I stumbled on Jen Briselli’s work the other day. She’s a fantastic writer and communicator, distilling the complexity work that we both know and love and making it approachable and understandable to others. She asks great questions, and is introducing me to approaches and tools that are new and interesting and great process and facilitation debriefs to reflect on her practice.
And her Letter to a Young Systems Thinker speaks to me, drawing from poets, and artists and filmmakers and scientists to provide a really lovely set of thoughtfully articulated practices that are excellent advice for all of us. To wit:
Bruising
Some parts of a system only speak on impact: when you touch it, bump into it, crash through it. You can’t learn everything from a map. You can still trip over the rocks at your feet.
Deep knowing emerges when action and reflection collide, when ideas get tested against lived complexity, and when our models fall apart just enough to let something else poke through.
Consider this a form of gnosis: the type of knowing that arises not from detached observation, but from our own direct, lived experience. Unlike abstract knowledge (episteme) or belief (doxa), gnosis is intimate, situated, and relational.
The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot. — Werner Herzog
To know a system through gnosis is to enter the dialogue through participation and give credibility to intuition. It requires that we feel our way forward, and let our assumptions be reshaped in real time. This kind of knowing cannot be abstracted or outsourced. It is slow, iterative, and deeply personal. And it changes not just what we know, but how we identify the future outcomes we want to amplify.
Nice to meet you Jen.
Cedric Jamet and I together at the Art of Hosting Reimagining Education gathering a couple of weeks ago.
The other week we were sitting in the Queen’s University Biological Station in Elgin Ontario, opening our third annual Art of Hosting on Reimagining Education. Cedric Jamet was teaching about the chaordic path, the term we use for the leadership path that works with a dance of chaos and order. The chaordic space is the space of self-organization, where structure and form creates the conditions for otherwise chaotic spaces to produce direction, coherence, energy and engagement without top down control. It is a way of conceptualizing self-organization in groups, which is the kind of facilitation practice I specialize in.
The idea of self-organization, what it is, how it arises, what practices support it is been the single most important organizing question of my professional career. As Cedric put it in Elgin, this is what the world needs, to be hosted so that people can self-organize to improve their conditions, make beautiful and sustainable things and sustain good work with strong relationships. When we create the conditions that enable self-organization, we are creating places of “safe uncertainty” and relational connectivity. We create what I call “dialogic containers” which become places of meaning and sustainable connection. Strong dialogic containers can hold difference and conflict without rendering the relational field. They can provide spaces for meaning and depth and purpose. Sustained over time they can become “life-giving contexts.” As a facilitator and in my work leading and supporting leaders, everything we do points in this direction.
Over the past 20 years this inquiry has led me into two major areas of practice. I have studied and worked deeply with the Art of Hosting and the field of participatory process design and facilitation. Based around the “Four Fold Practice” – presence, participation, hosting contribution, and co-creation – the Art of Hosting is a simple framework for a practice that, as Cedric said, helps us enable self-organization. This is a well-established field of facilitation practice and I work with facilitation methods that are found in the fields of dialogic organizational development, collaborative change management, and anthro-complexity including those contained in the seminal collection of large groups methods, and small scale Liberating Structures, as well as the suite of methods from Participatory Narrative Inquiry.
The other area of practice I have explored is complexity, in an effort to understand the conditions by which self-organization arises. This has led me through the various threads of complexity in human and living systems initially through the work of Senge, Wheatley, Scharmer who came out of the system thinking world with new metaphors, models and understandings about how things worked. From there I dove deep into anthro-complexity, championed primarily by Dave Snowden who work on ontologies is a significant contribution to this field as it helps leaders, facilitators and process designers make good choices about the way they participate and intervene in different situations. I also read deeply and learned with other complexity-focused theorists and process designers like Cynthia Kurtz, whose work on story is especially important, and Glenda Eoyang, whose work on complexity and whose suite of methods and approaches called Human Systems Dynamics is accessible, simple, and extremely effective for the most part in seeing and working with complexity.
The two most significant academic works I’ve published reflected these two streams as I have written about and explored the ideas of dialogic containers as the key structures which enable self-organization and meaning-making. In Hosting and Holding Containers, I talk about the concept of a dialogic container and use the four-fold practice to describe how to work with these phenomena. In “Hosting Dialogic Containers: a key to working in complexity” I talk about containers from a more complexity-informed perspective and discuss the role of constraints in designing and hosting containers. A subsequent paper, published only in Japanese is actually closer to my current thinking on the constraints framework that I use.
This morning I am sitting in an Open Space meeting while all around this place a small team of folks are busy engaging in conversations that are necessary for creating their future. These people are interested in pedagogy and learning design, and I was struck by the fact that Open Space was a new experience for almost every single one of them. But I can hear the snippets of conversation and see the energy and attention in the work that is happening, and I continue to be astonished at how powerful self-organization is, given the right kind of container for it. We have an urgent question that is a deep attractor. We have connections and exchanges that are already strong in the team and made stronger by the visioning conversations we had yesterday. And we have important boundaries, including a threshold that was crossed with a new Director, a beautiful space that is full or opportunity and a timeline for the work that is both bounded and generous. There is urgency but not emergency, still room for excitement creativity and energy.
I have done many hundreds of Open Space events, large and small, and each one has delighted me as I watch groups of people self-organize and take responsibility for the issues that matter to them. I remained astonished by the powerful and generative nature of a life-giving dialogic container that emerges from a few enabling constraints thoughtfully applied and held. And I remain grateful for the immense body of work that underlies this approach to human organizations and communities and all those friends and teachers who guided and taught me along the way.
Christina Baldwin, in a lovely post remembering her father’s death:
We often pray to our ancestors and call upon the angelic/invisible realms for help. We attune ourselves, like this favorite quote from Willa Cather (in Death Comes for the Archbishop): “Miracles seem to rest not so much upon healing power coming near us from afar, but on our perceptions being made finer so that our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there around us always.” We look for signals, for morphed presence. A bee that hovers, a raven that follows us, a light but discernible hand on the shoulder, a voice that calls out warning or blessing.
Thirty years ago tomorrow, Back in 1995, Quebecers nearly voted to leave Canada. Paul Wells was at the Montreal Gazette during those days and wrote a great piece for The Walrus about his experience covering the campaign.
This week I’m in Calgary where Albertans are facing two Constitutional issues. Yesterday the provincial government used the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Constitution to end a legal teacher’s strike and unilaterally impose a contract settlement on teachers in the Province. This clause, which is a weird piece of Canadian law, allows governments to temporarily suspend some Constitutionally protected Charter rights for a fixed period of time. It has been used recently for populist causes, to suspend the rights of children in Saskatchewan, to order education support workers off the picket lines in Ontario, to ban the wearing of religious symbols in public by Quebec public servants and, yesterday, to end a teacher’s strike in Alberta teachers. Ironically, it is often the supporters of these governments that advocate for the sanctity of the Charter of Rights.
The other Constitutional issue Alberta is facing is a problem of the Premier, Danielle Smiths’s own making. Populists are fond of courting outrage and a nascent spark of a separatist movement has been fanned into a smouldering pile of angry incoherence by the Premier and her government as she tries to hold on to folks at the far right of her base. In a very clever effort to upend this movement, Thomas Lukaszuk, tabled a petition request to create a “Forever Canada” referendum and he secured hundreds of thousands more signatures than the referendum law required. By law, that referendum would have to be held first, before any separatist referendum takes place. Strange things happen in Alberta above the waterline, but deep down folks are both focused on making their communities and province better and also a lot more thoughtful about how to do so. The outrageous soundbites we hear from political leaders are just not what everyone is always talking about. Those signals are important to heed.
I learned of Bill Torbert’s death today through a nice collection of links and tributes at Benjamin Taylor’s blog. I met Bill several times at the Shambhala Institute on Authentic Leadership where we were both on faculty in the late ‘aughts. Being on the faculty at that Institute was a mixed blessing. While one got to hang out with some true lions in the field, and make some unique memories, we never got to take each other’s sessions. Bill taught with Mary Stacey at those sessions and I was constantly intruiged by their module. He was also a friend and loving champion of Peter Frost’s, Caitlin’s father. After Peter died in 2004 and we made that connection he shared some very sweet memories of their times together at Academy of Management conferences over the years. Most of Bill’s research is freely available at ResearchGate.
Bill had an erring eye for the kinds of intangible resources that built capacity, like reflection, inquiry and relationality. In that vein thinking about systems change from the perspective of weaving relations and resilience inside a system is important. Here are some resources about the work of the Collective Change Lab who focus on just that work.
I was out at a play Friday night, a terrific local production of Tom Stoppard’s clever and funny Rough Crossing, and so I didn’t see the final score in the first game of the World Series. I knew the game was tied 2-2 for a while, but when the break came in the play I was told that the Jays had won 11-4. Later, watching the highlights, it was amazing to see the atmosphere in Toronto. Sport culture is such an abiding interest, and there is nothing more elevating as a communal experience than witnessing your underdog team beat the Champions in the most important game of the past 32 years.
Last night I was performing in a coffee house fundraiser on our island while the Blue Jays suffered a loss in Game 2. The chemistry and camaraderie and feedback loops across time and space are plainly visible with this team. They aren’t as talented as the Dodgers but they are exhibiting the power of those intangibles.
We’re getting soaked with a prime October Pineapple Express, an atmospheric river that is delivering wind and rain from down near Hawaii all the way to our coast, filling the streams, dusting the mountains with snow and welcoming the salmon home. I absolutely love this weather and this morning I’m sitting in my favourite cafe, window wide open and the full force of the rain falling on the pier and the sea. Ahhh.
Complexity delivers mind-blowing things all the time. In addition to, well, everything, the evolution of the universe has created both more entropy and more forms of order. When Margaret Wheatley wrote “Leadership and the New Science” she implored us to move on from the Newtonian model of the universe – linear, knowable, predictable – to embrace the quantum physics and living systems approaches that were the philosophical legacy of the 20th century. Using these big frames of how scientists understand reality as stories and metaphors for the systems that operate all around us is an all consuming cultural project as we seek to make sense of realities. In this video from Quanta Magazine, Robert Hazan and Michael Wong discuss their theory of information as they try to explain how evolution seeks to fill every possibility space that it creates. There are multiple stories that flow from this work including the idea that functional information is what powers evolution and increases the number of ways things can be organized, and that in turn increases resourcefulness and possibility. This flows from diversity and capacity and from life working to fill every affordance it encounters. I picture a vine probing every crack in a wall and finding new pathways to get a foothold, new creatures to evolve, new ways to combine the basic building blocks of the universe, even as it all happens with a stability of constrained possibility. Anyway, watch the video.
The most complex things I have ever encountered are my own toddlers. If you have parented a toddler, Tim Urban has your back. He perfectly describes the utter mystification of parenting a two year old. Read it in the rain.
Have s good weekend. Go Blue Jays.