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Retrospective coherence and the road not taken

September 14, 2015 By Complexity, Emergence, Featured, Leadership

One of my favourite concepts from the complexity world is the fallacy of thinking that comes from the truth of retrospective coherence.  The mistake is that, because we can look back in time to understand causes of our current condition, we can therefore see forward in time and affect the causes of a future condition.  Complex systems are emergent, so we can never be sure what the future holds, regardless of how well we can trace how we got here.

Despite the fact that it is illegal to sell an investment instrument without the warning that “past performance does not guarantee future results” falling for the trap that retrospective coherence gives you a reliable path forward is basically a feature of doing any strategic work at all.  It leads to planning that puts out a future preferred state and then backcasts a set of steps that, if we follow them, will take us there or nearly there.

So there are all kinds of issues with this, and the Cynefin framework’s greatest gift is that it helps us create strategy to avoid to pitfall of retrospective coherence.

Today though, a surprise in my morning reading.  A lovely article on Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”  We all think we know what that poem is about: about the adventure that will ensue if we just take the less beaten path.  But you might be surprised to learn that the poem is actually about retrospective coherence and not adventures strategic planning (emphasis mine):

 

Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Brilliant.

How self-organization works: short form

September 1, 2015 By Complexity, Invitation, Open Space, Organization One Comment

A small elevator speech I shared on the OSLIST yesterday:

Self organization works by a combination of attractors and boundaries.  Attractors are things that draw components of a system towards themselves (gravity wells, a pile of money left on the ground, an invitation).  Boundaries (or constraints) are barriers that constrain the elements in a system (an atmosphere, the edges of an island, the number of syllables in a haiku)

Working together, attractors and boundaries define order where otherwise there is chaos. We can be intentional about some of these, but not all of them. Within complex systems, attractors and constraints create the conditions to enable emergence.  What emerges isn’t always desirable and is never predictable, but it has the property of being new and different from any of the individual elements within the system.

Self-organization is where we get new, previously unknown things from.

 

Returning to the Basics

August 31, 2015 By Art of Hosting, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Leadership, Learning

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

— TS Eliot

Our Beyond the Basics team is about to host our last gathering of the current cycle of offers, back in North America.  Over the past five Beyond the Basics offerings I have learned more than I feel like I’ve shared. I can feel that my practice has changed as a result of doing this work, and I’ve become interested in the way our team’s ideas and lessons from working at scale have begun to outline a form and practice of leadership that is needed in much of our work now.

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Dave Snowden’s reflections on a theory of change

August 21, 2015 By Complexity, Culture, Design, Evaluation, Leadership 4 Comments

Dave is working on a theory of change, which I think is a good thing. In this latest post he has a nice summation of the way to move to action in complex situations (like cultures):

So where we are looking at culture change (to take an example), we first map the narrative landscape to see what the current dispositional state is. That allows us to look at where we have the potential to change, and where change would be near impossible to achieve. In those problematic cases we look more to stimulating alternative attractors rather that attempting to deal with the problem directly. Our method is the look at the narrative landscape and then ask the questions What can I (we) do tomorrow to create more stories like these and fewer like those? The question engages people in action without analysis and it allows us to take an approach that measures vectors (speed and direction) rather than outcome. The question also allows widespread engagement in small actions in the present, which reduces the unexpected (and potentially negative) consequences of large scale interventions.

In sum, complexity work is about understanding the context to understand where the potential for evolution might lie.  From there you try experiements to see what you can learn, and support what works while removing support for what doesn’t

It’s an old saw, but it’s actually a simple thing.  And I keep writing about it because it seems TOO simple for most folks.  Shouldn’t strategy be more ordered, laid out and thought through than this.

As always the answer depends, but with complex situations the answer is no.  Save your discipline and rigour for understanding things as they evolve rather than trying to get it all right from the start.

 

via Change through small actions in the present – Cognitive Edge.

Participating in our environment

August 20, 2015 By Art of Hosting, Being, Conversation, Culture, Design, Facilitation, Learning, Organization, Practice

Thanks to a rich conversation with artistic researcher Julien Thomas this morning I found this video of Olafur Eliasson at TED in 2009. In this presentation he talks about the responsibility of a person in a physical space, and discusses how his art elicits a reaction beyond simply gazing at a scene.  It address one of the fundamental problems in our society for me: that of the distinction between participation and consumption.  So much that happens in physical spaces and in our day to day lives has been geared towards gazing and consuming and away from participation and responsibility.

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