Image: a word cloud capturing Bowen Island culture from the 2017 Cultural Master Plan
About 15 years ago I met Lyman Orton, who is a small town entrepreneur who created a very successful mail order business from his family’s General Store in a small town in Vermont. He tells the story of how he got involved in town planning and ended up creating a community plan that was top-down, based on a template and not engaged with the community. When a developer with an idea for a carnival park and zoo came along, the community got quickly divided and Lyman realized that if the community had been more involved in the plan, perhaps the conflicts that lasted for years could have been averted.
That was the beginning of the Community Heart and Soul Initiative that Lyman started through his Orton Family Foundation, and that is how I met him, at a gathering of Community Heart and Soul planners in Denver in 2005. I ran an Open Space session for a ful day of that conference in which planners could share stories and tools and ask questions of each other as they wrestled with how you plan from the heart and soul of a community.
The process of heart and soul planning begins and ends with stories. It’s about the collection of stories about what matters in a place and the engagement of people to make sense of those stories. In my years on the Community Economic Development Committee on Bowen Island, Edward Wachtman and I ran a series of anecdote and sense-making circles in our community working with a storytelling research method that Edward and his life and business partner Sheree Johnson created. The data we gathered and the processes we ran resulted in an incredible set of studies that Ed and Sheree created on visitor, business and resident experiences of our island, and we used this information to produce reports and to hold an annual business summit at which businesses discussed how they could tap into a support the story of Bowen. This work also fed into our branding process. Over the years it became clear to me that the businesses that understood our story and embraced it became sustainable on Bowen and those that didn’t often failed. When the pandemic struck, the community rallied around the businesses that really meant the most to the Island and I think most of the storefronts on Bowen survived with government support and community devotion.
Over the years through the story gathering and engagement work we did, Sheree was able to bring her immense talents to discerning a core story about the heart and soul of Bowen Island. And here it is:
Just off the coast of Vancouver is a place where everything’s…well…a little different. When you take the 20min ferry ride over, it feels as though you’ve crossed over to another world, a special place where life is a little simpler, a little less stressful.
The sights, the smells, the sounds, the people – all fill you with a calmness and an
awareness; making you feel a little different. There’s no hustle, no bustle, and certainly no
rat race. The sense of community is so strong you can almost feel the hugs. In a modern
world where everything’s always moving faster and faster, it feels really, really good to hit
pause. To reflect. To exhale. To take stock. To stop and smell the ocean. To connect with
what really matters.Bowen Islanders are fiercely proud of their island, and more than a little protective.
Sometimes they’re tempted to keep it to themselves. But if you’re looking for a way to
redefine play, work or life, this might be your place, too. You’ll leave your ordinary self at the dock along with all your mainland baggage. Bowen will change you… for the better
We found that there were five pillars that I guess pointed to the soul of our community, and these seemed to have stood the tests of time, certainly over the 20 years that I have lived here, and in my experience many who have lived here much longer than me confirm these:
- Community. We know each other, we help each other out, we can easily connect and create things we need here.Even strangers on Bowen are closer than neighbours on the mainland. We have a shared experience of the place.
- Nature. We live in a forest, in an fjord, in the sea, We are contained in some pretty impressive natural landscapes and we treasure them. We value quiet, the silence, the fresh air and the access we have to the natural enviroment. Almost every Bowen Island owns a piece of Bowen Island art of some kind that points to this aspect of our heart and soul and the community mural by the ferry dock is all about this story.
- Crossing over. You can only get here by crossing over the waters of Átl’ka7tsem,usually by boat. The journey from there to here is archetypal and we use it to decompress, to slow down, to change our identity from mainlander to islander. And visitors feel this as well. There are few journey’s more meaningful to the human soul than crossing over a wild body of water and arriving safe in a snug harbour.
- You’ll be better for being here. Many of us moved here to raise our children, or came to find community. So many people I know became artists once they moved here, having never created anything before in their lives. This is a place to heal and rest, and we have retreat and recovery centres that are devoted to just this aspect of who we are. People talk about Bowen Island as having a healing character. And truthfully, even though we are often in conflict with one another, you HAVE to learn to live with each other because that person you are arguing with online today may be the one who helps you out of a ditch tomorrow. We have the chance to learn how to live with difference here.
- Connected with what matters most. That is to say those things you advise others not to take for granted while you are resting on your death bed: friends, kindness, fun, adventure, spirit, generosity, community. Bowen is a platform for the practice of what matters most.
Around the same time, Dave Pollard led us through the creation of a cultural master plan for Bowen Island which is a brilliant piece of work that used stories and sense-making to more deeply understand our community culture and find ways to use arts and allied organizations to support that culture. I think the Cultural Master Plan is one of most important documents outlining the heart and soul of our place, and one that was massively underappreciated outside of the arts community. Here is an example, an introduction paragraph to the section on trying to define what Bowen’s culture is:
This section of the Culture Plan was written in one of Bowen Island’s renowned cafés—a meeting place where Bowen’s culture is almost flagrantly on display. Bleary-eyed commuters stagger in well before dawn for enough caffeine to get them onto the ferry. Telecommuters work at their laptops, interrupted constantly by friends who pull up chairs and share the latest local news. Several breakfast business meetings are taking place. The walls are covered with local art. Tradespeople get the day’s instructions by
cellphone. A young couple studies a map of Bowen’s hiking trails. A small crowd of dogs waits anxiously by the door for their people, checking out the other dogs much as the people check each other out.Most of the people filing in wave and chat with others they know, while the few people visiting for the first time look somewhat bewildered, as if this place has a language they don’t know. Suddenly, a flash mob choir bursts into song, and then hurries off to brief applause. Then someone announces “The ferry is here…” and a mass exodus ensues. The café empties, but then as the ferry deposits its load of visitors and returning residents, it quickly fills up again.
Now these documents and values were what we said back in 2014-17 and it has been only six years or so since then but a LIFETIME has passed. We have had a turnover of well over half of our residents since then and many of those who left or died are our Elders and long time community builders who made the businesses and places and organizations that have sustained community life here. The pandemic sent us into our homes and created a double whammy of isolation from one another and a large influx of new people who arrived without having access to any of the institutions, rhythms and practices of community life that I had when I moved here. Things have changed, that’s for sure. But it’s hard to say exactly what’s different.
This has always been a place that welcomes newcomers, and the best stay on and help create new things. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but the important things we do and have are created by people that started things like the fastpitch league, our festivals and community events like Bowfest, Dog Days, The Dock Dance, the Craft Fair, Hallowe’en, Remembrance Day and Light up the Cove. We have a vibrant performing arts community of actors and musicians who worked for decades to build a community performance space. We have dozens of published writers, painters and sculptors, some of whom are internationally known. We have gardening clubs and a little farmers’ market and the shared frustrations of the ferry and fall storms and the overwhelm of tourist season. We have business owners and their teams that care for us like Pat Buchanan at the Building Centre and Glen Cormier at the Pub and the Dike family at the Union Steamship Company. We have teams that have built our arts centre, the library, a state of the art soccer field, a new Health Centre, and a community performance space, We have developers that are actually from here like Wolfgang Duntz and John Reid and although not everyone is always happy with what they do, they are us, and they have made parks and buildings and spaces that we cherish, All these things together make a soul. A turbulent, churning, generative soul.
The five pillars that we defined back in 2016 and the work Dave led in 2017 are so right feeling to me that when I see things that run counter to them, it gets my dander up. Sometimes people have great ideas that will build community but they are opposed on the grounds of property values decreasing. We’ve had lawsuits over docks and temporary use permits and although I understand why people want these things or want to oppose them, I can’t always find pillar number five reflected in those discussions.
The pandemic has restricted our ability to both create and maintain the heart and soul of Bowen Island (and crucially introduce it to newcomers) AND it has robbed us of the chance to have conversations about what is REALLY meaningful to Bowen Islanders. We’re not quite a zombie Island, but we are a bit like a new cake recipe slid into the oven for the first time and about half way through cooking. Tasty looking on the outside, a bit raw in the middle.
in the next few years we are simply going to have to re-do our Community Plan. It no longer serves us. It doesn’t capture the heart and soul of Bowen Island. When we find ourselves saying “no” to almost every new and interesting idea here, it says to me that our plan has not adequately captured a sense of who we are and what we want. And at the moment, I don’t actually think we collectively know who we are and what we want. I think as individuals we know that, but we have not been actively creating that collective sense for a few years now and so the conversations about what matters are rooted in both individual concerns and projections onto the whole. “This is what I think Bowen is, therefore this idea is in line with (or opposed) to that.” History and new perspectives are swirling together and we haven’t had a chance to see them all play out in the social spaces of community creation.
You might think it’s easy to know what Bowen Island is or wants. After all we are only 4200 people on a small-ish island. But back in 2014-16 it took us years of research to really look and see what we could find. And even then of course, we can’t capture it all. Folks who live in Hood Point have a different experience than those who live on Cates Hill or out in Bluewater or down by the golf course. The environment, neighbourhood and histories of our little areas give a flavour and spin to our collective story. But I do believe that before we take a serious and comprehensive look at our community plan we need to do three things:
- Participate in community much more than we are now. We need to REMAKE the soul of the place again. Being at some Fastpitch League games this summer reminded me of some of the best of what we continue to be. Singing in choirs, volunteering at the recycling depot, playing soccer, hanging out at the Pier and just watching people come and go all helps me to add a little and be fed a little by the soul of Bowen. What I don’t think is helping me much is having my attention distorted by the conversations on social media. What I am missing is meeting the new folks to the Island. Mostly I get to do that by playing soccer, because our Football Club is a great place for new folks to get started.
- Change the conversations we are having. Or at the very least start talking about the stuff that matters deeply. Yes we are worried about the impact of a park on traffic and water or how the community centre and muni hall isn’t the performance space we really wanted. But we aren’t talking about what matters and we aren’t exploring that with curiosity and interest like we did when we were gathering stories from businesses and residents and visitors. Without diminishing the anxiety and pain people feel at the changes that are happening here, we need to get underneath these discussion and find out what what the soul of the place really looks like these days. And we need to hear from the people we never hear from online too, in a way that works for them. Entering the public square right now is not for everyone, because the online space can be withering and the face-to-face space needs to be reinvented to be invitational and deliberative rather than reactionary and exclusive. All of that prevents us from learning from the diversity of opinion and viewpoints here.
- Make a very different plan. I don’t have an answer this one. But I know that we need a simpler plan that captures what we want to work together to build and let’s people come with creative ideas to help make that happen. Our community plan needs to be about 180 pages shorter than it currently is.
We have a local election coming up. I’m interested in who is running and what they think about this. As always I’m happy to help (I’m not running) and I CAN do stuff to help these three need-to-dos above. If you are a Bowen Islander perhaps you have ideas too. Share them here.
You might not know that one of the things I have developed a deep passion for over the past 20 years or so is football. Soccer. Association football. Fütbol. It started when I lived in the UK as a kid and supported our local team Tottenham Hotspur. It waned a bit during the 1980s and 1990s when it was hard to watch games and no one in Canada really cared about the sport. But one of the great gifts of the internet was rekindling familiarity with the sport that I love.
I love it for so many reasons, not the least of which is that it is complexity practice embodied, that it is about community and belonging, that it is about accessibility and passion and love and activism and development. And you get to stand and sing with people in public, which is never a bad thing. It is a beautiful game and it truly is “life.” It is an expression of culture and place and time that embodies so much of the struggles that take place throughout society. And it has the capability to drive you into all kinds of emotional territory and gives us a chance to explore all of those topographies of being human.
So this past weekend was kind a distillation of all that and I just wanted to record it all for posterity to see what happens when 48 passes in life of a football supporter.
For me the weekend began on Friday night when TSS Rovers played two matches in the men’s and women’s divisions of League 1 BC. League 1 is a semi-professional tier in Canadian soccer and, on the men’s side, is the second tier. On the women’s side it is currently the highest level of women’s soccer as we don’t yet have a domestic professional league in Canada. We don’t have promotion or relegation in our soccer system at the moment, and so our teams exist so that we can develop players and move them into higher tiers of the professional game. They players get promoted not the teams.
TSS Rovers is a club I have been involved with since they fielded a team of all-Canadian men in the United Soccer League 2 which is the fourth tier of American soccer. We started a supporter group called The Swanguardians, which a radically inclusive group (anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic) inspired by similar groups in places like St. Pauli in Germany, and Detroit City FC in the USA. Over the pandemic years our support for the club developed into a few of us working with the club to create a supporters trust and this year we became the first club in Canada to offer up to 49% of it’s equity ownership to supporters. We have sold over 650 shares to 300 co-owners since December and our initial offer is still open.
One of the initiatives our Swanguardians supporter group has undertaken, is a a Prideraiser, which is an event done by North American supporters groups throughout Pride month. Pledge an amount per goal and every goal scored raises money for a charity. This year we are supporting Rainbow Refugee in Vancouver. The club is also raising money for its newly minted Foundation, to provide funds and scholarships to kids who want to play soccer and develop their game. We kicked off our Prideraiser campaign on Friday and our women’s team scored 7 goals right out of the gate. Subsequently they scored another 2 yesterday and the men’s team scored 3 yesterday to to bring our 48 hour total up to 12 goals with 8 matches left to play in June! Over $600 raised.
Saturday the Vancouver Whitecaps played at home and although I have been an active supporter of that team for 14 years, I gave up my season’s tickets over the way they have handled numerous sexual abuse scandals over the years. Until there is a leadership change there I won’t be attending live matches, but I still follow the team and have many many friends who are active in the various supporters groups. On Saturday the contracted security force at BC Place where the Whitecaps play, made a complete botchup of a situation and ended up ejecting one of my close friends who is the President and lead capo of the Southsiders on the basis of provably false accusations. BC Place security has been plagued with issues for many years now relating to general security theatre and under trained staff being given too much policing authority, and this event was a real nadir. Football and life collide in all the ways.
Yesterday I was excited to celebrate my birthday with my family by all going into Vancouver to watch our National Men’s Team play a World Cup preparation match against Panama. I started the day by watching Grimsby Town secure promotion to the English Football League (and there is a whole other story why that matters to me) and then went into the city to meet our kids and their partners for the game and a birthday dinner.
Our men’s team has been amazing in this World Cup qualifying cycle, ranked 38th in the world now after moving up from 119th. We won our Confederation qualification tournament and qualified for our first world cup since 1986. We have immense talent on the team right with the likes of Alphonso Davies, Jonathan David, Cyle Larin, Atiba Hutchinson, Stephen Eustaquio, and many others. This is our golden generation of men’s players, and they are finally starting to show their stuff on the world stage. I would argue they are beginning to reach to the levels that our women’s team have occupied over the past ten years!
Unfortunately our National Soccer Association has been dithering on negotiating a contract for them and after hoping for discussions to take place since March, the Canada Soccer Association finally met with them on June 2 and tabled an offer that was far below what the players considered fair. As a result the players refused to train and then at the last minute, without an acceptable contract in place for their service, refused to play the Panama friendly. There are a million nuances to this situation, but as always I back the players who have devoted their lives to this game and to representing Canada and growing the Canadian game. It is their bodies that do the work, their lifetime commitment that has secured history and while of course they are supported by lots of folks, ultimately in Canada we do a poor job of supporting our men’s and women’s teams. They have carried the country on their backs, have been willing to negotiate and did not deserve to be treated with so much disrespect.
There is lots you can read about this evolving situation (and its wider implications for our fledgling national professional men’s league), but it is one more example of how fütbol is life. And in life I almost always support the workers in these situations, and especially where health, safety and long term injury and disability are the price of playing for your country.
People often say that sports and life should be separate. That there is no room for politics in sports or that it doesn’t matter. But not only is that not true at all, but football in particular is a broad canvas on which the entirety of the human experience is painted. In the last 48 hours, I’ve been amazed to witness just how varied that canvas can be, and so, that’s probably worth recording here for posterity.
Im just coming back from a meeting this weekend on Vancouver Island where Kelly Poirier and I were working with some specialized health care workers who were meeting with Indigenous families around creating a care model for their children. We had three families with us including six children, two of which were babies, a five month old and a seven month old.
It has been a long time since I facilitated meetings with babies taking an active role in the proceedings. The children were included in this meeting as participants and they had as much to offer both the content and the process while also demonstrating what it looks like when we build a system with children at the centre.
With the world increasingly full of people that are acting like babies, it’s a good time to pause and reflect on the lessons that actual babies bring to the game. Babies get a bad rap.
The clock doesn’t matter. Rhythm matters. When there are babies in the room, we learn to pay attention to natural rhythms. Babies that are constantly held and cared for are very quiet and happy. The two babies we had in the room with us loved being held by others and they were looked after by their older siblings and other participants in the meeting. This of course is common in Indigenous families and large families. The babies had a blanket in the middle of the room they could roll around on and their every need was looked after. If they needed holding, they were picked up. If they needed as nap they could cuddle up with someone. If they needed feeding, they were fed, if they started getting tired at the end of the day, we closed the meeting down. If they were late in the morning, then we started once everyone was present and settled. Babies do not obey a clock, but they do very well at reminding us of healthy rhythms. Watching Kelly facilitate an hour of reflective practice with a five month old baby curled up in her arms sound asleep was beautiful.
Put the children in the centre not around the edges. We had babies in the middle and we had smaller children who were offered many options for being present including going in and out of the room, being accompanied by different adults and contributing. But there was no child care offered for our meeting. The meeting was child care and the children had a place in it. We all took turns being with the children, and they were never out of sight or out of earshot.
Babies change the conversation. The meeting we were running was not full of conflict or high emotions but it was about tricky issues like cultural safety and non-Indigenous professionals meeting with Indigenous families and so there was some nervousness in the room as we were building the container and the relationships. But babies make excellent talking pieces and excellent centres for a dialogue circle and having them constantly in our space made the conversation about them all the time. Their presence helped ground and simplify the conversation and it ensured that we spent our time well so as not to tire them out.
Babies have something to offer. Find a way to include them. Babies offer lots of things to a meeting, including feedback and insight and a kind of checking of the ego. All of the children in te meeting were included in every conversation sometimes in small groups, sometimes in the larger group. They offered their own answers to the questions we were asking because the questions were simple enough that a five year old could contribute “What do you like about your worker?” is a question everyone can answer and the children will often find ways to add to an adult’s story or tell it in their own voice. Additionally the two smaller children we had in our meeting were both excellent singers and when offered the chance to do so, they shared songs with us to end our meetings or bless the food, which is a common practice in Indigenous meetings on the west coast with adults usually offering songs before eating. There is nothing better than a child who loves singing being invited to share their gift with others in services of a genuine need rather than a cute performance.
Babies will tell you what’s happening in the room. Babies are very sensitive to the energy of a group. I learned this years ago, that they will sometimes express the emotions that are in a room in more subtle ways before the audults become aware. If things get tense they will get squirmy or begin crying from worry. It’s a signal to take it easy and take a little break. The baby is the first one to become unregulated in a setting and usually the first one to become regulated again. Babies don’t carry a lot of stories about what is happening in the room, so I pay close attention to their sounds and movements and it gives me information especially in setting like this one where the primary purpose was building a relational field and sharing and making sense of stories.
The baby reveals the truth of the system. If you are developing a model of care centered on children, watch what is actually happening with the children in the room. They way they are included and respected and lifted up so they contribute tells you a lot about how ready the people are to bring a truly child centered approach to their work. I have seen systems where the babies and the children gave us warning signs in the room that much more work had to be done. This weekend though was very special.
“Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. The air is loaded with miasmas there. Other books breathe a livelier air; the bracing air of outdoors, the wind of high mountains, even the icy gust of the high crags buffeting the body; or in the morning, the cool scented air of southern paths through the pines. These books breathe. They are not overloaded, saturated, with dead, vain erudition.”
— from A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros
I love writing born of direct experience, born of the insight of a moment, or generated from the passing inspiration of the glint of sunlight on the sea seen through an open window. I love writing that arises from the quiet encounter with spirit or the contemplation of a mind that finally slows down and stretches out. That is writing of authentic voice or even the super-voice that all writers know, the voice we chase for its clarity and ease. It sometimes takes a long pounding away at the keyboard or days of scribbled lines before that voice arises somewhere below consciousness. In that moment you become merely a vehicle for it, in service to something. Your word choice become less ham-fisted, the cadence of the words more natural, like a jazz musician, you become open, trading fours with the muse, offering a lick of style or form and being rewarded with an image or a connection that you could never see before.
I’m enjoying A Philosophy of Walking. It is a testament to obliquity in the arts and philosophy, about the way a walk frees the mind and opens the heart. Today I’m heading out on y first work trip since February 15 2020 and I’m appreciating the way my thinking slows down even as my body is in the stop and go rhythm of ferry travel. There is spaciousness, time to kill, time to read or write or just peer out at the sea and look for whales or sea lions. Travelling on the coast means moving at the speed of the ferry, and the best way to do that is to travel on foot, at a human pace, free of the frustrations of being confined to a car, presented with options at every turn; a crossword, a book, an album, a blog post, a nap.
Have a read this weekend of some cool things I’ve found on the web. I’ll see what ideas and thoughts bubble up from this little trip to Vancouver Island.
- The Limitations of “Performance.” With a great quote from Tim Galloway: “When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.”
- Beyond the magic – growing our understanding of societal metamorphosis. An account of a radically open community development approach from Tunisia called Tamkeen. Lots in this piece to think about. Ht: Marcus Jenal, whose newsletter always delivers fantastic stuff.
- The Northern Ireland Assembly met, this time with simultaneous interpretation of the languages of English, Irish and Ulster Scots. More on these languages and dialects in Ulster on this beautiful video playlist from the Open University
- The Sultans of String record “The Power of the Land,” a poem by Duke Redbird set to some great music and visuals of some pretty impressive landscapes, including, at 1:36, a view of Nexlelexwem/Bowen Island and the south end of At’lka7tsem/Howe Sound, which I live.
- A discussion of Orthodox Christianity and theosis within the natural world, courtesy of Dave Pollard’s monthly link post.
- A fantastic list of mostly books on encountering silence in the Christian Contemplative tradition from Carl McColman’s blog.
- Aja Couchois Duncan and Kad Smith on the history and practice of Loving Accountability
Enjoy your weekend as we move towards midsummer. I heard my first Swainson’s Thrush today, which means the better part of the season has begun.
It’s an old post by Henry Mintzberg from 2015 but he tweeted it out today and the message is as current as ever. If Mintzberg is retweeting seven year old essays, it’s probably worth paying attention to them. Here’s the essence:
Someone I know once asked a most senior British civil servant why his department had to do so much measuring. His reply: “What else can we do when we don’t know what’s going on?” Did he ever try getting on the ground to find out what’s going on? And then using judgment to assess that? (Remember judgment? It’s still in the dictionary.)
Measuring as a replacement for managing has done enormous damage—undermining the souls of so many of our institutions (as discussed in last week’s TWOG). Think of how much education has been killed by assuming that we can measure what a child learns in a classroom. (I defy anyone to measure learning. You are reading this TWOG: please measure what you are learning.) Must we always deflect teaching from engaging students to examining them?
The principle of “bounded applicability” is one that I first learned from Dave Snowden (and one which Sonja expands on here). Measurement ticks all the boxes for pretending that the world is objectively knowable, and that anything can be quantified. in fact there are indeed probably HR consultants out that that will give you a quantitative analysis of your organizations culture.
Actually I just went down the rabbit hole looking for examples. I’ll save you the trouble. That is to peer into hell. Please do so only at your peril.
Sometimes when I’m teaching Cynefin i will say something about the boundary between Complicated and Complex problems that goes something like this: “The line between these two kinds of systems is important because there is a strong urge to use methods from the complicated domain to “solve” problems in the complex domain, and if you do that, you can create a world that hates humans. There is actually a really easy way to reduce the homeless population to 0, but not if you have an iota or morality in your character.” The most dehumanizing thing to do is to treat cultures, and people, and living human systems strictly by the number, as empirical units of problem or success, to be increased or eliminated. The peril we are in if AI starts making decisions about our lives is that these ways of working are devoid of ethics, or more frighteningly, they are reliant on the ethics of those who program them. Elon Musk’s acquisition of twitter for it’s massive semantic database should have us all wary of technology that learns from that data set.
imposing the ruthless methods of the complicated work onto the complex world is one way we map colonization onto the Cynefin framework. In complexity, culture is what matters and culture is produced by the countless interactions between people creating shared meaning from their stories and experiences. To the complicated system, all this meaning is noise that contributes to an inefficient waste of time and energy. But the energy produced by inefficiency in the complex domains produces warmth, human connection, community, society, relationship Community is inefficient. Thank god.
Long live the inefficient community. And long live measurement by the numbers, firmly nestled into the complicated domain where it can do the most good. And the least harm.