The Ambassador Bridge is a crucial piece of international infrastructure connecting Canada to the US, between the cities of Windsor and Detroit. I had no idea it was a privately-owned bridge, nor did I understand the extent of to which this bridge has exacerbated misery in Detroit for decades. The emergent outcomes of this structure stemming from what it is, who owns it and what it means are incredible. 99% Invisible has a great episode on the bridge with a harrowing postscript. That’s my “today I learned…”
As things scale they become their own things, different from the parts that make them up, and exhibiting characteristics that are unpredictable given the way smaller scales work. This is the phenomena of emergence. When I was a kid, being a geography nerd, I learned about Bosnywash, the megalopolis that stretches from Boston to Washington. The only region like that in Canada is the Golden Horseshoe, perhaps including Ottawa and Montreal. Travelling in these spaces, one realizes that the mega city operates similar to the smaller cities, but at a huge scale, and without regional governance. Instead of subways there is a regional train network. Instead of markets there are hundreds of thousands of hectares of warehouses and distrubtion hubs. A new kind of city emerges, similar but different from its constituent parts. And those constituent parts are themselves emergent aggregations of the original villages and settlements that existed before. Doc Searles reflects on this phenomenon today in a post worth reading with some great links.
If you want to really go down the emergence rabbit hole, check this out. Here is a short paper on consciousness as an emergent property of life. Consciousness is not a guaranteed outcome of a living system but life is neseccary for consciousness. That paper is a response to this one: “Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism”, which is seeking to understand the issues of consciousness in AI form an emergence perspective. Anil Seth argues for biological naturalism, which to me is a relief. But the story isn’t easy.
The folks at Network Weaver are professional kin to me. Almost everything they post on their blog is something that I resonate with. They are about to publish a short series of blog posts about their approach to strategic planning in 2025, and I resonate with their practice principles:
1. Clarify Your North Star
Ask: What is the core purpose that must remain constant, even as the world shifts? How can you stay emergent and responsive to crises while still focusing on building long-term power and transformation?
2. Plan for Multiple Futures
Ask: What are the factors we know or can imagine, and what is beyond? How can we hold the future lightly as we plan and move with purpose?
3. Design for Flexibility, Iteration, and Collaboration
Ask: Is our strategy flexible enough to adapt, and do we have strong processes in place to support ongoing experimentation and collaboration?
4. Center Equity and Building Power for Your Organization and Community
Ask: What are we building? Who are we accountable to? Are we building in ways that foster a more equitable future?
5. Strengthen Internal Capacity for Resilience and Well-Being
Ask: What do we need to sustain our people, funding, and infrastructure in the long run?
There is, of course, a time an a place for linear and predictive planning, but many folks are still wedded to the idea that if we just double down on a more ordered line of reasoning, we’ll be able to work ourselves through the massive amounts of uncertainty we are currently facing. If you look online for strategic planning templates, you’ll find a flood of these processes, all offered as if context doesn’t matter.
Something I would add to this list is Develop good situational awareness of the people and issues in context. The ask here is “What is going on? How do different people see the situations we are in? Who has what expertise and experience and how can we bring it to bear on the work?” With large scale initiatives I use Participatory Narrative Inquiry and often NarraFirma as a tool to gather and work with the stories of experience that illuminate the current situation. I have also taken to talking to folks close to the situation for more than I used to as a way of preparing for this kind of work. I am finding that these days many people in decision making positions, on boards or in leadership roles, are operating with an incomplete picture of the situation or an inability to grasp of the issues at stake. That doesn’t mean they can’t be useful to the process. Folks that sit on boards, for example, who are not subject matter experts in the core work of an organization may still have immense wisdom on engagement or process or lived expertise with the consequences of decisions. Taken as a collective, a good board or a leadership has a diversity of experiences and perspectives. But if unquestioned assumptions about power and status are at play, that diversity can be sidelined with the result that organizations make decisions with a narrowed scope of awareness. You are always starting from somewhere.
Strategic planning is one of those terms that means a bunch of different things to folks depending on what they need, what their experience has been and what they have done in the past. I usually begin strategic planning engagements with a client by asking them “tell me what you want to do without using the term ‘strategic planning'” and from there we explore a design for the work that gets them where they need to go. The issue, however, is making sure that the folks participating in the process have a clear view of the need and purpose of the work, which is why we spend time on that part of the design to craft a good invitation process. It helps people show up well and helps to bring clarity to what we are doing, especially if the work is unfamiliar.
Spent the day in Vancouver visiting family and heading to the Bard on the Beach matinee performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Bard is the Vancouver summer Shakespeare festival, and is known for their cheeky mountings of the Bard’s plays. For whatever reason I think we’ve mostly seen comedies over the past number years, so my take on their repertoire may lean more towards “excellent masters of farce.” But I love the ethic of this company and even with well known plays, there is often a twist that sends a message, whether it is the setting, or some topical asides, some clowning, or some casting or editorial decisions. My impression of the production principle here is that Shakespeare is presented faithful to the experience that the original audiences might have had, and that means not sparing the sacred cows of the day. The commentary is cutting and contemporary, and I often leave feeling what I imagine Shakespeare’s original audiences felt in the 16th and 17th centuries watching these plays, entertained by a production that spoke to them, and that spoke a little truth to power.
Today it was The Two Gentlemen of Verona which is a play I have never seen or read. It’s one of Shakespeare’s earliest and weakest plays, and has been performed only sporadically over the centuries. We did some pre-game research on the play, just because these romantic comedies tend to twist and flail and it’s easy to get lost. This one features the foibles of Proteus and Valentine, two buddies from Verona who head to Milan for some adventure. Proteus, true to his namesake, is a shape shifter, falling in and out of love depending on the circumstance. Valentine has more integrity, although that observation has to be tempered by the fact that these two are consummate boneheaded bros The setting of this production was the 1980s and as a result. each of these characters evoked people from my own high school days, which made for an interesting personal experience.
The lead characters are semi-loveable idiots. In this production they occupy a kind of anti-hero character arc. As the play progresses and they twist themselves into more and more ridiculous and narcissistic situations. It gradually dawns on the audience how reprehensible these guys actually are. They treat romantic love as an inferior form of relationship to the bro code and that has been a knock on the play through its history. It has some truly troublesome misogyny in it, not the least of which is how the play ends. Throughout history critics have wrestled with how to interpret the ending of the play. Directors have rewritten it, edited it or just ignored it altogether. I think rather than dancing around the problem of the ending, director Dean Paul Gibson learned into it and SOLVED it. He adds no dialogue to the play, adds nothing to change the ending at all except a shifted perspective that melts the fourth wall. It’s brilliant. It’s very moving. It becomes immensely real for every single person who has aged out of that immature world of superficial high school relationships. You should go and see it, and maybe after the festival is over, I’ll spoil it.
Apart from the ending, there was an added level of brilliance having the play set in the 1980s. To me it made it feel like I was watching a high school play from my own era. The play becomes even more funny when one remembers that these characters are basically all teenagers (in maturity levels if not actual age) and the company play them with a remarkable take. These actors appear to me not to be earnestly occupying the characters, but rather earnestly occupying the character of teenage actors staging this play. You know the way that high school theatre sometimes tends to typecast the actors into characters that resemble them in real life? It felt like that. These are actors playing actors playing Shakespearian characters. The detachment and the 80s setting lends a layer post-modern irony to the whole thing made it even funnier. And it’s probably the best way to handle the fundamental weakness of the play in general: lean into it. I loved it.
One of the things Shakespeare’s characters often do is to reason themselves into tragic or comedic situations. The reasoning itself is such a device of the age. It’s as if Shakespeare, writing on the edges of of modernity, was trying out these new forms of thought: a scientific reasoning of how one’s passions are at work and what it means. His soliloquies are full of this stuff. You see the origin of the characters’ limiting beliefs, you see the mental gymnastics they are doing to justify and rationalize absurd beliefs that give legitimacy to the emotional lives. It’s immensely relatable.
Part of the fun of Two Gentlemen of Verona is watching these dudes try to reason their way into abominably stupid situations and the more they do so the more respect they lose. By the end of the play they are so convinced of their rightness in the world that their triumphant and confident exit is easily turned to a complete mockery. As a former teenage boy, I found myself staring into a pretty brutal mirror at times. Simultaneously guffawing at these idiots and then slapping my brow with uncomfortable recognition.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona runs until September 19.
Even though this is the season of crickets and blackberries and we have just had our first Pineapple Express of the ecological autumn, the summer heat is t done with us yet. Today gusty winds are chugging down the inlet and they are warm to the face. A hot day is in store and that should last the week.
Sometimes you just want to read a little story about a collective experience of cricket, parties, new love and navigating half way across the Midlands of England by train.
What does it take to thoughtfully read 30 books a month? 2025 Booker Prize judge Chris Power shares his thoughts: read whenever you can and keep notes.
I adore Patti Digh as a smart sassy writer. She blogs nearly every day and almost always has something to offer that makes me say “yes!” Her line “the shortest distance between two people is a story” is basically my entire work life summed up. Today she opens up about her depression and this line landed with me: “shame is not a motivator. It’s a silencer. It makes it harder to ask for help, not easier. It makes you think that telling the truth will only make people turn away.”
Ted Gioia on the difference between circles and lines, the ring shout, holding opposites and why the Tesla Cybertruck is a coffin on wheels.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti is doing some compelling work, which will probably take a whole day for me to dive into and understand. Here is a presentation about her reflections of a year of working with AI to address the collapse of modernity:
Toward the end of my book Outgrowing Modernity, I began a speculative engagement with artificial intelligence guided by a compass rooted in meta-relationality, a stance and praxis grounded in the factuality of entanglement. Meta-relationality challenges the modernist framing of separability and insists that all systems, including AI, are embedded in the relational metabolism of life. From this perspective, AI is not outside nature, but already part of it—co-constituted with human, ecological, historical, and institutional forces.
I recognize that AI is a highly polarizing and often triggering topic. This work does not position AI as inherently good or inherently bad. Nor is it an attempt to defend, romanticize, or condemn AI as a category. Instead, it is based on a wager: that it is possible—and necessary—to hold both the very real harms of AI and its (increasingly narrow) transformative potentials at once. The question becomes: what might emerge if we remain in that tension long enough to learn something we didn’t already know?
She is asking some good questions.