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Measures, targets, and the gap where the heart lives

August 15, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Notes No Comments

Cool stuff from François Lavallé. I don’t think I can ever tire from hear Goodhart’s Law expressed in a multitude of different ways, and it’s especially nice hearing it from someone who has run his own business and fell into the trap of running it to achieve KPIs rather than use KPIs to evaluate, well, key performance indicators. Head over to his post to learn more with a bonus history about about Lord Kelvin.

Another great quote in François’ post comes from Mario Bagioli, if Wikipedia is correct, and it states: “when a feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people start to game it.” I was reminded of this when I read this piece by Simon Enoch in Policy Alternatives about why the Saskatchewan government won’t adopt rent controls despite rent affordability being a massive issue. The post debunks the typical talking points about rent control: that it doesn’t work, that it suppresses affordability and so on. Those talking points often hinge on this very point, that features of the economy are picked as indicators of activity, and worse, as evidence of policy failure. What it doesn’t do is answer its own question, but then expecting the Saskatchewan Party to have a sensible set of evidence-based social policies that benefit poor and marginalized folks is, let’s say, optimistic.

Data matters, both as a portal to the unknown and as a marker of what has been. So two links today to wrap up on, which activate my heart. Patti Digh gets some test results that put her in a liminal space, and Peter Rukavina muses on the scars he carries. Wishing the best for both and for all of us who are discovering that the gap between what we want our bodies to do and what they are actually doing grows a little more every year.

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Smoky skies and getting started

August 14, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Chaordic design, Football, Notes, Travel No Comments

The view across to Ahgykson and looking over towards Comox which is completely shrouded by smoke.

It is smoky here as we enjoy our last day of holiday on the Tla’Amin lands north of Powell River. A big wildfire at Mount Underwood is burning along the Alberni Inlet on Vancouver Island. It is feeding smoke into the south-easterly breeze and funnelling it up Vancouver Island and across the Strait of Georgia, smack into the northern Sunshine Coast. This fire is dangerous and fast growing and I’m worried for my friends at Huu-ay-aht and Tseshaht and in Port Alberni and Bamfield. So far there are no dangers to structures, but power is out, the smoke is terrible and local governments and First Nations in the area have declared states of emergency. We’re expecting a few days of rain starting this afternoon which may help a little. We’ve been relatively free of smoke this summer, unlike a lot of Canada. But here we are.

My friend Tenneson Woolf shares some of his go-to questions for getting started today:

  • what is the simple story here?
  • What is the simple intent here?
  • what is the outrageous intent here?

Simple and easy ways to begin an engagement with a new client and to find the top of mind necessity and purpose for the work. It’s hard for me to know how other consultants work, but he and I share a love of asking questions and letting the other speak. The stuff I hear in first few minutes with a new client is key to understanding how they see their situation coming into a new engagement.

A while ago I wrote about social media sites as enclosures, and that brought to mind the idea that it is a kind of feudal structure. Doc Searls names that today and proposes a way out with the release of a new kind of privacy contract for users and large entities called “MyTerms.” From his post this quote stood out for me:

“Freedom of contract enables enterprisers to legislate by contract and, what is even more important, to legislate in a substantially authoritarian manner without using the appearance of authoritarian forms. Standard contracts in particular could thus become effective instruments in the hands of powerful industrial and commercial overlords enabling them to impose a new feudal order of their own making upon a vast host of vassals.”

That quote is from Freidrich Kessler, a contract law scholar who wrote it in 1943.

Tottenham bottled a 2-0 lead against Paris St. Germain last night in the European Super Cup. We looked really good against the best team in the world for most of the match, but conceded two late goals and lost on penalties. Had we won I would have declared Spurs as champions of the world. Because we lost it’s just a pre-season friendly. I’m unabashedly partisan in these matters.

At any rate, it was good to see the new look that Tottenham will be employing this season under new manager Thomas Franck. A focus on set pieces, including long thrown from Kevin Danso (I love a long throw), a more balanced shape in defence, with a low block of five defenders which made it frustratingly hard for PSG to score. There was excellent communication on the backline, with the full backs not being afraid to mark their men out wide because there was always someone to slide into the inside channel behind them. This frustrated crosses, a number of which drifted into the centre of the box and were headed away by Christian Romero who had only one job. Palinha also looked good.

Going forward Kudus offers some lovely creative play, but we are going to need another decent attacking midfielder as James Maddison recovers from ACL surgery. I love watching this team, and hope they continue to look renewed and confident as they climb back into the upper echelons of the Premier League and make good account for themselves with the Champions League spot they won last year.

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Being together as a radical act

August 13, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Being, Collaboration, Community, Containers, Conversation, Democracy, Facilitation, Featured, Organization 2 Comments

I’m not sure that this shows up in the training set

About 8 years ago I remember Dave Snowden coming to Vancouver directly from a conference of security experts where they were discussing the top existential threats to humanity. In ascending order, at that time, they were: nuclear war, climate change and AI. At the time I remember thinking that how strange that seemed given that climate change is an absolute certainty and at least with nuclear war, we could actively try to prevent it. I had no idea what AI could really look like.

Nevertheless this particularly dystopian view of things had me on alert as I watched for signs that this might be happening. I am no AI expert, and the only AI I regularly and consciously interact with is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is now the best search engine out there, as everything else has become ruined by algorithms. It works, but it is also highly flawed and there is a simple reason for that: It acts like a human being.

If you’ve used ChatGPT you will be familiar with its major flaws which include approval seeking, hallucinations and, an overinflated sense of its own abilities. It will often say it can do things – like a harmonic analysis of a jazz tune – that it cannot actually do. And when it does the work and confidently provides the user with absolute garbage, my instinct is, that if it was an employee, I’d fire it. The inability to say “that is beyond my current limitations” is maddening. I was asking for this musical analysis the other day and after it couldn’t provide it, I discussed the fact that there is a price to this misplaced confidence. ChatGPT uses a tremendous amount of energy and water, and when it does so to just waste my time, I explained, there is an ethical issue here. It acknowledged that issue but it didn’t really seemed bothered by it.

That shouldn’t be a surprise because it was trained on the documented behaviours of certain classes of humans, for whom performative ethics is the norm. We do almost everything here in the global north with a detached knowledge that our ways of life are unsustainable and deeply and negatively impactful on our environment and other people but we don’t seem particularly bothered by that, nor to we display any real urgency to do anything about it.

This training is why Yuval Noah Harari is so worried in this video. AI is unlike any other tool that humans have invented in that it has agency to act and create on its own. As Harari says, printing presses cannot write their own books. But AI can, and it can choose what to write about and what not to, and it can print them and distribute them too.

The issue, and we have seen this recently with Grok, is that AI has been trained on the detritus that humans have left scattered around on the Internet. It has been raised on all the ways that we show up online. And although it has also been trained on great works of literature and the best of human thought, even though most of that material appears to have been stolen, Harari also points out that the quantity of information in the world means that only a very, very tiny proportion of it is true.

When I watched the video and then reflected on the post I wrote yesterday about difficult conversations, I had the insight that AI will know all about the stupid online conversation I started, but will know nothing about the face-to-face conversation that I later had. Harari points out, very importantly, that AI doesn’t understand trust. The reason for that, he says, is that we haven’t figured out the trust and cooperation problem in human society. That’s the one we should be solving first.

AI has no way of knowing that when there are crises in a community, human beings often behave in very beautiful ways. Folks that are at each other’s throats online will be in each other’s lives in a deeply meaningful way, raising money, rebuilding things, looking after important details. There is no way that AI can witness these acts of human kindness or care at the scale with which it also processes the information record we have left online. It sees the way we treat each other in social media settings and can only surmise that human life is about that. It has no other information that proves otherwise.*

For me, this is why face-to-face work is critically important. Meetings are just not the same over zoom. We cannot generate the levels of trust on zoom that we can by spending a significant amount of time in physical proximity to one another. Face-to-face encounters develop contexts of meaning – what I have called dialogic containers – and it is in those spaces and times that we develop community, trust, friendship, sustainable commitment and, dare I say, peace. The qualities of living that we ascribe to the highest aspirations for human community are only generated in their fullness in person. They require us to work through the messiness of shared life-spaces, the conflict of values and ideas and paths forward, the disagreements and confusions, by creating multiple ways in which we encounter and relate to one another. Sustainable community life requires us to see one another in multiple identities so that we discover that there are multiple possibilities for our relationships, multiple ways we can work around blockages and unresolvable conflict.

We are fast losing this capability as human beings. When people ask me to work with their groups there is always the lingering question of whether we can do the work of three days in two, and the work of two days in one. The answer is no. We can do different work in limited times and spaces. Narrowing the constraints on the act of making meaning together creates more transactional relationships based on incresingly incomplete and inaccurate information. This is world we are showing to AI agents. The actual human world is also relational, multi-faceted, subtle and soaked with meaning. As we feed our robots a particular picture of ourselves it’s possible that we are also becoming that very picture. Depth of relationship and meaning becomes replaced with a smeared, shallow breadth of connections and transactions.

There is no better way – no faster way, even – to develop trust than to be together. I think this is so true that it certainly is axiomatic to my practice and how I live my life. And if trust is the critical “resource” we need as human beings, to not only live well but to also address the existential threats that we face – which are all entirely created from our own lack of trust – then being together face-to-face working, playing, singing, struggling, discussing, and figuring stuff out is the most radical act of hope and generosity we can make, to ourselves and to our descendants.

I suppose there will always be a top three list of threats to human existence, but it would be nice if those top three were things like “sun goes supernova” or “super volcano blankets the earth in decades of darkness” and not actions for which we are entirely responsible.


* It also occurs to me that alien cultures who are able to pick up and understand the electronic signals we have been radiating towards every planet within 100 light years of ours will also get a very particular picture of who we are as a civilization. Never mind what was on the Voyageur record. Monday’s TV news has already overtaken it.

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The Ballad of Wallis Island and the lonesome touch

August 12, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Culture, Music No Comments

While on holiday we usually program a little film festival for ourselves and watch independent films that get great ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. I’ll share the complete list once we return home, but in the meantime, I’m really excited about the film and soundtrack for ‘The Ballad of Wallis Island.” It’s the story of a man who has won the lottery and invites his favourite musicians to the remote island on which he lives to give a private concerts.

The soundtrack is absolutely amazing. The original songs were written by co-star Tom Basden who is better known as a comedian, actor and writer. The soundtrack is earnest and coherent and just stands on it’s own as a great piece of folk-inspired singer-songwriter material.

Both teh film and the soundtrack echoes Once for me, the story of an Irish musician who falls in love with a Czech immigrant.. In both cases the soundtracks were composed and performed by the actors. Aesthetically and narratively, the films share an important quality. Of Once, Glen Hansard has said: “A lot of films let themselves down really badly by wrapping everything up in the last five minutes and giving you a story that trails off lovely. And what happens with those films is that you enjoy them but you forget them, because the story didn’t rip you. But some films pull you in, and then they leave you on edge. They end, and you’re left thinking about it. And that’s really the power of cinema, the duty of cinema—to make you feel something.”

I think that might also be the power of cinema that is built alongside soundtracks like these. Both films have that quality to them while the stories are completely different. Being that Once is Irish and Ballad of Wallis Island is Welsh, I might even say that this is a particularly Celtic form of storytelling. It somehow captures in images what Martin Hayes, the great Irish fiddler has called “the lonesome touch” in Irish traditional music:

The Lonesome Touch is a phrase I have heard in my native County Clare all my life. It is used to describe a person’s music. It is the intangible aspect of music that is both elusive and essential. The word lonesome expresses a sadness, a blue note, a sour note. Even though the music bares the trace of struggle and of pain, it is also the means of uplift, transcendence to joy and celebration.

The lonesome touch is something that is difficult to achieve. One is forced to put the requirements of the music before all personal considerations, to play honestly from the heart with no motive other than the selfless expression of joy and beauty for their own sake.

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Principles for difficult conversations

August 12, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Being, Chaordic design, Collaboration, Community, Conversation, Democracy, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Learning, Practice 8 Comments

Peter Levine shared a video today of a panel he was on back in June, discussing practical ways to have difficult conversations. We could all do with a little more practice in this these days. I know I certainly could.

I found the audio hard to hear, but Peter’s post helpfully summarizes what each presenter practices, and I have gathered these principles here in a list for future reference. Each person is working in a different context, but the gathering was about teaching civics in schools in the United States. I think there is some useful transferrance of these principles, so I’m going to slightly rephrase them to be more general.

Sarah Stitzlein:

  • Ground discussions in shared principles, such as living well together or a desire to find common ground
  • Explore tensions (such as between equality and liberty(
  • Use historical rather than current examples.
  • Let the other lead.

Winston C. Thompson:

  • Set norms for addressing identities
  • Allow a person to opt-out of “representing” a group
  • Take responsibility for imbalances in credibility

Janna Mohr Lone:

  • Give full attention to the other
  • Practice receptivity, curiosity and open-heartedness
  • Allow long pauses to allow quieter voices to emerge
  • Make the conversation multi-centred, in other words allow it to become a real conversation rather than a mediated exchange of ideas through one person with power in the situation.

Alison Cohen:

  • Ask “What are you concerned about?” to uncover core values
  • Legitimate concerns without needing to agree with them.
  • Ground the discussion in a shared moral foundation
  • Understanding your own philosophical, moral or ethical principles can help you generate good questions.
  • Listen for understanding, not debate or attack.

Peter Levine (my summary , because he doesn’t cover his own talk in his post!)

  • Name your own biases and make them visible
  • Find a share ground of values
  • Ask questions that are neither too abstract but also not settled.
  • Explore unresolvable tensions

I recently found myself in a difficult conversation and I handled it really badly. It stemmed from a poor comment I made on a social media post during an election campaign where I accused my interlocutor of posting a hoax becasue a meme he shared did not reflect the data that was contained in the report it referenced. I know this person in real life, and the conversation did not go well online. When I saw him in real life, I apologized. A few days later we found ourselves together in the community and we started discussing the point of the post he made. It became a dogfight. I was triggered and upset, feeling some shame and guilt that I had kicked this whole thing off with what he perceived as a personal attack online. For his part, he is a lawyer, so the conversation became a debate, both of us convinced we were right. I was without any kind of skillfulness in creating a good curiosity based conversation. It wasn’t a proud moment.

Practicing these kinds of conversations is incredibly hard. None of us are saints. Principles like the ones above are just basic good sense for anyone hosting or participating in a difficult conversation, but they are incredibly difficult to remember and practice when we are in an emotional state and when the conversations we are having may ultimately have existential implications for the folks in the discussion.

I think at the end of the day one of the key principles that is my own personal responsibility to take is “I want this to go well, for me and the person I’m talking too.” I don’t mean that we should avoid conflict and just be civil to each other, or that we should deny any part of our emotional response to a situation. What I mean is that we should embrace a relationship, even if only for a few minutes, that can hold different experiences, different points of view and different aspiration side by side. For that we need a practice ground and before we step out onto that mat, we need some principles to guide us.

Here are some. What are yours?

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