sophisticated conversation about practice in complex systems and situations.
A photo by Burns Jennings of a whale that surfaced near his boat in Seymour Bay in 2022. I’m on the shore in front of a garage door, watching through my binoculars.
Back in 2005, my friend Pauline Le Bel wrote a musical about the history of Bowen Island, starting with the Big Bang and coming up tot the present day. I was watching the video of the performance today and was struck by the scene where the protagonist, Duncan, learns about how Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound used to be home to 100 humpback whales. The narrator Raiva tells him that the last whale was killed in 1908 and their voice hadn’t been heard in the Sound since.
Back in 2005 this was pretty true. Humpbacks hadn’t visited our inlet since the last one was killed in 1908. But in 2008, when they returned. My friend Bob Turner made a video about this remarkable turnaround.
By 2022, there were 396 humpbacks in the Salish Sea, and the population has continued growing. Now baby humpbacks come with their mothers to spend the summers here, making this region their permanent home. When I asked Bob what was responsible for the remarkable comeback he said, “well, food of course, but mostly it’s amazing what happens when you just stop killing them.”
Watching Pauline’s performance made me remember that in 2005 we had no idea if this would happen. I remember thinking that if I could just see humpbacks back in the inlet in my lifetime I’d be a happy man. Three years later the first one returned. These days, once they return from their winter breeding grounds, they are almost impossible to miss.
A little hope-core for a rainy March Monday.
My first live Vancouver Goldeneyes game. A result typical of the last year of sports in my life, but an amazing atmosphere and culture in the arena. Everyone watches women’s sports.
So here is a rundown of the last eight months of sports in my life:
The ugly:
- TSS Rovers Men hold first position in the league until the last week of play. Langley United scores as added time penalty in the last game of the season against the Whitecaps and steals the title from us.
- The Toronto Blue Jays lose the World Series in extra innings in game seven.
- The Canada men’s and women hockey teams both lose their gold medal games in overtime to the USA.
- The Rugby Six Nations ended today with Ireland needing England to beat France. Nearly 100 points are scored and by the end of the game, England lead by one. At the clock ticks over the 80th minute they concede a penally for a high tackle and Ramos for France kicks a 45 yard penalty to win the Six Nations and break every heart in Ireland, and every Irish heart everywhere else.
- The Toronto Maple Leafs blow a million two goal leads, and lost another one tonight in the shootout. They drift towards the bottom of the standings, now 12 points out of a playoff spot.
- Tottenham Hotspur look to be facing relegation for the first time since 1977, and just bungled the first leg of their Champions League knockout round campaign. The new manager is, let’s say, not loved. Igor Tudor, we hardly knew ye.
- The Vancouver Goldeneyes drop two overtime losses in a row, making it four in a row lately.
Important individual games that provided moments of extreme quality and deep heartbreak. And seasons for some of the teams I follow that have drifted into bizarre and sustained failure.
The beautiful:
- TSS Rovers women win the Metro Women’s Soccer League on the last game of the season for the first time in their 15 year history.
- Vancouver Rise (including former TSS Rover Kirsten Tynan) slide into the playoffs, beat Ottawa on penalties in the second leg of the semi final and upset League winners AFC Toronto in the final to win the Championship.
So, focus on the women’s football. Rovers and Rise seasons starts next month.
Participants in a meeting of the Japanese OD Network self-organizing in a dialogic container to discuss what they learning from an embodied experience of constraints, Kanzan University, Nagoya, 2019
Dave Snowden is publishing a TON of stuff these last few weeks, much of densely theoretical and full of references to thinkers and traditions that would probably take years to properly unpack. Nevertheless I appreciate these posts because “anthro-complexity” – the name he has given to his body of work – has been the most influential body of theory in helping me to think through the ideas of dialogic containers, hosting, sense-making, and leadership.
What has been missing from his work is a clear definition of anthro-complexity. I have described it as “the complexity of human systems” as a short-hand way of differentiating it from other ways of thinking about complexity. At any rate, Dave took a crack at a provisional definition this week:
Anthro-complexity holds that human complex adaptive systems are part of the natural world and embedded within it, while being irreducibly different from other natural systems in ways that matter for how we understand and intervene in them. Their agents have intelligence, identity, and intention: a reflexive capacity enacted in language, relationship, and cultural practice rather than located in any bounded interior; a sense of self always constituted in interaction with others, shaped by history, narrative, and cultural membership, and never fully available to conscious inspection; and the ability to act toward imagined futures in ways that alter the very conditions being acted upon. These are not complications to be managed but constitutive features of the system. Meaning does not simply emerge; it is enacted through embodied experience, narrative, and distributed social interaction, and it is always path-dependent, culturally situated, and shaped by history that cannot be undone.
This shifts the practitioner’s question. Not what this system is for, but what it is doing and what is becoming possible or impossible within it. Not “what should this system become?” but “what are the energy gradients, what can be shifted and what cannot, and what micro-interventions change the conditions under which different futures become available?” The role is not to design outcomes but to attend to what is already emergent, to read the terrain: what flows, what resists, what the material, the skills, the habits, the experience and the natural evolved talent (in other words, the craft) affords; and to intervene with and through the natural grain of how meaning actually forms rather than imposing frameworks from outside.
I like this for a number of reasons:
- The embedded nature of human systems means that we have to take into consideration the many contexts in which they are embedded and to which they are related.
- Meaning is both emergent and enacted, which means that people are making and enacting meaning alongside the emergence and enactment of the system. And as they do so they influence the system in different ways.
- Dave’s “practitioner’s question” is one that I too am trying to address. Yes to not designing outcomes. Yes also to attending to what I call (borrowing from Juarerro) the constraint regimes at play, which shape emergence, affordances, flows, exchanges, boundaries. attractors, connectors and identities.
- And furthermore, I agree strongly that the practitioners’s role is not imposition of frameworks or methods. In my practice I see methods as something I might call constraint-craft.
My own exploration of this world uses the term “host” for this work, as it connects to participatory practice in the Art of Hosting community and takes the emphasis off of the action of “facilitation” which essentially means “to make things easy.” I don’t do that. I design and offer scaffolding for experiences to for participants and groups to be together making sense of the work in order to act. And a lot of my writing here has been in-the-public thinking through of this problem of “facilitator as a person with an outsized profile” and “facilitator as a person who uses that power and trust to immediately vacate the field for participants to get to work.”
So I appreciate this definition and Dave’s continued clarity on these topics both as a way to clarify what we are actually talking about and as a set of ideas from which we can truly critique facilitation while also building up a role of host as complexity practitioner who crafts with constraints to enable meaning and action through and understanding of emergence, interaction and affordances. I think I have one more post in me on the series on theory that I have been writing (part 1, part 2, part 3) and it will be about the role and craft of the practitioner, the host, the person who builds the scaffolding of constraints, and what that craft looks like and what pitfalls we have to avoid.
Back in 1995 I came across Open Space Technology, in a huge conference in Whistler, where 400 people were exploring public participation practice. Witnessing the facilitators hosting this event was game changing for my facilitation practice. After years of being the “sage on the stage” and standing at the front of a room with a flip chart marker in my hand reframing participant’s words, I finally saw what facilitation could be if it was in service of enabling self-organization in groups. It set me on a life-long journey to develop my practice of participatory process.
That journey coincided with my own learning about complexity and self-organization in the natural world, reading Capra and Maturana, and Gleick and later, Snowden, Eoyang, and others. In 2003 I encountered the Art of Hosting community for the first time, where I met other people who were asking the same questions as I was about the role of facilitation, the ways in which it gets in the way of groups doing their own work and what stance we could take that would enable people in groups and organizations to work together on their stickiest challenges. We were disrupting traditional notions of facilitation and organizational development and building a body of work that spanned many disciplines and an eclectic set of approaches.
Every year since 2004, along with some of our dearest colleagues, we have offered at least one, and many years two, Art of Hosting trainings here in the Vancouver region, inviting people from all over the world to join us. Next month we will welcome folks for our 27th local Art of Hosting and we have a few spots left to fill. April 27-29 we will gather at the historic Heritage Hall in Vancouver, a City-owned public space, to talk and learn about how participatory methods, leadership, and design can help unstick groups and organizations who are confronting complex challenges.
We’d love to have you join us. Learn more at the website, where you can also register right away.