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Wow, Grimsby Town!

August 28, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Football No Comments

Me in my Grimsby Town shirt in 2016, wearing it in support of the team in advance of their successful playoff promotion back to the Football League that year.

Back in 2015 I started an accidental and unlikely friendship with the supporters of Grimsby Town FC. Grimsby is a small fishing town on the north east coast of Lincolnshire, on the estuary of the Humber River. Their football team was founded in 1878 and is one of the oldest in the world. They have had a full history of ups and downs, have played at every one of the top five levels of football in England, and have a modest trophy haul, including divisional championships and playoff promotions and two Football League Cup wins, the second most important cup in English football.

Of all of those matches played over a century and a half few were as big as last night’s. Grimsby Town were drawn at home against Manchester United in the League Cup. It was a classic David v Goliath set up. Town is settled mid table in the fourth division (League 2) and Manchester United, despite horrific form in the last couple of years, are who they are, one of the most valuable global sports businesses, with a legendary history and a near permanent (but not absolute!) lock on Premier League and European football.

Last night was a match for the ages. The struggling visitors went down 2-0 on a couple of well worked, if a little lucky, goals from a hugely motivated home side, who were playing in front of some of the most diehard supporters in lower league English football. The only question in the second half was whether Town had the legs to sustain what was certainly going to be an onslaught from the billionaires from Manchester. Withstood it they did, but it cost them two goals, and when the referee blew for full time after 98 torrid minutes, much of which was played in a monsoon, the two sides remained drawn.

That meant penalties. The first five penalties for both sides were near perfect, but Town missed their third, requiring their keeper Christy Pym to come up with a spot of magic or risk going out. Pym saved United’s fifth penalty and the context continued. Every kick was scored from then out, including both keepers scoring on each other and it wasn’t until they started into the second round off penalties that united’s Bryan Mbeuno hit the cross bar and sent the supporters into giant-killing heaven.

Having been on the winning end of a historic giant killing myself, I LOVE watching these things happen, something which is unique to football in general in which clubs from different levels of the pyramid play each other in Cup matches. For supporters it is an indescribable moment. The tension builds and builds, especially if you are defending a lead. Going to penalties makes it worse. But the relief and joy and pride that is released after the victory, and the subsequent sinking in of the magnitude of the occasion makes it a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

This is why we follow our teams, especially the ones we have a real stake in. It is for the drama and community and the emotional roller coaster ride that passion takes you upon. I’m so happy for my Grimsby Town friends. I know what they are feeling today – the glow of something truly special still lingering in their hearts, stunned smiles pasted across their faces. A lifetime of suffering through cold nights and desperate relegations and crappy ownership and a glory era that ended 90 years ago – all of that gone by the wayside this morning, traded for a feeling that you will never know except by experiencing it.

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Slow down and integrate

August 27, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Notes, Uncategorized No Comments

A propos of yesterday’s post on strategic planning, Cameron Norman has a nice post today on working with organizations as a consultant engaging in strategic design and helping contracted work land and be integrated within client organizations.

My buddy Tenneson is inviting a little weekly practice with his Wander Wednesday series. Today he asks What is a gift of slowing down for you? I’m about to join him on a call with a client in the next hour, so this little space here, a chance to read inspiring bits from my blogroll and take a moment to reflect on them without just scrolling by, that is the gift. In face since I’ve been blogging nearly daily again since June, I find that this practice has slowed down how I consume the great ideas that surround me and invited me to reflect on them. I’m not really writing for anyone other than me (but I hope if you drop in here you also find stuff that resonates with you). The gift of slowing down is the chance to try things on. Like I’m looking at some really nice shirts on the rack at the store, but unless I can see how they look on me I may never remember that I saw them. And the way my brain works, it’s not a slam dunk that anything I post here or reflect upon will stick, but by writing about things – by ACTUALLY engaging – I get to try them on.

Do things because they are just worth doing. Not everything nets you a return. Blogging is to social media what hiking is to commuting I think.

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Some interesting notes on emergence in AI, cities and international bridges

August 26, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Emergence, Notes No Comments

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.

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Strategic planning is changing, that old saw

August 26, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Chaordic design, Complexity, Design, Facilitation, Featured No Comments

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.

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Two bros from Verona

August 24, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Being, Culture, Featured One Comment

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.

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