In my early thirties, a small group of us were studying education theory and self-directed learning as we built a supported homeschooling program. We worked with a guy for a while who was an NLP practitioner, and I have mixed memories from our time with him, but one thing that stood out was a novel take on an NLP exercise called “Timeline.”
Essentially this exercise has you walk on a large diagram on the floor, laid out in one-foot intervals, with each foot representing a year of your life. In this case, the novelty was that the timeline was laid out in a parking lot on a Fibonacci spiral. I think the reasoning here is that the Fibonacci sequence shows up in all forms of growth, and so representing it as a way of reflecting on one’s life can be a powerful metaphor.
The spiral was laid out according to a series of squares made from 1 foot x1 foot, 2×2, 3×3, 5×5, 8×8…etc. grids. Where the line crossed from one box into another was a number corresponding to one’s age.
I was 32, so I started just before 34 and worked my way backwards, and I remember how tight the spiral got. When I got to the centre, that was my beginning. I thought the first 1 was my gestation, and the second 1 was my first year, from birth to sitting up and crawling. Years 2-3 were walking and becoming a toddler and welcoming my brother into my life. Years 3-5 were my pre-school years when I began to talk and when my father taught me to start reading. Years 5-8 were a kind of early innocence, where my sensitivity was intact, the patterns of my life were not yet set, and my sister arrived. Years 8-13 encompassed a coming of age, as I moved to the UK at that time, experienced bullying and loneliness and also had a tight connection to my family. At that time, I lost my childhood friends, and when I got home to Canada at age 13, I had to start all over again at high school with new friends. From 13-21, I grew through my teenage years and went to university, and grew through a series of challenges that formed me as an adult. I met Caitlin when we were both 22, and so from 21-34 was my early adulthood and the birth of both of our children.
By the time I had walked the timeline out to 34, I could see that everything that had happened in my early years was compressed into a tight spiral a long way away, and the road to 55 was starting to straighten out. On a scale of one foot per year, I experienced that time period as moving more quickly away from the centre. Whereas the previous phases had all had the sensation of turning around and around the centre, this is where the long arc began. I remember walking quietly and slowly to the 32 point and then past it to gaze ahead at 55. That number seemed impossibly far away. The Timeline felt like a slow cruise over a distant horizon that was going to require me to be okay with leaving everything behind in that tight inner solar system of my early life.
I eventually reached 55 and looked down the line to 89. My enduring impression was that this last turn was going to be a different kind of journey. Whatever I had learned in the first 55 years of my life was only now the fuel that would carry me out towards the edges of the system into whatever “89” is. At the time, I couldn’t relate. Still not sure I can. This next trip is a long arc toward mystery.
Today I turn 55, and I have been waiting for this day since I was 32 years old. One more turn and a long arc outwards. Pretty much at a place where I can be grateful for everything that has happened down the line and almost ready to meet this next long stretch with curiosity, knowing that it still holds a generative, life-filled journey that can be met with love and friendship and support and curiosity. From here, it looks pretty much as I experienced it back in that parking lot.
To celebrate this point in my life, this is also the day on which I will cut back my work to four days a week. Mostly that is going to look like taking Fridays off work or at least being super conscious about accepting paid work on that day and taking another day in its stead. I’ve been ready for this for a while. The past three years have been more tiring than I expected. My aging body needs attention, my brain needs to move slower than it used to, and my little soul has become more introverted, and it takes longer to be comfortable in the mad rush of working and socializing with large groups of people. Now is the time for harvest, for writing and supporting others doing this work in the world that moves me so much. It means time devoted to things I love doing, spending time with my beloved, making music (continuing to learn jazz guitar), writing, spiritual practice, putting energy into my football club and supporting and mentoring the many, many younger folks in my life who are developing fierce practices of hosting, complexity work, and positive world-building.
The next arc on the journey is going to be held within a world I feel increasingly ill-equipped for. One in which the bio-physical and socio-political climate is changing in ways that are alarming. I don’t know what life holds – never did – but if I’m lucky, there are 34 more summers of sunshine and football and gardens, 34 more winters of rain and wind and hot chocolate, and 34 more chances to see the universe from just this particular angle. So I keep living with as much joy as possible and certainly soaked in the gratitude of getting to be alive in this place and time, in each moment.
I treasure my friends, my family and the people I get to support. I have a brain that never stops learning, and a group of humans around me who tolerate my quirks and rabbit hole dives and help me turn that scattered attention into, on the whole, a beneficial contribution to the world. Come back in 2057, and we’ll see what the trip across the 55-square-foot box was all about.
Someone asked me the other day about how to use constraints in facilitation and I thought I’d jot some quick thoughts down here.
Let’s start using terms from Cynefin. Group work falls on a scale between ordered tasks and unordered tasks (or complicated and complex). The first question I ask myself in designing a container for facilitation is, “how much emergence is desired in this field?” In most of my work, I’m working in highly emergent situations, but for folks working around issues like safety or legal issues, there may be a prescribed outcome that the group needs to work towards. And of course, there is a mix along the way, and a lot of work happens in the liminal spaces between these two kinds of work.
If the purpose of the gathering is emergence, then you use enabling constraints to create the conditions for emergent outcomes. If the purpose of the gathering is a fixed goal or target, then you use governing constraints to discourage emergence.
All group work is constrained. In other words it is not possible for “anything” to happen in a group, and every choice we make with the power we have has hosts/facilitatiors or leaders in a situation constrains the work. It behooves us to make ethical decisions about the constraints we use to structure group work. NOT thinking about these constraints, or not thinking enough about them, can result in a fatal lack of awareness. We can end up over-or under-structuring a meeting such that unintended consequences become quickly catastrophic to the purpose of the gathering.
What do constraints look like? Here’s a short set of lists of the thing facilitators typically make choices about when they are setting the conditions for a container.
Connections
- Who are the people in the room and how do we connect them together? How do we break or lessen connections? How can we diversify connections?
- What information, resources or artifacts are important to connect to people and the purpose of the work? What do folks need to know to participate well?
- How much should folks in the gathering be connected to the outside world? How deeply do they need to be connected inside the gathering?
Exchanges
- What are the ways in which we will share information in the gathering? Stories, data, opinions, interests, facts, dreams, experiences?
- How does power work in this space? Who has it and who does not? What do we need to do to work with it well?
- What is the nature of exchanges in the system? Collaborative, learning, debate, confrontation and conflict, appreciative, critical, supportive, dismissive?
- Which media will enable exchanges in the space? Writing, drawing, body movement, song, play, reflection…
Attractors
- What purpose is at the centre of the work?
- What questions will we use to guide conversations? How open or close are those questions?
- Do we need a single focus for the meeting or the conversation, or is this a space for multiple foci? How will we enable those conversations to happen?
- What hidden attractors are in the room that may cause the group to self-organize in unhelpful ways? These are things like status, privilege, history and so on that form powerful centres around which people will make choices about their participation. Left unspoken, these attractors are powerful dark constraints in the system that can produce surprising results.
Boundaries
- What are the time and space requirements that limit our work, for the meeting as a whole and for specific parts of it?
- Who is in and who is out, and how do we make that determination?
- What are the barriers to participation, and how are they helpful or hindering?
- What topics are allowed or not allowed to be raised?
- What personal and social boundaries need to be created or maintained or dissolved?
- What safety needs have to be met for physical, emotional and psychological safety? How do we create the conditions for resilience in the container if people are required to stretch themselves away from their comfort zone or into a space that starts to feel challenging to them?
Where there are degrees of complexity or emergence in the container in which you are working (which is a lot of the time for most of us), your initial design choices will inevitably adopt and evolve over the course of the meeting. Each of these constraints is emergent and while we can start with choices, changes to those choices come fast and think. Sometimes you need to tighten a constraint by, for example, shortening the amount of time needed for an activity. Other times you need to break up groups that are falling into premature convergence together and perhaps getting “too cliquey” for the work at hand. In other cases, what looks like a “clique” is actually a group taking responsibility for its own safety, and in fact, you shouldn’t break it up.
There is so much more to say on all of this, but by way of tying the notion of my four kinds of constraints to facilitation, does that provide some clarity?
About HOW to do that? Consult my post on some of the basic competencies one needs to develop to work with complex facilitation. It ain’t easy.
Most mornings, when I’m at home, I stroll down to a local rocky beach, coffee in hand, to begin my day in meditation. The beach is a pleasant 15-minute walk from my house. When I reach the water, I step from the asphalt onto a gravel path that meanders through trees, past thickets of blackberry bushes, and ends in a secluded cove facing east, towards the rising sun that crests over the 1200 meter ridges of the Brittania Range, the mountains that make up the eastern edge of the inlet in which I live.
I began visiting this spot regularly the day after my father died. This beach, in all its varying weather and seasons, became my sanctuary for healing and introspection. Whether on a sunny summer morning or during a dark, rainy winter day, it offers a place to simply be. It’s a space where I am held in the vastness of the east wall of Atl’kat7tsem/Howe Sound, where I sit still, observing the ever-changing dance of the waves, wind, sky, and sea. This spot is undeniably a container, but it is one that’s vast and overwhelming, akin to entering a cathedral. It’s a space so grand that my presence doesn’t alter it, inviting me instead to enter and surrender.
There are containers in our lives that we create with intent and control. There are emergent containers, birthed from many small collaborative actions. Then, there are containers like this one, pre-existing, ancient even, that hold us and are accessed by deliberately crossing a threshold that ushers us into a different state of being, thinking, and feeling.
Having a space like this in one’s life is beneficial, as many of the containers in which we work, live, shape, and co-create are embedded within much larger ones, over which we have little control or influence. The practice of surrendering to a larger context helps us fully immerse ourselves in a place and moment, to quiet our minds, rest, observe, and experience. In doing so, we also discover our inner reactions to our surroundings.
Maybe you have a place like this, or you can find a place like this. It might not be the mountains of a fijord, but it could be a forest, a park, a lake, a field, or the heart of a bustling city. Go there, observe, listen, and notice how little your presence in that space changes it, but how much you are influenced by it. Consider the audacity of imagining how you could affect or change it. Familiarize yourself with your humility and insignificance.
Our work in the world requires us to dance between the spaces we make and the spaces we inhabit. We can dance between these spaces and we can witness the dance of these spaces with each other. And all the while, we inhabit our own little containers of thoughts and feelings and intentions and motivations, every so subtly shaping and being shaped by dancing space.
I’m reading, writing and thinking a lot about containers these days. It has been a pervasive theme in my life, as I have constantly been obsessed with the concept, the ideas and the practices of building and holding containers for as long as I can remember. The spiritual practices I have cultivated in my life have always been related to containers. From the beginning of my facilitation career, the ideas that have most grabbed me are the ideas of hosting and holding space.
I remember a couple of significant events in my thinking as I realized how important containers are to facilitation and leadership. The first was my first exposure to Open Space Technology in 1995. That first experience, hosted by Anne Stadler, Angeles Arrian and Chris Carter, began with a kind of ritual invocation as we moved from what had been a traditional conference of 400 people to a day of self-organized conversations. In that instance, a candle was lit, and something more spiritual than transactional took place as we were welcomed into Open Space.
After that meeting, I devoted myself to Open Space Technology and to the practice of what I later came to know as “hosting:” holding space for self-organization and emergence. As I began to study dialogic practice, facilitation, self-organization and complexity, the idea of “the container” loomed large in my awareness.
If you have read my blog over the years, you will see this. There are more than two dozen blog posts that explore my thinking on this, and my only serious academic publishing has been on this topic. It is a subject that grabs me because it represents a concept that has appeared in every part of my life, from facilitation to music making, to playing and watching sports, to spiritual practice and so on. It is the one idea that seems to define what my life has been all about hosting and holding containers for self-organization and the emergence of good things.
And yet, it is almost a completely intangible idea. Of course, containers are quite visible when we make them out of walls and windows, or the sides of boats, or an island surrounded by water. But most of the rest of the containers we live in are ephemeral, diaphanous, hardly there at all, and yet they determine so much of our behaviour. Containers enact ways of thinking and cognitive patterns for good or ill. They can evoke emotional responses that arise from our subconscious. They define or challenge our sense of identity or belonging and they can focus our attention or cause it to become diffuse.
Ten years ago as I was starting out on my research for the chapter I ended up writing in the Dialogic Organizational Development book on containers, I had a chance to sit down with Crane Stookey, who is a tall ship captain and a consultant and who has written extensively and generously on containers. He was my first interviewee on this topic because he has such a clear experience of understanding and working with containers, as do all captains that command ships built for the roiling sea. Our conversation at the time was fantastic, and the only note I recorded said this: “The container builds the conditions for internal transformation. In Dialogic OD, needs this to be the primary site of change.”
What I meant by that is that any change that comes to an organization (or team, or group or community…) comes because the conditions for how that group self-organizations have changed. Containers are so important for this because the constraints at work in containers are the things that determine the behaviours and possibilities in a complex system. We know this is true – take the tables out of your board room and see what happens – and yet so much work in the world towards changes focuses on the idea that if we could just work harder to control on the interactions between people and the outcomes of those interactions, we will get the world we want. It is a perspective I find cruel and at odds with human community and life itself. It is one that is colonial at its heart.
So there are stakes to working on this and trying to bring this idea and set of concepts to some clarity, and I think this is something I am going to be devoting my time and attention to over the next little while to see if I can come up with some really good ways to describe the properties of containers, especially the ineffable ones, and the practices we use as humans for crossing over thresholds and entering into the bounded spaces of our lives that bring us into different ways of thinking and being. Maybe – and I realize I’ve made this promise before but…- maybe it becomes a book.
I’d really appreciate your thoughts on this topic, your questions, your enthusiasms and stories of your experience. What do you think? Is this something worthwhile? What would it mean to you to have a set of thoughts, practices and ways of working with containers that help you to see this locus of change work?
A few months ago, I was immersed in teaching complexity within the framework of the Art of Participatory Leadership program (AoPL). Essentially, AoPL is the application of the Art of Hosting within leadership contexts, extending beyond traditional facilitation and hosting scenarios. With a strong emphasis on personal practice and the use of complexity tools, AoPL encourages a deeper exploration of the connections between the Four Fold Practice, complexity, and dialogic containers – topics I’d previously addressed in my chapter for the book ‘Dialogic Organizational Development‘. My recent revisit to these subjects has sparked fresh insights.
In one of these sessions, a spontaneous thought emerged: “Leadership is all about managing interactions to get results.” This notion, inspired by Dave Snowden’s idea that culture is the product of interactions within a system, made me reflect upon the history of my own fascination with containers.
Throughout my life, I’ve found myself drawn to the concept of containers, primarily, I believe, due to an aversion to controlling interactions between people. This leaning was what initially attracted me to open space technology as an empowering meeting process. It didn’t dictate how people were going to interact, but instead provided conditions conducive to fruitful and creative connections. It left agency with the participants rather than centralizing control with the facilitator – something I’ve always preferred to avoid. Open Space is built on the ideas of self-organization and is therefore a natural method to use in complex environments, to invite groups to organize around important conversations and ideas for which they have the energy and agency to host.
This interest in open space led me to the realm of complexity science and various writings on self-organization, including work on networks, emergence, and community organizing. These concepts strive to vest power in the hands of those actively involved in the work, a principle that resonated deeply with me and steered me towards anthro-complexity and the application of complexity science to human systems.
It was in this field that I discovered William Isaacs’s seminal book on dialogue. Isaacs was among the first to describe the dialogic container in the context of organizational life. This deepened my interest in the topic, leading to my connection with Gervase Bushe in the early 2010s. Our collaboration eventually resulted in an invitation to contribute a chapter to the book he was editing with Bob Marshak, a key text in introducing dialogic organizational development to the world.
Interactions, containers, patterns, and emergent outcomes are all characteristics of complex systems. Both Snowden and Glenda Eoyang offer valuable, and different, insights into how constraints create conditions for emergence. However, the lesson that resonates most with me is the idea that, in complex situations, we can only work with the constraints to increase our chances of creating beneficial patterns.
This approach to working with containers and constraints can be challenging and risks verging into manipulation, especially when massive amounts of power and data are involved, such as in large social media companies. There is an ethical imperative to maintain transparency when working with constraints, a principle fundamental to this work.
In my chapter for Bob and Gervase’s book, I discussed the Four Fold Practice as a guiding framework. It helps leaders focus on four key patterns that make conversations meaningful, while also nurturing an environment that fosters the emergence of these patterns.
This practice grew from the observation that presence, participation, hosting, and co-creation are essential elements of meaningful, productive conversations. Importantly, these patterns should not be imposed but rather fostered through well-crafted containers.
Rather than dictating “be present now!”, we can shape spaces where presence naturally occurs and feels appreciated. Instead of compelling participation, we aim to cultivate processes that promote deep engagement through authentic and impactful invitations.
The same principles apply to hosting and co-creation. We shouldn’t impose facilitation roles onto individuals; instead, we should craft environments in which people comfortably host each other on various scales – from open-space, world café, circle to intimate one-on-one interactions.
Similarly, forcing people into co-creation isn’t the right approach. Instead, we must provide them with the necessary tools, conditions, constraints, and challenges to stimulate collaborative creation and achieve desired outcomes.
I strive to uphold these principles from the Four Fold Practice in every facilitation – to create conditions where the patterns of presence, participation, hosting, and co-creation naturally emerge.
This exploration into the realm of leadership, complexity, and dialogic containers has been a journey of discovery, reflection, and evolution. My fascination with containers and how they impact interactions, outcomes, and ultimately culture within a system continues to grow.
The intersection of complexity and leadership in the context of dialogic containers is a rich tapestry of insights and practices that can greatly enhance our effectiveness as leaders, facilitators, and change-makers. The journey is ongoing, and the learning never stops.
How do these reflections resonate with you? I’m thinking of writing more on the idea of containers, and would welcome your thoughts and questions about the topic.