Menu

Constraints that enable emergence

May 13, 2020 By Bowen, Collaboration, Complexity, Culture, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured, Learning 8 Comments

I adore Alicia Juarerro’s work. So much so that I just watched a short video and spent the last hour writing about it. Here’s what I’m learning

Alicia Juarrero is a philosopher whose thinking about causality, complexity, action, and emergence has been critical to some of the ways in which folks like Dave Snowden have thought about this field. Her book Dynamics in Action is a really important read, packed full of thinking about complex systems and constraints. It’s a hard book to get into – indeed advice I have had from others is “start in the middle” (a helpful enabling constraint) – but worth the read.

But if reading philosophy is not your idea of a fun pandemic activity and you’d like a tiny primer into her work, I strongly encourage you to watch this 27-minute video of her presenting on emergence, constraints, and closure. Watch it first and then come back to these notes, for I am going to summarize her ideas and bring them into more common applications. I’ll probably end up carving massive holes in her thinking – so feel free to correct my takes here – but here’s what got me thinking.

Juarrero presents on three main topics, emergence and constraints, context-free and context-sensitive constraints, and closure.

Emergence

Here are her main points:

  • Nature uses constraints to generate emergence and sustain it. Constraints both limit and enable.
  • Evolution selects for resilience, adaptability, and evolvability.
  • Resilience is sustained by micro-diversity.
  • Ecosystems are sustained by distributed control rather than governing control. The key is in the links.
  • The emergence of novel practices – innovation – cannot be caused, but novelty can be enabled. You do this by catalyzing conditions that allow innovation to occur.
  • Think of constraints as phenomena that change the likelihood of things, and the probabilities of what is going on.

SO the conclusion from this section is pretty straightforward. One cannot simply say to people “INNOVATE!” and expect emergence to happen. In order to create the conditions for novelty, one must change the interaction between the people in the system. You can do that in any number of ways, by changing a constraint. Everyone will be familiar with what happens when you are given a task with a constrained amount of time in which to complete it. The pressure of a deadline sometimes creates the conditions for novel practice. By cutting your available time in half, you will discover that a solution that requires an hour will not work, and you may discover that you can find a way to do the task in 30 minutes.

Folks are. discovering this all the time right now. Being forced to work from home is suddenly creating all kinds of novelty and innovation. Many people are discovering that the commute is simply not worth it. Some are finding that they cannot do their work from home and so must find new jobs or new ways to do what they did before. Being forced to isolate has created the conditions for emergence and innovation, and not all of it is successful. Complexity-informed governments have created temporary universal incomes to enable people to be safe to fail. This is not the time to force people to “stand on their own two feet.” If you want people to stay at home, you have to enable them to do that in order to disrupt the pandemic, otherwise, they will have no choice but to head out looking for jobs, thereby increasing the spread of COVID-19.

Context-free and context-specific constraints

This is important and dense stuff, and Juarerro gets this from Lil Gatlin who wrote about it as far back as 1971, but here are the main points:

  • In a system, the probability that something will happen vs. something else happening is due to constraints.
  • A system with no constraints is “smooth,” in other words there is an equal probability of anything happening.

For example, if I give you a random number sequence like 761893826544528… what do you think the next number will be? In a random system, there is an equal probability that the next number will be between 0-9.

Now If I give you this number sequence: 123456… there is a much higher probability that the next number will be a 7. Why? Because the way to make some things more likely than others is to provide constraints. In this case, the constraint is your bias that the number sequence is not random and you are entrained to expect a 7.

So then what of constraints. Juarerro says:

  • All systems come with built-in probability: it’s more likely to be one thing or another. Probability is determined by two types of constraints: context-free and context-sensitive.
  • A context free-constraint is like a bias, or an assumption, or a preference.
  • A context-sensitive constraint is something that is conditional on a state in the context.

For example, you might say “I like walking on the beach” and that is a context-free constraint that might help you get a date. But a context-sensitive constraint like “If it is raining, I hate walking on beaches” is helpful for your date to know so they don’t invite you out for a beach walk on a rainy day, thereby ruining the chances of romance.

(“But you said you liked to walk on beaches!” is not an endearing thing to say to a waterlogged and miserable partner)

This is useful for innovation because a context-free constraint – like a shared purpose – can help give a sense of direction to work. Developing a new shared purpose will cause some things to be more likely than others. If you decide to stop farming and start building cars, you will be unlikely to be found buying seeds, discussing the weather, or thinking about crop yields. You will be more likely to be focused on supply chains, manufacturing efficiency, engineering, and roads. But in both cases, the higher level context-free constraint is the need to make money.

Context-sensitive constraints begin to give a system coherence. A context-sensitive constraint creates an interdependence or an interrelationship between to parts of a system. Hating rain makes one’s mood dependant on rain, and that can govern or enable a whole set of behaviors. If you end up with a friend who loves rain and one that hates rain, the probability of enjoying each other outdoors on a rainy day decreases radically. But it also means that two people may find that they both love being indoors playing board games while it is raining outside. Sustainable long term relationships are dependant on people finding novel ways of being together as their context-specific constraints change. This is called resilience: the ability to maintain coherence while changing.

Juarrero then talks about some useful kinds of constraints:

  • Linkages and relationships: innovation requires interaction and collaboration and interdependence among what will become the components of a larger system.
  • Catalysts: things which, given their presence, make other things possible. Catalysts act to break patterns or to create new ones and can sometimes become attractors in their own right.
  • Feedback, especially positive (reinforcing) feedback between parts in a system which increases the likelihood of emergence.
  • Rhythm, gait, cadence, sequence, order, and timing – temporal constraints – which are very helpful context-sensitive constraints that make things interconnected and interdependent in time as well as space.

In my work as a facilitator and a consultant that helps people innovate, I catalog these attractors with the ABCEI acronym, standing for Attractors, Boundaries, Connections, Exchanges, and Identities. These constraints can all be found active in systems and sets of problems. When people tell me that they are “stuck” we can usually find some of the constraints at play that are causing that state of affairs. Once we have put our finger on something, it’s a good idea to try catalyzing that constraint to see if we can break it or tighten it as need be, to create the conditions in which another course of action is more probable.

For example, today I was coaching someone to use Zoom. She had read the documentation and watched videos, but she had context-specific questions about the application. Clearly she needed more connection with someone who had more experience than she did. So I tightened that connection with her and focused the exchange of information. I started by giving her a tour and I showed her things, but when when I was going too fast she slowed me down, and ask me how she could do those things. Responding to this new constraint on our session – her desire to learn hands-on – I shifted her identity and handed her the power to host our meeting and she took a turn making breakout groups. The whole session took a funny turn when we ended up chasing each other through ten breakout rooms we had created.

By the end of the session, she had enough information to be able to schedule and host a Zoom meeting. She took on the mantle of “Zoom host” an identity that an hour previously, we didn’t even know existed.

Learning like this is emergent and one can work with constraints to discover new ways to teach, new ways to learn and play, and new things to do to address old problems. Constraints-led learning is major field of pedagogy and my friend Mark O Sullivan, a football coach with AIK in Stockholm, is one of the leading proponents of this way of learning skills and teaching the complex sport of football.

Closure

The last part of Juarrero’s talk is about closure, the essential dynamic that makes emergence possible. She says:

  • Loops create novelty and innovation. When a loop closes, what emerges is cohesion and cohesiveness.
  • Autocatalytic, circular causality and closed positive feedback loops generate novelty.
  • Parts interact and when the loop closes, an emergent whole is created, and when that loops back it influences the parts: cultures, systems, organizations, communities, identities,. These are all cohesive and influence parts that come into the system.

Stuart Kauffman’s work on evolutionary biology and autocatalytic systems describes this process beautifully. Essentially the ancestors of all living things are small contained systems of molecules that act on one another. A interacts with B to create C and C interact with A to create B, and suddenly you have a coherent system that “creates itself.”

At the cultural level, look at the way that feedback loops and closure create communities online, for better or worse. In highly partisan contexts, “echo-chambers” are simply autocatalyzing social systems, where biases are reinforced, shared purposes are strengthened and new identities are formed and stabilized. This can create such deep attractor wells into which people fall, almost like cults. Family members can no longer relate to them, they become unable to work with people who are different than they are, especially those who are considered “the enemy.”

Closure creates identity and landscapes of mountains and valleys that Juarrero talks about toward the end of her talk. A mountain might represent an idea that is unthinkable – having dinner with your racist uncle – and a valley might be a much easier, more preferable, and more possible outcome, such as going to a rally for racial justice with your friends. The way in which constraints have closed and looped and fed back information to you in your life will determine which of these two scenarios is most probable. When you choose dinner with your uncle. everyone will express surprise. They never saw that coming. You must have climbed a mountain to make that possible.

Juarrero ends with a really important point about what happens with context-specific constraints operate in a closed system: you get identities, cultures and mindsets, which themselves become context-free constraints for new things entering the system. If you have ever had the experience of moving to a new place you know this well. On our island where I live we have a “Newcomers Guide” that talks about practical realities of becoming a Bowen Islander. It contains a helpful mix of tangible facts – like where the school is, and how to check the ferry schedule. But it also contains insider information about the emergent characteristics of Bowen Island life that have grown out of our interactions with each other and our environment over many decades. These include things such as “Someone flashing their hazard lights in the rearview mirror is not being a jerk. They are a firefighter on their way to a call” or “Don’t ask online for whom an ambulance siren was sounding…” The original guide was written in 2016, and I can already see where things need changing, although the heuristics by which one shod live here, seem robust enough for now.

Like everything associated with complexity these three simple concepts – emergence, constraints, and closure – are easy to see, difficult to unpack, and powerful in practice. Go read and listen to Alica Juarrero though, and be grateful, as I am, that someone as brilliant as her has done the heavy lifting for us.

Surviving a pandemic

May 11, 2020 By Being, Bowen, Featured 4 Comments

Sunday was one of these magnificent days we get on the south coast of British Columbia at this time of year, where the deep summer makes a preview appearance with warm temperatures, bright sunshine, and the scent of berry blossoms and new grass wafting on the air. It’s just humid enough that it is warm in the shade, and there is no bite in the breeze by the water. So it was a perfect day to launch the kayaks.

Our first paddle of the year took us out of Galbraith Bay on the northwest side of Bowen Island and had us exploring the shoreline around to Grafton Bay and back. The tide was low and there was lots to see, but most remarkable of all was the number of sea stars

Back in 2013, seas stars began dying by the millions. Over 40 species on our coast fell victim to what became known as Sea Star Wasting Disease which causes them to dissolve and die. Our once abundant sea star populations crashed. Our coast was once covered in deep purple ochre sea stars and the bottoms were patrolled by magnificent huge twenty-legged sunflower stars, with another few dozen species thrown in the mix. Overnight, these iconic creatures disappeared and some years it was nearly impossible to find even one.

The cause of the collapse of sea stars was attributed to warmer seawater – an effect of climate change – and the spread of a virus against which the sea stars were helpless. They had their pandemic, and it looked like entire local populations would be completely wiped out.

Last year, whilst paddling in the Gulf Islands, we saw some ochre sea stars in small patches on some of the more isolated islands, like the Secretary Islands in the Trincomali Channel. This was encouraging.

But yesterday, paddling at low low tide, we rounded a point and saw entire shorelines covered with young ochre sea stars. There were hundreds of them crammed into cracks and nooks and crannies. The vast majority of them were young, and clumping together protected them from hungry gulls that like to wolf them down whole. In a year these stars will be big enough to feast on the sea urchins that have cleaned out our local kelp beds, and thereby restore the balance of plants and animals in that little cycle. More kelp means more small fish, and that is good for the seals and sea lions and the salmon and the orcas. And so goes the chain of interrelationships and interdependencies that make up the marine ecosystem of my local fjord.

Seeing these huge groups of sea star survivors was moving, because I’ve missed them for these past seven years. And in a time of the global pandemic, where we are helpless against our own viral threat, it was good to be reminded of cycles, and resilience.

I hope our sea stars make it, and that they adapt to the ocean conditions and that they have somehow developed an immunity to their virus. I’m hoping they are different and no longer as vulnerable to climate change or disease. The threat of a second spike is always just around the corner, as it is with our virus at the moment. Witnessing a mass local extinction of an iconic species is sobering, and the reminder that survival is possible under changed conditions is encouraging.

I have no idea how OUR pandemic will play itself out: I imagine we will survive. But I’m interested in how we will be different too. This virus detests the things that will defeat it: collaboration, sharing of information, care and protection of the vulnerable, gentleness, compassion. Absent these things, the novel coronavirus COVID-19 will thrive and continue to run through us all, taking the vulnerable and randomly selecting from the rest. If we beat it, it will only be with the capacities and capabilities that make us the best of who we can be.

A framework for planning a harvest

May 6, 2020 By Art of Harvesting, Chaordic design, Collaboration, Complexity, Design, Evaluation, Facilitation, Featured 4 Comments

I love working with frameworks, of all kinds. Templates, canvases, questions, story spines…all the different kinds of ways of bringing a little form to confusion. As a person who specializes in complex facilitation, using a good framework is the wise application of constraints to a participatory process. It’s hard to get it right – sometimes I offer frameworks that are too tight and don’t allow for any creativity, and sometimes they are too open and don’t help us to focus. But when you are able to offer a group just the right degree of constraint balanced by just the right degree of openness, the magic of self-organization and emergence takes over and groups learn and discover new things together.

Today I was on a coaching call with some clients and they were talking about a long term process that had a lot of technical steps but needed good relationships to be sustainable. It was possible for them just to do the required tasks and kick relationships to the curb, but they also knew that doing so would make the work harder, riskier, and over the long term, less sustainable.

To help out I offered them an old framework that I have been using more frequently with clients. This is based on the integral framework of Ken Wilber. I like it not because I love Integral Theory – I don’t – but because it offers an open frame with just enough container that it allows for focus and still inspires insight into “things we haven’t thought about.” It helps us to see. I wrote about using this one late last year, but here’s a cleaner version of the tool.

Basically the way you use this is in the design process of a gathering. The framework assumes that every conversation, interaction or process will produce outputs and results in all four of these quadrants. If you are not intentional about naming these things, you run the risk of over-focusing on one particular quadrant (usually from the tangible side of the framework). It is entirely possible to do good quality work as a group and destroy group cohesion, trust, and individual commitment. So I have found that supporting a planning team to name outputs in all the quadrants helps them to focus on choosing tools and processes that will be conscious of the effect of their work on the intangibles.

Time after time, using this tool creates interesting conversations about what we want to happen, what is possible and what we need to do differently to get results that are far more holistic and sustainable over time. As you use this tool you will discover questions that work to elicit ideas in each quadrant, and you will build up your eye for spotting where folks are missing a big part of their planning.

Give it a whirl in your process design conversation and see how it changes your practice and your group’s design. Leave a comment to tell me a little about your experience.

What is a decision, exactly?

April 7, 2020 By Featured, Leadership 3 Comments

I want to draw your attention to this incredible post by Zhen Goh, a fellow Cognitive Edge practitioner, exploring what is happening to the formerly-named “Disorder” domain in Cynefin, now called “Confusion.” In renaming the domain Confusion, Dave has also divided it into two types of confusion: Aproretic and Confused. I have taken to describing these, respectively, this way:

Aporetic means “at a loss” and indicates an unresolved confusion, or a paradox, which is just fine. Sometimes things need to remain a little murky for a while. “Confused” refers to the state of mind where you just aren’t getting it, and you don’t understand the problem. It’s often the result of a failure to see past one’s own biases, habits, and entrained patterns of solving things.

I have started thinking of this domain as the most important Cynefin domain because really, everything starts there. When you are confused, you can go to Cynefin to help you make sense of the routes available to you for action. This is the subject of some of Dave’s recent thinking, and also the meaning of the above graphic that he has produced. There is probably a lot more coming on this.

At any rate, that brings me to Zhen’s great post, which has been rattling around in my consciousness the last couple of weeks, largely because of this line, which is Jacques Derrida ultimately quoting Søren Kirkegaard:

“The moment of decision as such… must always remain a finite moment of urgency and precipitation; it must not be the consequence or the effect of theoretical or historical knowledge, reflection or deliberation, since the decision always marks the interruption of the juridico-, ethico-, or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it. The instant of a decision is a madness.” (‘Dialanguages’ in Points: Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995), 147–8.)

Isn’t that the truth? We only ever need to make a decision in the absence of actually knowing what is the right thing to do.

Speaking personally, it is one of my personal leadership challenges, making a decision in the absence of certainty. I find myself paralyzed at times, unable to make a choice. As Dave Snowden said on a webinar last week “there is really no right decision, but there ARE wrong ones.” Making a tough decision often feels like a kind of madness, dangling above an abyss full of projected and imagined monsters and very real pitfalls.

But making decisions in radical uncertainty is what is happening to all of us right now. We are all in radical Aporia, confronting paradoxes and situations that have no resolution, no precedent and no right way forward. We have to rely on human instincts now, ethics, values, morality. Moments like this reveal true character, and we are seeing the leaders who are truly built for these times, like Leo Varadhkar who has taken up his doctor’s license again. Also, our own Dr. Bonnie Henry in BC, who I can’t stop writing about. These are people who recognize, as Zhen puts it, that “Aporia allows for humanity:”

Aporia is part of ontological reality when facing crisis – but the burden of leadership is to communicate with clarity and authenticity. At once providing direction, demonstrating action, but acknowledging where there is uncertainty. Acknowledgment of this uncertainty is where the invitation for collective action can take place.


These folks are merely the most visible archetypes of human leadership in times of unresolvable confusion. In every home and every family, there are many millions more who are discovering what high-risk decision making is all about. May you all persevere in this time in being a leader who confronts the reality of Aporia and works diligently against mere confusion.

Living on islands: complexity, self-organization, and pandemic coping

April 5, 2020 By Bowen, Community, Complexity, Culture, Emergence, Featured, Leadership, Organization, Power 7 Comments

I live on an island, literally. It is a small community located near Vancouver, home to 3750 people in the winter and perhaps 5000 or so in the summer. Living on an island attunes one to the realities of working with bounded spaces. There is really only one way in our out of here, through the ferry, so it is a good chance to explore and learn about self-organizing systems. And as anyone who has visited an island knows, every one has its own unique culture and character, developed through decades of living in tightly connected, tightly bounded community.

During the pandemic, all I can see are islands within islands within islands, as each of us retreats into heavily bounded spaces, contained within other heavily bounded spaces and so on. Holonic containers repeating at fractal scales. Our word is organizing itself to defeat a virus that can permeate all but the most impermeable boundaries, and for a complexity worker, it is fascinating.

Complex adaptive systems consist of agents operating within bounded spaces. The five main factors that influence self-organization in complex systems are:

  • Connections between agents in the system and the Exchange between those agents.
  • The Identities that those agents have, in any given context.
  • The Attractors and Boundaries that form the spaces in which agents interact. These contain and constrain the behaviour of the agents in the system.

The world is fractal at the moment meaning that these systems are nested within one another; the whole of one system becomes a part of a higher level space. Levels look like this:

  • As a person, I try to keep the virus from entering my body
  • I am in a relationship with two other people in my home and we are trying to keep the virus from entering our home. Our Chief Public Health Officer calls these “bubbles,” defined right now by people you can touch.
  • Our bubble lives in a community and we must be very careful to keep at least two meters away from other bubbles so that we can keep the virus from entering our bubble. “Don’t connect the bubbles” is the heuristic here.
  • Our community is very highly contained, being an island, and we have to do everything we can to limit the connections and exchanges we have to other communities.
  • All of us together are living in a province that is itself contained and has limited connection with other provinces in our country. As a result, differences are appearing in how each province is handling the crises. and so far ours is doing fairly well.
  • Our country is also bounded and contained, with very little international travel, and so we are also starting to see differences in how different countries are handling the pandemic, even close neighbours like Canada and the US. Anyone arriving in our country to stay must self-quarantine for 14 days and that is an order that is enforceable.
  • And then of course, here we are on earth, perhaps yearning for an escape to a cleaner place, but no such place exists.

So it is clear that the two main factors influencing the pandemic are boundaries and connections at this point. Managing these is what we are doing now. Public health is about influencing behaviour, and as behaviour is an emergent property of people interacting within systems, it can only be influenced by changing the conditions for self-organization. Health authorities are applying tight constraints on Boundaries and Connections in order to influence behaviour and within each of the various levels, in the hopes that behaviours will change and we will ‘flatten the curve.” The challenge, as always, is that you cannot predict what will work and what won’t, so you need to try things and see what happens and adjust. Lots of adjustment has been going on and we can see a gradual tightening of Boundaries and narrowing of connections. Just as you are supposed to wash your hands and not touch your face, people in communities are expected to keep physically distant from one another and stay at home as much as possible.

Application in practice

By all accounts, this is working in British Columbia, where I live. All of our nested holons are engaged in the same project so that even with outliers who are disobeying the public health orders and recommendations, we are generally operating at the moment within the capacity of our health care system. Of course, things can change very quickly and so our daily reports have contained a mix of the carrot and the stick: praise at the efforts that are paying off, and a dire warning that we have not yet reached our peak and that the choices we make now will determine how many people literally live or die in the next few weeks and months.

Our only metric that matters is the curve. Exceeding the capacity of our health care system to provide care will trigger a massive escalation in this crisis meaning even tighter constraints. Currently, we are managing well, and we haven’t had any major tightening of constraints since March 18 for the general population.

As a case study, the way the British Columbia government has handled the pandemic is an excellent example of managing in complexity. I put this down to our Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry. Dr. Henry is trained in public health and preventative medicine, which is itself a complexity field. She was the operational lead in Toronto during the SARS epidemic in 2003 and she subsequently worked on the ebola and H1N1 outbreaks. She knows her stuff.

Her advice to British Columbians has been a mixture of heuristics – wash your hands, don’t touch your face, practice physical distancing – and orders that make it illegal to gather in groups larger than 50, and by law officers have been empowered locally to enforce physical distancing orders around much smaller groups in public places. This shows excellent use of what we try to teach with Cynefin: the proper application of the right use of constraints and practices for the type of situation at hand, with sophisticated monitoring, openness to change, and decisive action. My confidence in her is unparalleled. This is what a top rate complexity-informed leader looks like. Her actions and her influence have been widely praised and as a result of her leadership at this moment, people in our province generally feel safe.

What I worry about now

From a complexity perspective, the worry is what might happen to the connections and boundaries that are currently the most important constraints at play. In general, the tighter you make a constraint, the more catastrophically it fails and so there is a fine art to finding just the right balance to manage the disease and not provoke widespread social unrest. Even though we would all be 100% safe if we were locked in our houses and forced at gunpoint to stay there, this would probably provoke a massive social reaction that would defy that order en masse, creating the perfect conditions for 100% of the population to contract the virus. Likewise, a too lackadaisical attitude will not be effective in keeping people separate. There are already concerns that the March 18th order needs to be tightened to groups of less than 50. At this point, I think everyone would agree with that. The major boundary violations have been happening in house parties which is very dangerous as one infected person at a party will almost certainly infect everyone else who will take the virus home to their own generally tightly constrained bubble. Within bubbles, we don;t have boundaries, so the virus spreads by jumping across a boundary at one scale and finding it’s way into a bubble at a lower scale.

This has massive implications especially for people whose ability to adhere to orders and practice good heuristics is compromised by poverty, disability, or disempowerment. A general population health approach allows for flexibility in the system so that in principles, those who cannot adhere to the highest standard can nevertheless do their best. Our federal government emergency benefit, which looked initially like a $2000 a month income supplement for any who need it, now appears to be excluding up to a third of workers in our country. This is NOT the time to exclude people who would otherwise need to go out into the community to find work. The simplest solution would be to make that benefit available to all, to protect renters and homeowners from losing their homes during this period and housing homeless people properly in empty hotels instead of on uncomfortable cots in conventions centres and hockey rinks. Our society’s unequal in-bred distrust of the poor and disabled will have massive consequences if we don’t get this right.

At the best of times our system lets hundreds of thousands of people fall through the cracks. These days what will also certainly fall through the cracks is the virus we are trying to contain, simply because we don’t trust poor people.

On our island, we have asked that no one come and visit us, as we try to limit the connections with the outside world. This is because within the bubble of our island we have self-organized practices and systems that are working to care for our community. We are a small island, tightly connected, and our community crisis infrastructure is very small. People coming to live in the summer homes, or coming to visit for the day don’t know the protocols that have developed here and many small communities are reporting that visitors are more cavalier than residents are. Indeed this article names the problem of uncontrolled connections between bubbles as a major issue for small towns. (The lede phrase “wealth is the vector” is a powerful statement of the truth). Small communities are fragile social ecosystems. An outbreak of COVID-19 on our island, for example resulting from a visiting infected boater who doesn’t understand or follow our social practices, could ravage our General Store staff and would have a catastrophic consequence. We would quickly run out of food options and have no choice but to make more frequent trips to the mainland, thus increasing the exposure and overall exchange bandwidth for the virus to move.

Other constraints are also playing into this. Our island is an interesting Attractor for people who have been cooped up in their homes for months and the weather is changing. It will be very hard to stop people visiting on the ferry or on boats and so our ferry company has begun making serious discouraging announcements about visitors to small islands and our tourism association has been ramping up the message. With a sunny long weekend coming up, I believe that we need to make ourselves less interesting as a catalyst. I imagine the provincial government will be driving home that message too. Already ferry runs between the mainland and Vancouver Island have been massively reduced, with several reserved only for cargo. Entire routes have been shuttered.

Identities too become an important aspect to play with. We see our provincial government and health officer praising British Columbians and reminding us that we are all in this together. they are trying hard to get everyone to belong to the same team, and showing the results is a good way to reinforce that identity. Using wartime metaphors, while not especially helpful, nevertheless have the effect of getting folks into a serious mode of action. Our health officer sprinkles her messages with calls to be diligent over one’s own role, and have kindness and compassion for others. She refuses to condemn people for momentary or temporary violations of physical distancing practices (she says “you don’t have the full picture of what your neighbour is up to, so don’t be quick to judge”) but has no qualms using her authority to enforce orders against house parties and large outdoor gatherings.

It’s interesting times to be sure, but it has been a living and breathing example of how complexity thinking is providing the best way through the pandemic. I hope you are currently living in a jurisdiction where your decision-makers understand this, and I know many people are not. To you, my friends, all I can say is make sure YOU take a complexity-informed view of the situation and keep your bubble as tight as a little rocky island.