Dave Snowden has a new post up this week in which he gives us a situational snapshot about a big chunk of his body of work he has been developing for a number of years now. I love these posts because every so often Dave publishes them to consolidate teaching he has done and methods he has been working on in practice. They have the energy of “okay…I think I’ve got something here. Check it out.” I alos love these posts becasue they always offer me something to dive further into and ways to improve my own practice. So first …
In our Complexity from the Inside Out program, we do a session on evaluation, looking at some of the implications that complexity has for traditional models of monitoring and evaluation. This is especially an issue in the non-profit world where organizations find themselves managing complexity while being subject to requirements from funders that treat their operations as if they were ordered and predictable. It is common for participants in these sessions to ask the question “Complexity is all good, but how do we actually deal with the funding bodies that want us to measure everything and create targets?” Well, this …
Fall in the north is a time for teaching for me!. I have a few different courses and workshops on offer this fall, including our third cohort of Complexity from the Inside Out, which is a program Caitlin and I have put together from 20+ years of collective experience with dialogue and personal leadership tools in service of working with complexity. I invite you to join us (and an amazing group of co-learners) for our fall cohort of this highly engaging, practice focussed program. Together we will explore and learn effective and meaningful ways to better understand and work with …
Found this morning on Network Weaver: Over the past few years, I have been increasingly influenced by the concept of “weaving” — what for me means connecting people, ideas, and projects to foster more collaborative social change. Weaving is a skill, a mindset, and a way of being. More art than science, it requires deep listening, being responsive to interests and needs, and “sensing” opportunities to bring people or projects together. Nice post on a set of practical strategies for increasing connections and exchanges at work. One of the more powerful ways to shift patterns in complex systems and catalyze new …
My friend Marcus Jenal published his latest weekly newsletter in which he muses over a few questions related to complexity, strategy and taking a stance. He doesn’t have a comments section enabled on his blog (hint! hint!) so I’m going to respond a bit to what he wrote here and we can have a conversation in this space. Too often, I fall into the trap of questioning every new insight I have and asking myself if that insight goes deep enough. Every insight is still biased through my cultural coding, my upbringing, my context, etc. Yet by the very nature …