I’m still delightfully jet lagged from the France trip meaning, early nights and early mornings, which suits me fine. It gives me time to read and reflect and to walk, this morning taking time to make a detailed eBird list of the species around me (about 25 this morning, many new flycatchers on the scene), and sit by the sea and catch up with neighbours and their dogs.
I was walking a bit this morning with Augusto Cugnotti’s post in my mind, “The Container is Borrowed” in which he reflects on a mammoth essay by Mark Downham called “The Geometry of the Vanishing Container.”
Downham’s essay imagines a kind of conservation between Harrison Owen and Patricia Shaw, who is a much more interesting person to read. I have not read much of Shaw’s work, to my shame. She was a collaborator with Ralph Stacy and her book on Changing Conversations in Organizations is an important work, and I’ve made a note to take Augusto’s advice and read it.
At any rate, the Coles Notes version here is that I’m looking at this through my own interest in what a “container” is. Increasingly I think that the way I think about dialogic containers are not really captured in the way folks talk use the word. Harrison’s work, captured in Downham’s essay is that the container (especially the physical container) is prepared as a way to trying to create the conditions for emergence. That was his abiding interest and I think Downham names the liturgical and spiritual elements of that in a way I haven’t really seen others capture. When I’m setting up a room, I sometimes feel like a bower bird, and I won’t pretend that liturgy and ceremony is far from my mind. I get it.
It seems that Shaw’s work is primarily concerned with the idea that a consultant or a host or a facilitator can never really be outside of the field in which they are intervening. This seems elemental to me and I’ve made a point of saying that the Participation aspect of the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting is very much about this. You are a part of the field, as is the container and everything else.
Augusto is naming some of these ideas here and it makes me think about why both actual appeal to me.
I see containers as constraint regimes. They are structures that are catalyzed and emerge from constraints that create boundaries and affordances for meaning and action. They are emergent. They are a part of the field, and when we step into a field (a la Shaw) we create a constraint regime just through our presence. Harrison’s approach is that we create physical space and get out of the way of what happens next. But it seems obvious to me that what happens next is not devoid of power, conflict or all the avoidances and limitations that are rooted in the field as well. It is naive to use Open Space (our any other methods) and believe that somehow everyone has left history and identity at the door, including the host. They have not.
Somehow I might define my work as catalyzing action that moves in a “more like this, less like that” direction by working with constraints to change interactions. All change work is about changing constraints, and finding the ones that are most influential in a given context is what complexity work is about. It is not the work of the facilitator to do that. Complex facilitation is about changing interactions not about changing people. A facilitator is not neutral in this context but is in fact a deeply influential participant.
I’m not defending Harrison’s work per se, but learning Open Space taught me about the essential work of managing process and not getting involved in content. It was the first big move for me away from traditional “get involved in the content” facilitation. Shaw’s work – as I understand it from the papers I’ve read – is about acknowledging that there is no “outside.” This was clear to me as a person who had spent my whole career working in communities and organizations. These ideas flow from a number of streams. Lewin helpfully names fields. Snowden and Juarrero name constraints. Pualani Kanakaole names the importance of the deep layers of context that do the real work of hosting. Snowden and Kurtz name the importance of narrative. Isaacs names the container. All of it conspires and moves together to put a question to the practitioner:
“What are you doing?”
When I enter a field to make change now it is not without attention to the landscape of meaning and affordances that exist. I use narrative capture to do that so that the field itself can talk about its experiences, make sense of them, decide what to do. There is a container for this work, and it is lifted intentionally and deliberately and gently from the field, like pinching a bit of cloth on a table to form a little wrinkle. It is not the One Meeting That Rules Them All. Change work requires staying in intimate contact with the field, the larger context. When the dialogic container loses contact with the field, whatever happens there will fail to make the change. It becomes its own thing. Fun maybe, or frustrating, or a kind of utopia. But you will quickly hear people talk about returning to “the real world.” Understanding the current topography of change and resistance and make that visible with minimal intervention is critical. Keeping the work in contact with the field but intervening in smaller ways more often gives a better chance that affordances will be found for promising action. If you aren’t making change in the “real world,” change isn’t being made.
Containers exist because constraints exist. There is a connection. There is a flow. There is an inside and outside, there is an attractor. Even in the most subtle forms, these precipitate differences that become meaningful. What is happening inside this coffee shop is defined by who is on what side of the counter, which languages are being spoken, what the layout of tables and benches do. Who knows whom. The woman who made my espresso was once a kid on a team I coached. When she appears at her job at the community centre, I don’t order coffee from her. We both own shares in the same soccer team, one for which she also once played. The container emerges, is “borrowed” as Augusto says, from the field.
We cannot pretend otherwise. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t intervene to make change. It means we should be aware of our intervention and the role we play especially if we show up to the field with power and influence. And if we are making change, that work needs to be as deeply embedded in the field itself and not in the briefcases of consultants or the magic spells of method user guides. It’s about practice. I’m a practitioner.
Harrison’s most influential teaching on my life was not Open Space, actually. It was his slogan “Don’t trust the process, trust the people.” Follow that to its deepest implications and one might arrive at the kinds of questions about epistemic justice, colonization, domination, change-making, and democracy that matter. Those implications are ever-present in my work. I have no answers, but the question “What am I doing?” is a dear companion on the journey.
The Var River below the high village of Touët in France.
This is going to continue the series of posts that began with The Inundated Delta, which was a response to Dave Snowden’s thoughtful position of the Art of Hosting in the context of anthro-complexity.
I want to name the four most influential streams that have shaped my professional life. This is important because it names my intellectual and practitioner lineage so people understand where I am coming from and what questions have formed my practice. This post focusses especially on how I arrived at anthro-complexity as a theory-informed dialogue practitioner and it connects it to the longest standing curiosity I have had which is essentially “What are you going to do about it?” That question has driven every inquiry in my life. It is important to talk about where one is coming from.
The first: my work with Friendship Centres and other Indigenous organizations through the 1990s gave me a practical experience of applying what I learned during the five years I spent at Trent University in what was then called Native Studies, with an emphasis on community and organizational culture. That already shaped much of the way I approached working with people. My practice was further formed by the organizers, facilitators and leaders in the Friendship Centre movement who had built an influential national grassroots movement in Canada.
The second: I’ve talked before about how Open Space completely changed my approach to group facilitation by introducing my to a mode of working with groups that was rooted in the people, their own intelligence and knowledge and not the performative or interventionist nature of the facilitator. Learning about Open Space fundamentally changed the way I looked at organizations, governance and facilitation, and it led me into an inquiry with a wider group of people who were asking questions about what self-organization, complexity and participation meant for these milleaux.
The third: In 2003, at a gathering called by Harrison Owen and others we spent five days in Open Space and I came into the Art of Hosting community through an explicit invitation from Toke Møller who was one of a small number of people forming a community of of practice around the idea of the Four Fold Practice. This appealed to me because I recognized right away that the communities of practice associated with process methodologies were too limiting in terms of trying to understand what happens in a groups space that is truly complex. I was looking for what I later called “communities of praxis” where theory and practice were meeting.
The Art of Hosting itself – the four fold practice – provided a useful heuristic for facilitating practice (and design of participatory facilitation work) and was disruptive enough to the understood norms of facilitation that it was named “hosting.” This naming pointed at the idea that it wasn’t the people or the process that was being actively facilitated by the host. Rather it was the conditions of interaction that were being shaped by the host. The work of the dialogic container was done by the people themselves. The work was not just tools, but rather developing principles of practice.
Several threads from different large group method practice found their way into this nascent understanding of what hosting seeks to generate. It is about highly participatory work, rooted in dialogue and shared meaning-making. From the World Cafe, it was about the “magic in the middle: as Finn Voldtofte named it: the emergent possibilities of what happens in truly participatory spaces. From The Circle Way practice of Baldwin and Linnea, it was “leadership in every seat.” From Harrison Owen and Open Space it was about self-organization and “trust the people, not the process.” All of these point to something that didn’t yet have a mainstream frame of reference, but we understood them to be rooted in complexity.
At that time complexity in humans systems was tied more to the chaos science world, and my own understanding had been informed by the sources the Open Space practitioner community pointed to: Capra, Gleick, Kauffmann, Isaacs, and Bohm. I was less enamoured with Senge et. all’s systems thinking stuff with its causal loops and leverages and flows. In the Art of Hosting world, Tøke and Monica had spent some time with Dee Hock in a Kaos Pilot cohort in San Francisco in the late 1990s and his idea of the dynamic relationship between chaos and order (producing chaordic space) helped us to understand that hosting was a process that helped address the volatile and unknowable nature of true complexity. Hock formulated that thinking in the 1960s when he was trying to create a currency – the VISA cared – and he struggled to find organizational structures that could provide some stability while allowing for self organization. Hock’s work, formed in the 1960s, was more in line with the living systems/chaos theory approach to complexity rather than the more mechanistic systems thinking stuff that Senge and Meadows and others were producing.
Still my curiosity about how complexity happened in groups and organizations and what implications it had for facilitation practice and leadership – and what I was going to do about it – continue to seek deeper understanding And that’s where the fourth big pivotal shift in my practice happened.
Sometime in 2008 I became aware of Dave Snowden’s work and the Cynefin framework entered my awareness. I had been searching for a framework that helped me to understand all the different ways humans systems work and in particular the need to be context specific when doing all of this. My degree in Native Studies had taught me that; context is so much bigger and more important that anything that might happen within it. Maps were central to this understanding.
During my years at Trent, the medicine wheel was perhaps the first framework that was introduced to me to help me understand how context operates. We talked about holistic ways of seeing and working, and be aware of the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of all that we do. Medicine wheels were extremely powerful frameworks used in the cultural revitalization movements of the 1970s and 1980s when I was studying this work. They represented a way of seeing that recovered Indigenous perspectives on conditions and situations and demanded a deeper accountability to the interconnectedness of living and non-living things in order to create healthy lives. HOW they were used was important though.
I actually wrote my honours these on this, looking two Indigenous organizations and how they were expressing Indigenous culture in the their work. One used the medicine wheel in an almost fundamentalist way, structuring everything according to directions. So it assigned roles to people who lived in the north, east, south and west not according to ability but according to where they lived. Action, healing, vision and strategy had nothing to do with competencies or need, and everything to do with the structure. This was an abject failure and created confusion, conflict and despair in the organization. It was led by two Anishinaabe Elders and cultural practitioners and it was a blanket application of an Anishinaabe values onto a national organization made up of people from many different cultures, spiritual traditions and ways of working.
By contrast, the other organization – the National Association of Friendship Centres, for whom I later worked – organized itself along traditional non-profit ways of doing things. It had a representative board, a standard staffing model, with an Executive Director and a small staff and a pretty clear mandate. The form was light, the staff was small, and it allowed for the organization to be agile and flexible in pursuing funding and program opportunities with the federal government. The work was deeply cultural as well, and the organization had many different cultural practitioners, spiritual leaders and Elders within its ranks and every meeting was supported by this role. We had Elders like Bruce Elijah who attended to our national board meetings and our AGMs were full of ceremony, appropriate to the territory in which we were meeting or supported by people who stepped up to take responsibility for caring for the spiritual and cultural life of the organization. The light, grassroots, member driven structure gave rise to a rich organizational cultural life that was able to handle depression conflicts, emergencies and crises, but also to create a movement in which people were cared for and chose to spend their careers.
The conclusions that stayed with me from the year long piece of research were essentially that culture does not live in imposed frameworks, no matter how sacred or rigidly applied they are, but rather lives in the ways in which people can bring their skills, themselves, and their experiences to bear on the situation at hand. There were many medicine wheels used at the NAFC, but they were used to orient us and make sense of what was happening and to ask questions about what we might do, not to prescribe action or, horror, demand outcome accountability.
This is the backdrop to how I saw and used maps. (I even mashed them all together at one point in what is clearly a whimsical folly.)
Of all the maps I saw, Cynefin said this most explicitly: “horses for courses.” And also, one of Dave’s important principles “data precedes the framework.” Do the appropriate thing given the context you are working with. Don’t impose anything on people that forces them to make meaning according to your frame. And beyond that, Snowden’s work on complexity was exactly what I was looking for to explain how to work with human systems. Hock’s chaord and the way we talked about it in the Art of Hosting mapped well enough onto what Snowden called “linear Cynefin.” I still use this framing to lightly introduce people to complexity, becasue the idea that we default to control when confusing things get unpredictable rather than leaning into a “shallow dive into chaos” is still – and maybe increasingly – radical to most people. The Chaord and Cynenfin are NOT the same thing at all though, and this point will be explored in a subsequent post.
After many years of reading, teaching, and trying stuff out, I took my first Cynefin course in London in 2014. I was especially interested in how complexity would change my approach to harvesting and evaluation, but it did so much more than that. What became “anthro-complexity” offered a significant redirection to my own hosting practice and changed (and continues to inform) my practice of the Art of Hosting. This redirection was strong enough that it knocked me outside of the mainstream practice of the Art of Hosting community of practice. This included the way methods are used (and the primacy of methods), the way training happens, and the way we use this approach for making change. The lessons of that course still resonate with me to this day and have shaped my Art of Hosting practice.
I find myself now in a world that straddles both approaches to this work and I believe that there is a very fruitful area of overlap and generative engagement to be had, the inquiry of which is the basis of our Complexity Inside and Out program.
I also recognize that I am very nearly alone in this inquiry. Many folks in the Art of Hosting community disagree or just don’t understand some of what is core to my practice, and Snowden has made it clear where he understands the limits of the Art of Hosting to be, as he understands them. The confluence of anthro-complexity and the Art of Hosting has distorted my own practice in a way that I feel honours the depth of what both bodies of work are getting at, but it hasn’t left me too many close colleagues. I am still and active member and global steward of the Art of Hosting community of practice, but my stewardship focuses on the Four Fold Practice. I believe that, with use and experience, that framework is incredible helpful for facilitators and leaders to expand their practices deeply into complexity. It helps us to convene better participatory meetings and it helps leaders to lead more engaged teams and organizations, all of which is much desired. Learning to convene well, to host dialogue and to lead in an inclusive way is worthy work.
This commitment to the Four Fold Practice is shaped by what I have learned from anthro-complexity over the years. My next post will dive into some of the specific ways that principles and practices of Snowden’s (and Cynthia Kurtz’s) work have influenced mine, and why I feel like these are important lesson for Art of Hosting practitioners to take on board, especially those of us working explicitly with complexity and change. And following that, I’ll write more on what I think are valuable and important contributions that the Art of Hosting makes on it’s own with respect to convening and learning.
So this post is one of a series that is seeking to describe some of this development in a little more detail. It is also intended to invite Art of Hosting practitioners to further develop our practice especially as we use it within organizations and communities to support change and strategy work. More to come.
Over the past several weeks, Dave Snowden has been writing a very extensive series of long blog posts that serve as a watershed declaration of the state of his work thus far in the field of anthro-complexity. The posts both define what the field is and make sharp distinctions about what it isn’t, especially in relation to practices, ontologies, and theories that sit adjacent or close to it. I believe this represents a moment where Snowden is making a strong declaration about what anthro-complexity is, and being very deliberate about pulling it back from interpretations that seek to fit it into pre-existing understandings of complexity. Anthro-complexity is a new approach to complexity in human systems, and these posts are a strong statement of what that is.
In the course of these posts, Dave has focused in part on the Art of Hosting, among other approaches to working in complexity, and has named me explicitly as someone who has been trying to work within the field of the Art of Hosting to bring my own practice more in line with what I have been learning about anthro-complexity over the past 15 years or so, since I was introduced to Cynefin.
The entire series is very important to understand the context, and it is very long and dense stuff, but it’s important to understand some of the context. You can start the most recent series on the channel and the estuary here. For these posts I am going to write, I encourage you to read the two most direct posts about the Art of Hosting:
These posts have helped me to reach an important moment in my own thinking, and I promised to respond to them personally and messily, so I’ll do my best here, probably in a series of posts. I am just heading out on a three-and-a-half-week walking holiday, so I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to get to, but long walks do offer a chance to ruminate.
So here is the first of what will likely be a number of posts on this topic.
First, thank you, Dave, for naming me, and for naming the Art of Hosting as a practice field, and for putting some deeply important questions to me and to us. These are questions that help guide and deepen our understanding of the field we work in. The Art of Hosting field is a broad one, spanning every continent, made up of people who arrive from many different traditions and levels of experience in the worlds of facilitation and change-making. Originally, the field was formed by folks moved by their experiences in social change, new metaphors of organizational leadership and systems change, and large-group facilitation methods. We are, and always have been, a community of practitioners first, and so the field has taken on the feel of a place where methods and tools are top of mind. I think the world sees the Art of Hosting as a collection of tools and practices for convening dialogue, and I don’t think that is incorrect. But it presents a problem that Snowden has identified, and it’s one we have to deal with.
The basic problem is this: while we use the language of emergence and complexity in the Art of Hosting, our use of methods and pre-designed processes, and our emphasis on “hosts,” means that we run the risk of not always being coherent with our own claims about emergence. Our approach to hosting conversations that matter certainly acknowledges emergence and can create conditions in which emergence happens, but it does that largely because humans operating in any constraint regime will create emergent outcomes. The question is whether that emergence is relevant to the field out of which these people come, or whether it is a distortion brought about by the container in which people are gathered and in which we convene conversation. A powerful conversation on its own is not helpful if its effects cannot survive contact with the system that it seeks to change.
The critique is important because it raises a question of epistemic justice, and I don’t think we answer that question very well: whose knowledge is being surfaced, and under what conditions? Are we enabling the distributed intelligence of the system to become visible, or are we shaping what can be said and heard through the design of our processes, invitations, and harvests?
If the conversations we convene are to truly matter, they must be coherent with the field in which they are situated. More than that, whatever emerges in those conversations must be able to travel back into that field and interact with it: shifting patterns, enabling action, and surviving beyond the temporary conditions of the container.
The issue, then, is not whether to convene, but how to do so in ways that remain accountable to the field. We need to be aware of the constraints we introduce, conscious of the power we hold as hosts, and attentive to whether what emerges is actually usable once people return to the systems they inhabit. And we need to be constantly critiquing our positionality.
Dave’s work lately has been to discuss systems as geological features. He locates the work of anthro-complexity firmly in the metaphor of the estuary, and yesterday his post very helpfully described the Art of Hosting (as a body of work) as a delta. These are two different kinds of systems, and the distinction is important. I want to quote from that post at length:
Art of Hosting is the delta of the leadership and organisational field. Over two decades and across dozens of cultural contexts, Toke Møller, Monica Nissen, and the community they built have produced real moments of collective intelligence, genuine emergence, and authentic contact. The practice carries real generosity and real craft, and this post takes that seriously.
But the delta has been building. The hosting aesthetic, the circle, the open space, the world café, the council, the harvest: these are now a recognisable repertoire, instantly legible to anyone who has spent time in that world. And a repertoire is a structure that precedes the encounter. The hosting team designs the invitation, shapes the container, holds the process, and harvests the outputs. The circle looks leaderless. The architecture is not.
Chris Corrigan, who has engaged generously with this argument in previous conversations and stated plainly that he is trying to change Art of Hosting from within, deserves acknowledgement here. That is the most intellectually honest position available to a practitioner committed to a tradition they have also diagnosed. It is exactly the move Griffin made with Stacey and the matrix: following the argument toward its conclusion, regardless of the professional cost. The question is whether the tradition as a whole is willing to follow that argument, or whether the delta will continue to accumulate.
The delta’s generativity is real. The flood plain moments, the occasions when Art of Hosting breaks through its own container and something genuinely distributed happens, are not accidental. They are what the tradition has been reaching for, and they occur. The problem is that the method cannot reliably produce them, cannot fully explain when they occur, and cannot sustain them when they do. The hosting team is still in the room. The design is still prior. The harvest is still shaped by hands that arrived before the conversation began.
In order to fairly deal with this critique we must honestly look at the ways in which it is true. And so to all my friends and colleagues in this field, I invite you and us to find the genuine questions in here that help us deepen our practice and rise to the challenge posed by serious questions of epistemic justice, legitimate change, and a deeper understanding of complexity and its dynamics.
My experience of reading Dave’s posts lately has been at times feeling a bit defensive but on the whole (and especially after yesterday’s) more akin to what a delta might feel during and after an autumn king tide, when it is overwhelmed and inundated by the sea and the rain. When the deluge stops and the tide ebbs, one finds that the landscape has been gently rearranged and new patterns of flow and precarious stability arise. I find myself in somewhat familiar location, but standing on new ground and needing to re-navigate and re-orient myself and my practice. I genuine experience of estuarine thinking. As I have been doing so over the past few days (during which I was also co-leading an Art of Hosting training) I found myself operating with heightened curiosity and inquiry.
I’ll write more about these questions, and especially as they relate specifically to how I understand the practice of the Art of Hosting, the usefulness of methods (including harvest), the importance of dialogic containers and how anthro-complexity helps us make better change. Stay tuned, and enjoy the view.
We are just about to begin Day Two of our bi-annual Art of Hosting here in Vancouver. Yesterday, we introduced participants to the four-fold practice of the art of hosting (presence, participation, hosting and co-creation) as a generative framework for designing participatory meeting and supporting participatory leadership, and we also taught the Chaordic Path, as a way into confronting the dynamics of self-organization in meetings.
This teaching in particular is a bit of a gateway into complexity theory, as it is intended to help participants confront issues of control and self-organization in facilitation and leadership. For many people coming to the practice of hosting, where we place an emphasis on working with constraints rather than intervening in events, the idea that groups of people can be self-organizing within constraints is sometimes a challenging notion. The idea that we might design dialogic containers thoughtfully to encourage work that is useful, rich, affirming, novel, and full of diversity, difference and novelty is desired, but is tricky in practice.
For me, the dance of chaos and order and the confrontation with the potential of self-organization I found in Open Space in 1995 was mind blowing. It transformed my facilitation practice from being a person whose job was to control conversations, make sure that they “stayed on track” and “dealt with” conflict. My job had been to reframe people’s words and help people listen to each other and write longs lists of things on flip charts. That’s okay I suppose in a communications workshop, but in meetings? Hmm.
At the same time as I had been facilitating groups that way I hated being facilitated in this way. I didn’t want someone reframing things I was saying. I didn’t want differences mediated between myself and another person; I wanted to work those out together. I didn’t need someone else to tell me to listen to another person with curiosity. And if something was to go up on a flip chart, I needed it to be in my own words, especially if the facilitator working with us didn’t know anything about the context they were working in.
After 30 years of hosting conversations very differently, I still get clients calling me to facilitate conversations by, essentially, inserting myself into a set of human dynamics that they are unable or unwilling to participate in. It is not the folks that are excluded or unheard in organizational or community dynamics that are calling me. It is often folks whose agendas are not finding a fast enough route to implementation because there is resistance in the field.
My work is often to help those folks discover what is actually happening. This resistance is information and it tells us a lot about what is possible and what isn’t. Running roughshod over resistance is possible, but unethical. Exploring the nature of the field of relations is a pre-requisite to discovering the affordances for action.
(I once had an employer group contact me to see if I could facilitate the employers’ agenda regarding labour relations issues becasue the unions they worked with were always being unreasonable. When I asked to call the union reps to talk about the issue they told me that wasn’t part of the work and they simply needed me to find a way to get the union to back off their demands and grievances and forward to employers’ agenda. Of course I declined the offer to work with them).
Perhaps it goes without saying, but I think there are a lot of implicit actions of control built into the unexamined role of the facilitator. When folks ask me to deal with difficult people as if I have some magic wand, I’ll often ask them “how would you like to be treated if someone didn’t like what you had to say?” I think in general, most folks are not in favour of being controlled by others, but there is some residual idea out there that facilitation or leadership comes with permission to control conversations, conflict, and dissent. It can be a useful practice for those of us who lead or work with groups to reflect on these questions.
Enabling self-organization and co-creation of a container that can hold conflict is the better – and harder – way. But a group that learns to work with difference and hold conflict generatively while also dealing with harm in a relational way is a resilient group. It becomes a group that can host itself and that doesn’t require a facilitator at all.
To paraphrase Derrida, “the moment of facilitation is a moment of madness.”
Dave Snowden concluded his six-part series on the Channel and the Estuary this week. He used gangster movies and TV Series to illustrate the different kinds of contexts in which people are sense-making. The series contrasted the categorical ambiguity and gradients represented by the ecology of a tidal estuary with the managed and ordered passageway through uncertainty represented by the marked channel. The metaphors are meaningful for coastal people, and anyone who has had to navigate these kinds of marine ecosystems. The point is that navigating in the estuary and in the channel requires different approaches to sense-making.
The whole series deserves to be read and thought through, as it is an important declaration of what “complexity thinking” really is and what it requires from the complexity practitioner. It is also a warning against the way in which we receive the world in a pre-channeled, dredged state, made easier for us; “facilitated” one might say, especially by the digitization of our experience, which has dredged and channelled the world and offered us pre-designed categories of experience.
Dave’s series contains an embedded tribute to those whose lot in life requires them to practice estuarine thinking in a world of pre-cut channels. It recognizes the loneliness that such people sometimes experience and the separateness they often feel. It is also a call to action for an approach to organizational life that treats complexity as a context in which we are required to deploy “estuarine thinking.” These are lost capacities – exiled capacities, if you like – and we lose something essential if they disappear.
I have been wrestling with this series from the perspective of a person who hosts conversations in organizations and communities. Dave’s work has deeply shaped the way I view and practice facilitation over the past 15 years or so. It has left me in a liminal space of practice. I try to locate myself adjacent to those in the ‘facilitation’ world, those who are dialogic practitioners, and folks who are exploring the implications that complexity has for their practice. I say adjacent because I am aware that although I use the language of facilitation, dialogue, and hosting, I find that much of the practice in these fields fails to confront the complexity of human groups and systems. We all have work to do to build our practice around Dave’s invitation, not just in these posts but in his work in general as it relates to complex facilitation.
The thing about complexity is that once you see it you can’t unsee it, and Dave’s refection on the gangsters and business mavens from Guinness, Peaky Blinders and The Godfather had me noticing similar patterns in the stories I was encountering. Last weekend, we attended a screening of the 1961 version of the film West Side Story, which is unbelievably contemporary in many ways, not the least of which is that it explores what happens when people are born into a world of tight constraints not of their making. I have never seen the film or the musical, so this was all new to me. There is A LOT I can say about this film, and perhaps it deserves a whole other post to explore some of the themes, but one scene stood out to me in particular, and I think anyone who engages in facilitation (or community development or consulting or organizing) might find it beneficial to watch this and reflect.
The two gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, are locked in a struggle against each other, divided by ethnicity, neighbourhood, history, and class. Tony, the former leader of the Jets, falls in love with Maria, the younger sister of the Sharks’ leader. Their love crosses the boundaries of gangs, race, history, and tradition. Both gangs sing about the constraints of their worlds: childhood trauma, exclusion, racism, homesickness, loyalty, and the struggle to belong. At a critical point in the film, both gangs agree to meet at a dance in what they consider ‘neutral’ territory.
The dance is run by a social worker called Glad Hand, played beautiful by John Astin. Glad Hand, armed with his clipboard and his whistle, has some activities planned for the dance, and he naively tries to mix up the crowd of teenagers, probably so that they might have a different kind of experience of getting to know one another. His design for the evening is almost totally ignorant of the contexts that make it impossible for this dance to have any kind of success. It is a well-intentioned effort that goes terribly wrong. You can see the painfully earnest effort on Astin’s face, convinced that he is bringing a hopeful and helpful evening to this group of poor immigrant youth.
In the key scene, Glad Hand organizes the teenagers into a circle dance. the idea is that the girls walk one way and the boys walk the other and when he blows the whistle you have to dance with who ever you are standing in front of. He says “form a circle. Boys will be on the outside, girls will be on the inside.” Action, one of the Jets who has the best, most cynical quips in the films asks “And where will you be?” Glad Hand chuckles nervously with an awkward smile and ignores the question.
It takes a few moments for anyone to move into the circle. There is no trust between the teens and Glad Hand and everybody is HYPER aware of the dynamics in the room which Glad Hand has just gleefully ignored in favour of his plans and his clipboard. He has tried to create “safe” space and the gangs understand this as “neutral” space, which is a very different thing. “Neutral” requires that you keep your guard up and restrain your instincts. While Glad Hand is committed to civility, the gangs are actually committed to an uneasy peace in a social field that is filled with tension.
As the circle dance begins Glad Hand is clearly waiting for his chance to impose a predetermined outcome, where the Sharks girls will end up with the Jets boys and vice versa. It’s transparent and manipulative. The kids in the dance are looking anxiously around themselves, scanning the room and knowing exactly where they are in every moment. Glad Hand blows his whistle when the circles are lined up perfectly for his agenda. Immediately everyone catches on to what is happening. They stop, look around and break the exercise and go back into their couples and groups, and the dance disintegrates into a ritualized gang war, with the two sides doing their own thing more divided than ever. As the circle breaks down you can see the police officer running to Glad Hand and clearly reprimanding him for the situation he has created. This is the last we see of the social worker.
This is deeply familiar to me, and perhaps you too. For many of us the facilitation journey starts with tools and methods. A devotion to these creates a situation in which the context and pre-existing constraints are pushed into the background. When a group rebels against what I am doing. my experience has been that it is almost always the result of my own ignorance to what is happening in the group. These are hard lessons to learn, but important. It’s why I wrote the series on theory, to recognize that the dialogic containers in which we are working are embedded in multiple constraint regimes and landscapes of context which exert a more powerful influence on the present moment than a facilitated method.
Dave’s recent series pushes us to understand the capacity needed not only to enter into the ambiguous and uncertain space of complex situations, but to navigate once we are there. It calls me to a practice of constant self-reflection, knowing that in any situations it is impossible to map the next step, and recognizing that the channel markers I encounter are often the ones I have put down before, to protect myself, to avoid the messiness I can’t handle, to steer the group into a place where I am most comfortable or hopeful. Channels are not bad in and of themselves. But one cannot lose sight of the estuary in which the channel is dredged.
Relentless self-awareness is critical to leading in the estuary. Being aware of where we are in relation to what is happening, and knowing how to respond to the steadily changing context is the capacity. It is not often what people are contracting you for; so often the client wants certainty and structure and guidance. What is needed in complexity instead is a kind of learning scaffolding that for developing the capacity that people have for being in the estuary. Dredging a channel does not mean that we are no longer navigating in the salt marsh. On the contrary, it may well rob us of the ability to be able to do so.