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Sarah Jane Scouten and Susie Ungerleider on Bowen Island

July 15, 2023 By Bowen, Featured, Music

Last night we were treated to an incredible concert here on Bowen Island by Susie Ungerleider and Sarah Jane Scouten, two of Canada’s finest singer-songwriters, lyricists who simply and directly reach for the soul, remind you of things you have loved and lost, of times that have rolled on and of places that hold the heart no matter how they change. Sarah Jane is Bowen Island born and raised, brought up in a family and a community that soaked her in folk music, theatre and language. She lives in Scotland now and this is the first time she has been back to play in her own small town in about seven years. I warned her on Facebook that she would be facing a love bomb of appreciation when she took to the stage at the Tir na nOg Theatre, and she was.

Susie Ungerlieder is a long-time mainstay on the Canadian music scene, and she has come out from under the cover of “Oh Susanna” as if, after 35 years, her alter ego in the song “My Boyfriend” steps into bringing the soul.

These two are accomplished crafters of exquisite song. Simply chords, folk/country/Americana idiom, but distinctly west coast Last night in concert they traded songs back and forth, in a barely amplified setting, both offering only the sparsest of guitar accompaniment to their lyrics. The songs are simple but powerful and evocative. From Sarah Jane’s lament of a World War 1 mother’s labours to Susie’s conjuring of the landmarks and zeitgeist of 1980s Vancouver, back when it used to rain and Teenage Head played in dingy clubs in East Van and the Town Pump turned you away for not having ID. What delivers them are their voices, and for both, the intensity of being back on home soil, singing songs that resonate just that little bit deeper with an audience who knows their place and knows a little of what has formed these songs.

It was a really special evening, and I’m thankful that one of this Island’s prodigal daughters returned to us for a night with stories from her travels, and a curious and incisive eye for what makes us all tick.

Containers of meaning

July 3, 2023 By Being, Bowen, Containers, Emergence, Featured 2 Comments

Funeral urn by Charles LaFond.

My friend Charles LaFond is a potter. He is also a man who understands how to make space sacred, whether it is the space inside of which life unfolds or a space between two people deepening into friendship and ever-generative mutual blessing. He is also cheeky while being earnest, and his work plays constantly with the dance of the sacred and the profane. His funeral urns, for example, come with his own cookie recipe, and he encourages you to use them as cookie jars until you expire, after which your body, which by that time will be composed of the most amazing cookies, can be stored within.

Today I was in a local gallery here on Bowen Island talking to one our local artists, Kathleen Ainscough whose work explores liminality, and especially the space where the natural world encounters the built environment. We dove deep into the subject of containers. I brought up Charles because we discussed how containers impart meaning to the things they contain. This is true of both the physical world and the social world. Kathleen noted that we carry french fries in disposable containers, making our meal meaningless. It’s a different story if you were to eat those same french fries out of your own funeral urn!

The point here, of course, is that life is enriched by meaningful experiences, and those experiences can often be induced with the emergence of a powerful and thoughtful container and a set of practices that helps us move from one world to another. Even in the example of eating french fries, there is something different, if only marginally, in eating fish and chips from a container made from one’s own local newspaper, than it is eating one from a piece of waxed paper with a fake newspaper printed on it. The same meal becomes a little different, a little bit more meaningful.

Containers induce meaning. If we meet in disposable settings, the contents of those meetings are likely to be just as disposable. If we don’t have time to build a thoughtful social container at work, then we can’t expect thoughtful responses to important challenges. No, you cannot do the same quality of work in a one-hour meeting as you can in a four-hour meeting. The emergence of rich social containers does not happen in a short stand-up meeting. Similarly, if our conversations happen on meaning-depleted social media pages, they are likely to be thin on relationality and thoughtfulness. Many of us prefer the slower conversations that happen in places like this blog, or in physical life, than on the endlessly scrolling field of social media sites.

The container itself is intimately connected to the meaningfulness of what happens within. Even in the play of sacred and profane, it is about the attention we give to what surrounds things and experiences that builds the importance of what takes (its) place within.

The annals of break-out groups

June 28, 2023 By Conversation, Facilitation, Open Space 6 Comments

An interesting rabbit hole was opened for me thanks to Tim O’Reilly’s cheeky claim that the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt created the “unconference” in 1828.

Through a link on the OSLIST provided by Rolf Schneidereit I’ve just read Humboldt’s opening address at the “Meeting of German Naturalists and Physicians” held over several days and several locations in Berlin during September of 1878.

The invitation was to break down barriers between scientists from multiple disciplines to explore diverging opinions and ideas. As Harrison Owen did a century later when reflecting on his development of Open Space Technology, Humboldt drew his inspiration from the natural world for a conference that was primarily based on the exchange of oral ideas in small groups, across disciplines, in dialogue. Here are some remarks from his opening address:

The terms naturalist and doctor are therefore almost synonymous here. Chained by earthly ties to the type of lower structures, man completes the series of higher organizations. In its physiological and pathological condition, it hardly presents a class of its own. Anything that relates to this high purpose of medical studies and rises to general scientific views belongs primarily to this association. As important as it is not to loosen the bond, which embraces the equal exploration of organic and inorganic nature; yet the increasing size and gradual development of this institute will make it necessary to give section-by-section more detailed lectures on individual disciplines, in addition to the communal public meetings to which this hall is dedicated. Oral discussions are possible only in such narrower circles, only among men, who are attracted by equality of study. Without this kind of discussion, without a view of the collected, often difficult to define, and therefore contentious bodies of nature, the frank intercourse of truth-seeking men would be deprived of an invigorating principle. also to give more detailed lectures about individual disciplines in sections. Oral discussions are possible only in such narrower circles, only among men, who are attracted by equality of study. Without this kind of discussion, without a view of the collected, often difficult to define, and therefore contentious bodies of nature, the frank intercourse of truth-seeking men would be deprived of an invigorating principle. also to give more detailed lectures about individual disciplines in sections. Oral discussions are possible only in such narrower circles, only among men, who are attracted by equality of study. Without this kind of discussion, without a view of the collected, often difficult to define, and therefore contentious bodies of nature, the frank intercourse of truth-seeking men would be deprived of an invigorating principle.

Humboldt, Alexander von: Speech delivered at the opening of the meeting of German naturalists and physicians in Berlin, September 18, 1828. Berlin, 1828. p. 7-8.

So I don’t know that Humboldt invented the “unconference” as O’Reilly claims, but it is certainly an interesting early record of break-out groups being used to discuss findings and ideas in the spirit of Open Space and current good dialogue practice.

Connections as constraints

June 23, 2023 By Complexity, Containers, Emergence, Featured 11 Comments

Me and Anthony White this week. Anthony is a professional soccer player who plays for Vancouver FC and is a former player for the team I co-own, TSS Rovers. He helped us win a championship last season. On Wednesday, he came to watch his brother play against us, and we had a long conversation about his career starting to take off. We didn’t pay attention to much else for about ten minutes!

Mark McKergow is a friend and colleague in the field of both complexity and hosting (and whisky and jazz!). What I like about Mark’s work is the way he writes about Host Leadership without being enmeshed in the Art of the Hosting world. He has also written a book on hosting generative dialogic containers from the dialogic OD world, which I like a lot. His writing is rooted in theory and research and he shares his ideas in practical ways.

Today he has made available a new paper called “Lead as a Connecter, not a Constrainer,” and it triggered for me an important clarification in how I write about and talk about constraints.

In the paper, Mark advocates for choosing connection over constraining because connection generates possibilities and participation. He alludes to constraining behaviours as those that make it all about oneself and not a mutual, exchanging relationship.

It is common to think about “constraints” as a negative limitation on freedom and relationship. No one likes being constrained. This becomes tricky when teaching about complexity and constraints because in a complex system, emergence and self-organizations proceed from constraints, which include connection.

Constraints in complexity work hand in hand with affordances, like yang and yin. When one makes a connection of any kind, one immediately limits the possible states that the system can take going forward. Connection is already a constraint and it enables an affordance, that, if stabilized, I would name as a container.

If I meet you at a conference, we might greet each other and I might ask you how you are and what you are working on. in that moment, the way I connect with you and what we exchange will create certain probabilities. For example, it is more likely in that moment we will talk about you rather than me. If the conversation goes deep off the start, because I have followed Mark’s advice and asked about YOU and showed and interest in you, it is probably less likely that we will allow ourselves to be interrupted by someone we don’t know. Starting with a mutual interest in each other creates an affordance towards depth in the relationship, and for the time we are together, we might even form a powerful and stable little container. We may find ourselves locked in a deep conversation, unaware of time passing, or other factors outside our immediate awareness. Our focus narrows. We might form a tighter boundary around our little two-person system, and that will enable our friendship to deepen, but it will also prevent us from connecting easily with others. In this sense, the container that we create becomes an emergent phenomenon that arises out of the way we constrain the situation through a simple connection.

Alicia Juarrerro has just published her long-awaited latest book on constraints, and I’m starting to dive in. A lot of what I am writing about in the relationship between constraints, affordances and containers comes from her work and its influence on Snowden’s work. She has been writing about these ideas for a long time and I’m relishing the clarity and ease with which she outlines the key philosophical foundations of anthro-complexity.

And I appreciate Mark’s work too! Don’t be afraid of working with constraints. Without them, we live in a world of unhelpful chaos. All life and life-giving context proceeds from constraints.

Implementing participatory practice as a CEO

June 20, 2023 By Art of Hosting, Conversation, Facilitation, Featured, Leadership

I love Phil Cass. He’s one of my closest friends in the world of the Art of Hosting and is a long-time collaborator. I’ve been lucky to work with him on some BIG work over the years, including a national Food and Society Conference for the Kellogg Foundation and a two-year scenario planning process for a national effort to change the conversation on palliative care in the United States. These days I am on faculty with his Physicians’ Leadership Academy in Columbus, Ohio, where I get to teach complexity to a couple of dozen incredible physicians every year. Plus, he has great taste in bourbon and music!

This is a really nice reflection on his years as CEO of the Columbus Medical Association, where he spent 16 years implementing participatory practices within the organization and in the community as the CMA spearheaded a massive effort to create affordable health care across Franklin County. He has led major state mental health organizations and is one of those guys that is built for senior leadership. OPur colleague Mary Alice Arthur sat him down to chat about what this form of leadership is like from the CEO’s office

implementing participatory practices has its challenges, and Phil’s story will cover ground that many leaders will find familiar around letting go of control, being afraid of vulnerability, delivering on mandates and worrying about seeming flakey. But he has lived the path, and it comes down to a few simple things to do regularly. Have a listen to the whole thing.