When you live on an island like ours, Nex?wle?lex?xwm/Bowen Island there are rhythms that are like breathing. They come and go over time on cycles as short as an hour or as long as geological epochs.
Most mornings I begin my day on my covered porch, drinking a coffee, reading a meditation, spending some time in silence and contemplation. At this time of year the mornings are dark and, more often than not, wet. This morning we are in day four of what is called an atmospheric river, a massive steady plume of rain that extends from the Hawaiian Islands north-east to our coast. Such a pattern is like a long exhale of moisture, a plume of breath from the tropics that brings warm air and rain and sometimes fronts with gale force winds, which we call the Pineapple Express.
From my morning perch I can see the ferry coming and going, every hour or so, our connection to “the continent.” The early ferries – 6:20 and 7:30 – are commuter runs, with workers heading to the city on the earlier boat and high school students off to school on the later one. As the ferry approaches, the intensity of traffic on my road increases, and the closer we get to sailing time, the higher the speed of cars racing to make sure they don’t miss the boat, or to deliver a sleepy bus-missing teenager to the dock. There is a period of stillness and then the flow reverses and the labourers from the city who have made an early start travel in their work vans and pick-up trucks through the arteries and capillaries of our island road system. As the ferry leaves, things become still and quiet again.
It is very much like the tide that comes and goes twice a day, sometimes bringing as much as 3.5 meters of water to our shoreline, lifting the logs off the beach and floating them on the currents and eddies of Atl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, the inlet in which we live. This time of year we are coming into our highest tides, and the beaches will be cleared of the boom logs and torrent debris that has cascaded off the mountains into the sea during the past few months of rain and erosion.
And there are the longer period rhythms here as well. The world breathes birds on to our island all in season. Right now there are the winter residents having their run of the place, and with a mild and possibly snowless winter at this altitude near sea level, the towhees, juncos, song sparrows, chickadees, nuthatches, and wrens are spoiled for choice. large flocks of siskins and kinglets swirl in the grey air and occasionally at night you can hear the calls of snow geese flying high above the coast line in search of their estuary winter feeding grounds south of here at the mouth of the Sto:lo/Fraser River.
Winter is short here, and the new year brings with it a month of rain and grey, with gradually brightening skies and then the first hints of spring weather in early February, in line with the Irish seasons more so than the Gregorian ones. But of course there is already a calendar here, the Squamish calendar,that relates to the seasons of food and harvest. The land never really rests in warm winters like this, with the forest extracting as much as it can from the dim light but the mycelial networks in the forest floor working overtime to breakdown nutrients and keep everything fed and flowing in the moist and nutrient rich humus. The forest itself breaths a rhythm of feed from the sky and the earth, continuously growing the giant trees for which our coast is known.
Everything is geared around natural rhythms here, and they care little for the smoothing out of human life brought about by a pandemic. Our community rhythms have become a faint signal in the past 10 months, the peaks and troughs of gatherings, festivals and commemorative events flattened into mere bumps and barely acknowledged remembrances. In this sense it feels very much like our village has been holding its breath, but I also have a small worry that with another year of lock down we will become severed from the rhythms of community life. It only means that we will have to create new ones, or resurrect the former ones in new forms. But it does remind one of how easy it is to break the fabric of community life and set people adrift with one another, a dynamic that was sued against the indigenous population here over generations, through the pandemics of smallpox and colonization, which ravaged community life and stole even the waiting breath.
And in my own life, a turn has been taken as my youngest child has moved out, into an apartment in the city where his 20 year old life is also on hold. He has a job and will start a new set of university classes online this winter, but being 20 and living in a city for the first time is supposed to be a time of socializing, living life fully and enjoying oneself, and that’s just not possible at the moment. Back on the island, Caitlin and I have become empty nesters, and have just spent a couple of weeks in quiet and still recalibration of our lives in a shared space that, after 23 years of parenting, is once again just the two of us. Another exhalation, a deeper one, and an intake of breath for what the next third of life will hold.
Happy New Year to you all. May you continue to breathe and find life in the rhythms of breath that surround you.
I sometimes feel like I’m repeating myself here, but please indulge me. When I get my teeth into learning about something I come back to it over and over, finding new ways to think about it, polishing it up. I love blogs because they offer us a chance to put drafting thinking out into the world and get responses, forcing me to think more deeply and more clearly about things.
Likewise teaching, which for me is always the best stone that sharpens the blade, so to speak. Tomorrow I will rise at an ungodly hour – 4am – to teach a two hour session to some amazing social justice activists in Eastern and Central Europe, who are fighting for things like environment justice, and racial and gender and sexual orientation equality, among other topics. I get to teach about working with complexity.
As part of that, I will elaborate on my little model of constraints, which for the record is now described as Connections, Exchanges, Attractors, Boundaries and Identities the short form of which is CEAB(I). In this blog post I’ll explain why.
These five types of constraints essentially cover all the ways that complex systems or problems are constituted. They function as a mix of constraints that govern and constraints that enable. These two terms come from the work of Alicia Juarrero and Dave Snowden. Governing constraints stop certain things from happening (a door keeps the public out, a bolt attaches two pieces of metal). They create a limitation on action. Enabling constraints create a space, a context or a container in which action can happen within boundaries. They are essential for emergence and coherence in a complex system. Think about form in poetry, or the kinds of direction that managers give their workers. If these constraints are too tight, we compromise and stifle emergence. If they are too loose, we create too diffuse a context for action. A manager that says “do whatever you want” is going to make trouble in the organization. So too will one who says “let me review every single move you make.” Managing enabling constraints is really the high art of working in complexity especially as you can never know in advance what “too tight” and “too loose” looks like.
So far so good.
Now this little model, CEAB(I) can be used to both analyse a situation and to take action to change that situation. When I am confronted with a stuck problem in ir near the complexity domain, I will often do a quick survey of the constraints that are active in the moment. From a social action perspective, lets just look at a relatively straightforward (!) case or trying to change policy around affordable rental housing. What are the constraints at play that create the emergent situation of “unaffordabilty?” Here are a few sketched out thoughts:
CONNECTIONS – Landlords can use AirBnB to get a better revenue stream rather than long term rental; tenants need to be “connected” to find good deals;
EXCHANGES – Insiders in communities recommend “good” tenants to landlords, thereby gaming the market for accessibility to affordable spaces;
ATTRACTORS –Landlords have few incentives to offer long term housing over short term rentals that give them more flexibility; landlord regulations make long term rental prohibitive, but lax regulations on BnB’s make it easy to rent short term; high mortgages and house prices mean landlords charge high rents to recover costs.
BOUNDARIES – Government regulations make developing a suite to be prohibitive (secondary suites are often banned in residential neighbourhoods due to concerns about traffic and noise); restricted zoning means rentals are located only in certain places making them more scarce and therefore higher priced on the market; lack of rental increase guidelines that allow landlords to charge maximum rather than affordable rents.
IDENTITY – Renters perceived as poorer than the home owners in the surrounding neighbourhood; rentals and density considered undesirable as it is perceived to lower property values; density considered a change to the character of a neighbourhood opposed by people with a vested interest in the status quo; fear of outsiders or transient residents.
Okay. You see where this is going. Complex issues are so named because these factors (and many many more) work together to create the emergent characteristic of unaffordable rents.
To change the system we need to change the constraints.
There are some high value targets. For example, you could create a governing constraint in the system that bans rents above a certain price point and creates expensive fines for breaking that law. This may have the unintended consequence of forcing rentals OFF the market and possibly into shotr term rentals OR having a black market emerge of unregulated suites and apartments. It may limit the supply and force renters into tent cities for example, creating another situation. On the other hand such a law may give everyone clarity and force a change for the good. But this is a very high energy solution and requires a great deal of power to effect.
At the other end of the spectrum, you could create different kinds of connections in the system. You could ban AirBnB (as some jurisdictions have done) but also incentivize rentals by providing a property tax breaks to people renting out affordable suites or apartments. Tenants can organize to strike against high rents by creating tight connections and limiting the exchanges that go between them as a class and landlords as a class, forcing political action.
You could also change the nature of the problem by allowing different kinds of rentals (such as secondary suites in single family homes, which happened in my community and instantly increased the amount of rental housing in the stock). Potential renters could form new connections, such as co-ops and co-housing groups (or indeed create tent cities) to create new forms of housing and community.
The four constraints of connection, exchanges, attractors, and boundaries offer places for action. As you go from C —-> E —-> A —> B you require more and more power to act. Creating and enforcing boundaries is very difficult for community organizers to do. But creating new connections and changing the exchanges that happen are accessible tools for people without formal power in a system. This is how people organize and build movements for change. If your hands are not on the levers of power, you need to mobilize to get them there.
Identities are a special class of constraint, and everyone plays in this space. You are often forced into a certain class by the ethos of a culture: in a white supremacist culture like Canada, BIPOC people are often marginalized as outsiders. But white people have choices about using power and privilege, to either uphold the status quo or change it. Identity and context play together. Some people are able to code switch, or form alliances, or play along with epectations and then make surprise moves. The film Black Klansman is a great example of this. How you name yourself, appear, code-switch, separate and join groups is a tactical consideration for making change. Do you join certain clubs and networks to gain influence? Or is it better to stand outside the system and protest? Do you join the mainstream or offer alternatives? Do you participate in advisory panels or critique and tear down the process? Or do you do all of these simultaneously. Identity and identity politics are a big deal.
To set up new attractors and new boundaries is possible only if you have some power. That power can be formal coercive power, or it could be charismatic influence. Even a social movement without policy making capability can force change through boycotts (limiting exchanges), shifting the story (through re-casting identity), creating alliances (connections acorss power gradients) or creating alternative glimpses of the future (off the grid experiments, tent cities communities) that might force policy makers to stabilize good ideas or finally confront the constraints that create problems by breaking them.
Being effective in mobilizing for change requires a huge amount of creativity, collaborative relationship, collective intelligence, and situational awareness. You need to ask:
- How does this problem work?
- What do we have the power to change?
- What do we not yet have the power to change?
- What can we change now that will create more stories and examples of what we want to see and fewer examples of what we don;t want to see?
Then you make small plans, try to catalyze new patterns in the system and see what happens. And you fail. A LOT, which is something that all activists know, but which doesn’t stop them from organizing and working anyway.
A long ramble, but hopefully it gives you a peek at some of the thinking that I’m doing about how power comes into play in influencing complex systems and addressing complex problems. Let me know what you think in the comments.
James Gleick, the author of the classic book “Chaos: Making a New Science” has written a terrific review of Jill Lepore’s new book “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.”The book covers the origin of data science as applied to democracy, and comes as conversations about social media, algorithms, and electoral manipulation are in full swing due to the US election and the release of The Social Dilemma.
Gleick’s review is worth a read. He covers some basic complexity theory when working with data. He provides a good history of the discovery of how the principles of “work at fine granularity” helps to see patterns that aren’t otherwise there. He also shows how the data companies – Facebook, Google, Amazon – has mastered the principle of “data precedes the framework” that lies at the heart of good sensemaking. For me, both of these principles learned from anthro-complexity, are essential in defining my complexity practice.
Working at fine granularity means that, if you are looking for patterns, you need lots of data points before seeing what those patterns are. You cannot simply stake the temperature in one location and make a general conclusion about what the weather is. You need not only many sites, but many kinds of data, including air pressure, wind speed and direction, humidity and so on – in order to draw a weather map that can then be used to predict what MIGHT happen. The more data you have, the more models you can run, and the closer you can come to a probable prediction of the future state. The data companies are able to work at such a fine level of granularity that they can not only reliably predict the behaviour of individuals, but they can also serve information in a way that results in probable changes to behaviour. AS a result, social media is destroying democracy, as it segments and divides people for the purpose of marketing, but also dividing them into camps that are so disconnected from one another that Facebook has already been responsible for one genocide, in Myanmar.
Data preceding the framework means that you don’t start with a framework and try to fit data to that matrix, but rather, you let the data reveal patterns that can then be used to generate activity. Once you have a ton of data, and you start querying it, you will see stable patterns. If you turn these into a framework for action, you can sometimes catalyze new behaviours or actions. This is useful if you are trying to shift dynamics in a toxic culture. But in the dystopian use of this principle, Facebook for example notices the kinds of behaviours that you demonstrate and then serves you information to get you to buy things in a pattern that is similar to others who share a particular set of connections and experiences and behaviours. Cambridge Analytica used this power in many elections, including the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum as well as elections in Trinidad and Tobago and other places to create divisions that resulted in a particular result being achieved. You can see that story in The Great Hack. Algorithms that were designed to sell products was quickly repurposed to sell ideas, and the result has been the most perilous threat to democracy since the system was invented.
Complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable but using data you can learn about probabilities. If you have a lot of data you gain an advantage over your competitors. If you have all the data you gain an advantage over your customers, turning them from the customer to the product. “If you’re not paying, you are the product” is the adage that signals that customers are now more valuable products to companies that the stuff they are trying to sell to them.
Putting these principles to use for good.
I work with complexity, and that means that I also work with these same principles in helping organizations and communities confront the complex nature of their work. Unlike Facebook though )he says polemically) I try to operate from a moral and ethical standpoint. At any rate, the data we are able to work within our complexity work is pretty fine-grained but not fine-grained enough to provide accurate pictures of what can be manipulated. We work with small pieces of narrative data, collecting them using a variety of methods and using different tools to look for patterns. Tools include NarraFirma, Sensmaker and Spryng, all of which do this work. We work with our clients and their people to look for patterns in these stories and then generate what are called “actionable insights” using methods of complex facilitation and dialogic practice. These insights give us the inspiration to try things and see what happens. When things work, we do more and when they don’t we stop and try something else.
It’s a simple approach derived from a variety of approaches and toolsets. It allows us to sift through hundreds of stories and use them to generate new ideas and actions. It is getting to the point that all my strategic work now is actually just about making sense of data, but doing it in a human way. We don’t use algorithms to generate actions. We use the natural tools of human sensemaking to do it. But instead of starting with a blank slate and a vision statement that is disconnected from reality, we start with a picture of the stories that matter and we ask ourselves, what can we start, stop, stabilize or create to take us where we want to go.
In a world that is becoming increasingly dystopian and where our human facilities are being used against us, it’s immensely satisfying to use the ancient human capacities of telling stories and listening for patterns to create action together. I think in some ways doing work this way is an essential antidote to the way the machines are beginning to determine our next moves. You can use complexity tools like this to look at things like your own patterns of social media use and try to make some small changes to see what happens. Delete the apps from your phone, visit sites incognito, actively seek out warm connections with real humans in your community and look for people that get served very different ads and YouTube videos and recommended search results. Talk to them. They are being made to be very different from you, but away from the digital world, in the slower, warmer world of actual unmediated human interaction, they are not so different.
Postscript
Over the past few years, my work has taken shape from the following bodies of work:
- Dave Snowden’s theories of anthro-complexity, which forms the basis of my understanding of complexity theory and some of the tools for addressing it, including facilitation tools and Sensemaker.
- Cynthia Kurtz’s Participatory Narrative Inquiry, which is a developmental evaluation approach that uses stories and methods of sensemaking that she partly developed with Dave and then subsequently. I use her software, NarraFirma, for most of our narrative work now.
- Glenda Eoyang’s Human System Dynamics is a set of tools and methods for working with complex adaptive systems.
- The facilitation and leadership practices from the Art of Hosting which help us to develop the personal capacity to work dialogically with complexity.
Just a little story about how I lost my assumptions about mask culture.
Here in Vancouver, over the past twenty years, it used to be very common to see people from Asia, specifically China, Japan, and Korea, wearing masks out in public. I have to admit that for a long time I felt it was kind of arrogant like you were wearing a mask because you didn’t want to contract something from me. To the naked eye, it didn’t look like folks were vulnerable. It looked like healthy, mostly young people were wearing masks to send a signal that somehow it wasn’t safe to be around me.
Last year, however, I was in Japan, and one day, crossing the street in Shinagawa, I saw tons of people wearing masks and I turned to my Japanese friend and straight out asked her “what’s the deal with everyone wearing masks?”
And she matter of factly replied “of course…because they are feeling a little bit sick and they don’t want anyone else to get infected.”
This realization hit me so hard that I may have actually stopped in my tracks, halfway across the street, on one of the busiest pedestrian crossings in Tokyo, upsetting the flow of pedestrians moving out from the busy Shinagawa station and causing a bit of grumbling from the folks behind me.
I was simultaneously overcome with gratitude, admiration, and shame. That was the beginning of my education in how key consideration for other people is as a rule in Japan. In general, folks there try to respect each other’s space, not to make noises too loud, to talk on their phones while on a train, to wait in traffic when there is a delay, or patiently line up for a ticket booth or a train. In a culture like that, of course wearing a mask is about consideration for other people.
These days I am wearing a mask when I am in my local village or in the city, and because of this particular epiphany, I find that when doing so I am a lot more conscious of my neighbours and the strangers around me. I wear a mask, because I might be infected with COVID-19 and be asymptomatic, and the kinder thing to do is to try and keep my breath to myself as much as possible.
Now I get why people are a bit put off wearing masks. I understand why people reason that “I’m not vulnerable, I probably won’t catch it, and anyway, the masks don’t protect you…” I get that because we live in a culture that prizes our individuality over consideration for others. We rationalize our behaviour based on our personal good first. And often that’s all the planning we do. The results of this behaviour are evident in things like climate change, or the inability to address the opioid crises, poverty or homelessness with radical solutions. The vast majority of people look at their own circumstances and believe that they are not connected to these problems, or that somehow they are immune to them.
In our culture, it takes an epiphany to change one’s view. It seems that one has to get sick, or become homeless or addicted before suddenly things become problems. We often hear stories of people who suddenly find themselves in dire straits complaining about the levels of service at hospitals for example, while for years they never paid attention as health care budgets were slashed to pieces.
One of the biggest lessons I took away from last year’s trip to Japan was about this culture of consideration, and it’s interdependance between the individual and the group (and yes knowing full well there are exceptions to the rule.) One of the things I am taking away from this pandemic is the same. There is no way out of this through an assertion of the individual over the health of the group. That is not how public health works. We must learn that our collective health is bound up in individual choices that we make and that our individual health and overall wellbeing is directly dependant upon the health and wellbeing of the group, and especially the most vulnerable in the group.
That is the lesson this pandemic is teaching us. Whether we learn this or not will very much determine how this thing will play out and what happens next in our world.
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.