My friend seanna davidson sent through an invitation today to a one-day event she is holding on Toronto Island in October called Systems Leadership: seeing the forest for the trees. The one-day retreat will be held on October 19 and is associated with the incredible RSD 14 Symposium which is being held virtually and physically in Toronto this year. Go if you can.
Navigating the currents of dynamic systems at speed seems impossible now. The “flood the zone” strategy of disruption turns everything into a crisis, meaning that it is seemingly impossible to find the time to slow down and see where you are at, and who is there with you. I think the strategy of flood the zone is superficial in that those who promote it are not interested in deep seated change. They continually move the chairs around so you can find no where to sit, while meanwhile they use the pretext of chaos to impose high level constraints. But if we take a view out at different scales, we can see that fundamental patterns of power haven’t changed, and the chaos being wrought upon the world isn’t rooted. If we play at the level at which the perpetrators of this strategy are working, it feels too fast. If we get above it and watch, we see repeating patterns of power and influence at play, and the strategies we have learned as humans to deal with these may yet be useful to us who are committed to life-giving contexts. That is a propos of my post from the other day. I think the fundamental capacities of participatory leadership and dialogue are as necessary as ever. We can, and we need to, connect and exchange at speed. I think this is what seanna’s work is about, where she sees that systems leadership is an outcome of working with systems. Or, as she quotes Nora Bateson:
‘leadership does not reside in a person but in an arena that can be occupied by offerings of specific wisdom to the needs of the community. so leadership is produced collectively in the community, not the individual… leadership for this era is not a role, or set of traits; it’s a zone of inter-relational process.’
seanna and her colleague Fiona McKenzie in the post linked above, are trying to see leadership as a forest metaphor, which, like all metaphors, is both limited and useful. Specifically, they see systems leadership this way:
Our metaphor won’t hold for theoretical purists, but bear with us — it has helped us to frame the ‘when, where, who and how’ of a type of systems leadership that is dynamic, fluid, and moves far beyond the role of an individual as a systems leader. Our thinking goes that ‘systems leadership as a forest’ is:
Seasonal—leadership that is taken up at the right time, not all the time, with different approaches, roles and behaviours needed in different contexts
Self-selecting—leadership taken up and held by many, not by just one ‘leader’ (or a single tree?) — across position, authority, roles
Biodiverse—thrives in a context of a diversity of people and worldviews, ways of knowing, being and doing
Layered—taking place at multiple scales, levels, sub-systems, cultures, capacities, ways of knowing
Sometimes invisible—Often happening in-between places and below the radar without formal recognition.
Self-organising—Organised patterns of behaviour arise without ‘control’ over decisions on what gets grown where.
Inter-dependent and adaptive—Where actions influence each other through interactions, are reliant on many to sustain change, and are recalibrated from feedback.
Emergent—always transitioning from one pattern/season/state to another, which can only be seen by looking at the whole forest, not just a single tree. Transitions can include phases of breakdown and renewal.
Generative—Healthy system parts enable improved health and capacity amongst other system parts. Their interconnected nature is an amplifying feature of health and resilience in the system.
Existing—this forest has inherent value not defined by others and does not need permission to exist
I strongly resonate with that. I would even say that this has been a cornerstone of my practice over the past 25 years as well, underpinning the ways I have thought about and worked with communities and organizations as complex living systems. What I notice here is that at every level of “systems” (I think I prefer “contexts”) there is both dynamic change and longer term stability. The stability is brought by the constraint regime (as Alicia Juarerro would say). In a forest, at the level that seanna and Fiona are talking about there is enduring stability of structure and predictable dynamic processes: cadences and rhythms that, while they are dynamic, are nevertheless stable in their pattern. And there is also the work at the micro level in a forest where there is constant movement and change. Pull apart a rotting log and you see very little stability as creatures of all shapes and sizes are at work transforming the system without a larger view of what they are doing, or what they are even a part of.
I’m thinking a lot about this stuff at the moment. Today I was set to meet with a young person whose heart lies in social change, personal healing and systems transformation, and I wanted to give her a sense of possibility in her work. She wasn’t feeling well, so I’ve put this blog post together partly as a gift to her and to let the world know about seanna’s work and some of the ways people are trying to think about this moment in time in the context of history.
This is a blog post, so it’s not 100% coherent, but if you have made it this far, I’d love to hear your thoughts, and I’d like to leave you with a stunning visualization of action at the dynamic level. Last night The Montreal Roses defeated the Halifax Tides 2-0 in the Northern Super League to claim a playoff spot. Montreal’s second goal was a sublime team effort from a counter attack, ultimately scored by Noémi Paquin who steamed her way through the entire Halifax midfield, received the ball at speed from a PICTURE perfect pass from Mégane Sauvé, dribbled around one more defender and calmly passed the ball into the net while still two more Tides defenders and the keeper watched it happen. I can only imagine what Paquin felt in that moment. Time slowing down, every opportunity and affordance open to her, a simple action, a touch to the outside and suddenly the goal looming so large that she couldn’t miss. Even the commentator Signe Butler, said the goal was easy, and it clearly wasn’t. It was magical. For the defenders, the opposite. They couldn’t see the affordances Paquin was seeing. They were flummoxed by how she found the seams in their defence that appeared larger than life to her.
Acting within incredibly dynamic systems sometimes has this flow to it. That is something of the emergent outcome that seanna is talking about – a way of seeing, a way finding the underlying stability of the constraint regime that allows you to move at another scale. I think what we know about flow states is that they reveal a kind of stability, sometimes known as “slowing down time” that allows for action on a different level than what other agents see around you.
It’s a tricky time. We need more Noémi Paquin-style action, and perhaps we always did.
For as long as I have been working in the non-profit and government worlds, since 1991, I have been confronted with the idea that somehow we always must do more with less. When I began work at the National Association of Friendship Centres in 1992, my first real job after leaving university, the organization was coming to the end of a five-year cycle of funding for urban Indigenous programs and core capacity that had grown steadily since 1972. Over twenty years, the federal government had increased funding in the Friendship Centres in Canada’s towns and cities, and the movement had grown to over 100 communities with between three and five core funded positions in each centre, offering a myriad of services to urban Indigenous populations from Halifax to Port Alberni and Red Lake to Inuvik.
In 1993, the Liberals were elected to power after ten years of Progressive Conservative government, and they committed to tackling the federal deficit. The did this by actually continuing a series of budget reductions that the last Tory finance Minister Ray Hnatyshyn had proposed in his election budget. Paul Martin got credit for it, but it was a PC plan.
The upshot of these across-the-board spending reductions was that we “had to do more with less,” or “become more efficient” or “get creative” or “innovate” or “tighten belts and find redundancies.” With very, very, few exceptions almost every organization I have worked with since then has had to face the same problem. The neo-liberal economic revolution of Regan and Thatcher and Mulroney delivered massive amounts of money to the richest people in the world and starved government of revenues and marginalized communities of funding and material support, even as they picked up the work of addressing the increasing social problems externalized by the private sector.
We went through periods of funding freezes, cuts, occasional bumps (“investment” it is sometimes called) but there has in general been a growing trend of increasing social problems and complexity, decreasing government support and increasing wealth inequality in Canada leading to massively underfunded non-profits. We are now seeing core government services shredded too. When the word “austerity” is used it seems to signal that direct government services such as health and education and income security are in for a tough time.
Ideology drives all of this. For most of the past 45 years that ideology has been the market-based economic liberalism that has privatized and financialized everything. In the past 20 years it has included ideologies of the culture war that has tied government funding to strange ideas that are put out there to stoke outrage, fuel algorithms, divide citizens and achieve razor thin electoral margins. In places like Alberta a bewildering set of strange ideas about public health, energy independence and education has meant that the public purse is weaponized against people who are trying to provide vaccines against fatal and preventable illnesses, or create sustainable and low-cost energy technologies, or build education systems that create welcoming and inclusive learning environments. These were things we used to fund, plan for and organize around.
In talking with a colleague today we were noticing how this moment of austerity is showing up in the work we do to support organizations and facilitate dialogue, and engagement, especially in this moment when we are confronted by nearly overwhelming confusion and complexity. It used to be that the conversations we were hosting suffered at times from a scarcity mindset, meaning that we weren’t aware of the actual richness that was around us. Participatory leadership and process opens up access to that richness.
Today we are suffering from an austerity mindset, which can be thought of as a realization that the richness we need has been taken away from us. It is harder and harder to find diverse groups of people and voices to work on issues of staggering complexity. People have had their time and material resources privatized, colonized, and taken from them.
We were noticing that coming out of the pandemic, people have welcomed the chance to be together in person again, but how we show up has changed. Every face-to-face meeting is high stakes and there is decreasing trust in opening up and letting go into a participatory process. While in the past it seemed easier to coach leaders and organizations to find solutions at the margins of their work with authentic and creative engagement with their people and communities, these days it seems like our work is to keep leaders from becoming autocratic. With so few hands willing and able to do the work of addressing huge systemic issues, most organizations and networks seem to have only a few key people who are close to the work. This creates a fear that if the leader doesn’t directly influence and shift everyone to their way of thinking, we won’t get the chance to do the work properly.
To be honest some of this worry is warranted. We know from the ways in which Cynefin advises us to act in crisis, that applying tight constraints is the best way to establish safety. But what you do with that safety once you have it is what’s at stake. These days it seems that many leaders are drifting towards consolidating that power by offering to sustain the work of maintaining safety at the expense of other ideas, diverse thinking, or even a challenge to their plans. We see this in national leadership. Trump is the obvious example, but it has been interesting to see Prime Minister Carney stumbling in the House of Commons as Pierre Poilievre looks his seat and provided the first testing challenges of Carney’s leadership. Carney has had it easy since he was elected.
There are lots of implications here for facilitating participatory work and supporting leaders in this time, and to me they come from our lessons in complexity and dialogic practice. Here’s a few, and maybe you can add to them:
The work of the world is teetering on the edge of chaos AND is deeply complex. So that means that yes, leaders and facilitators and Board chairs need to consolidate decision making and create safety. But it also means that this is EXACT time to open up leadership to people who have differing view points and perspectives and experiences. That diversity is what provides the sophisticated situational awareness needed to address the challenges we are in. Polarity management is coming back into my practice in a big way as we help groups to see the tensions they are working with and engage with them productively.
Avoid premature convergence. One of my favourite Dave Snowden slogans implores us to not choose the first good idea and go with it. Even if thing seems to be moving fast, committing too early to a course of action can send you on a path from which return is very tricky. Use scenario planning to keep a view on possibilities, and adjust plans as you go. COVID killed the five-year plan, but you can still set longer-view directions of travel and think about the different landscapes you will confront to get there.
Leave more community than you found. In times of crisis it is impossible to build the social connectivity and relational fields that help sustain us. We need to be doing that in the moments when we can take a breath and think. And meetings are what those moments look like in organizational life. If you are using meetings to preach to the masses, you are missing this chance. Every conversation in the organization right now has the chance to build community while also doing good work, including conversations about how to be together. And if you are a leader with a good idea that you want others to take up, you need to build trust and relational capacity if that idea is to be supported and improved upon. Participatory work does this. It also does this much better if we are physically n the same room.
Big messy conversations are a feature, not a bug. Since the pandemic, I have been doing A LOT of Open Space meetings. Open Space just creates the kind of agenda that is impossible if only one person is in charge. When participants begin posting sessions in Open Space everyone gets to see the real texture of need and capacity in the organization, and we are given the chance to dive in and work on them. Same with Pro Action Cafe, which helps individuals in large gatherings get the help they need with the many different projects and programs they are running. We don’t need alignment on everything right now. We do need much more activity happening in plain view, co-created and co-supported. Like Harrison Owne used to say “Trust the people.”
We need to look after ourselves. This time is taking a real toll on many people. Caring for oneself is not greedy. It is essential. If we are all to stay resourceful in the messy chaos of the present moment we need to be taking our time to be grounded, become familiar with our own patterns of reactivity and do the world a favour and work on them. Yesterday, in talking with a colleague who works right at the coalface of social change and community organizing, I asked her how she was keeping it together. Her morning practice of prayer and meditation has never been more essential, and in fact she had to remind herself to get back to it. I can relate.
I’m sure this list could go on, and I invite you to add to it. Leave a comment about what you are noticing and how you are working with others to cope with the realities of this moment. We are living in a thin time when the macro currents of war and conflict and austerity and hatred are seeping into each of our special places. We need to work within these contexts and find islands of meaning and respite so good work can continue and people can be looked after.
Today Dave Snowden has published a significant post outlining his team’s work and thinking about safety: “we must stop trying to write better rules and start building better processes for rapid decision-making in each unique context.” Taking a complexity view on safety is essential. Organizational life, when it separates accountability from decision making by downloading simplistic accountabilities to front line workers while constricting their ability to respond appropriately, is full of structurally dangerous situations. Dave’s encouragement to look at the substrate for action is exactly right.
Last month Ted Gioia published a post wondering if we hadn’t reached the top of a stock bubble. Just leaving this here in case I want to come back to it.
At Game of the People, one of my favourite football blogs, guest writer Laura Joseph gives us a run down of the current bubble in football and why football economics is a little different from the bubble Gioia writes about.
A couple of films to look out for from Dana Solomon. The first Blood Lines deals with themes of belonging and family in a Metis setting and stars Solomon in the lead role. I love that the film includes Michif dialogue. The second is Solomon’s full directorial debut, Niimi (She Dances) is about an Indigenous ballerina who recovers her sense of self and love of her art after a traumatic episode. Both seem resonant with the themes Michelle Porter explores in the book I’m currently reading, A Grandmother Begins the Story.
The folks at Network Weaver are professional kin to me. Almost everything they post on their blog is something that I resonate with. They are about to publish a short series of blog posts about their approach to strategic planning in 2025, and I resonate with their practice principles:
1. Clarify Your North Star
Ask: What is the core purpose that must remain constant, even as the world shifts? How can you stay emergent and responsive to crises while still focusing on building long-term power and transformation?
2. Plan for Multiple Futures
Ask: What are the factors we know or can imagine, and what is beyond? How can we hold the future lightly as we plan and move with purpose?
3. Design for Flexibility, Iteration, and Collaboration
Ask: Is our strategy flexible enough to adapt, and do we have strong processes in place to support ongoing experimentation and collaboration?
4. Center Equity and Building Power for Your Organization and Community
Ask: What are we building? Who are we accountable to? Are we building in ways that foster a more equitable future?
5. Strengthen Internal Capacity for Resilience and Well-Being
Ask: What do we need to sustain our people, funding, and infrastructure in the long run?
There is, of course, a time an a place for linear and predictive planning, but many folks are still wedded to the idea that if we just double down on a more ordered line of reasoning, we’ll be able to work ourselves through the massive amounts of uncertainty we are currently facing. If you look online for strategic planning templates, you’ll find a flood of these processes, all offered as if context doesn’t matter.
Something I would add to this list is Develop good situational awareness of the people and issues in context. The ask here is “What is going on? How do different people see the situations we are in? Who has what expertise and experience and how can we bring it to bear on the work?” With large scale initiatives I use Participatory Narrative Inquiry and often NarraFirma as a tool to gather and work with the stories of experience that illuminate the current situation. I have also taken to talking to folks close to the situation for more than I used to as a way of preparing for this kind of work. I am finding that these days many people in decision making positions, on boards or in leadership roles, are operating with an incomplete picture of the situation or an inability to grasp of the issues at stake. That doesn’t mean they can’t be useful to the process. Folks that sit on boards, for example, who are not subject matter experts in the core work of an organization may still have immense wisdom on engagement or process or lived expertise with the consequences of decisions. Taken as a collective, a good board or a leadership has a diversity of experiences and perspectives. But if unquestioned assumptions about power and status are at play, that diversity can be sidelined with the result that organizations make decisions with a narrowed scope of awareness. You are always starting from somewhere.
Strategic planning is one of those terms that means a bunch of different things to folks depending on what they need, what their experience has been and what they have done in the past. I usually begin strategic planning engagements with a client by asking them “tell me what you want to do without using the term ‘strategic planning'” and from there we explore a design for the work that gets them where they need to go. The issue, however, is making sure that the folks participating in the process have a clear view of the need and purpose of the work, which is why we spend time on that part of the design to craft a good invitation process. It helps people show up well and helps to bring clarity to what we are doing, especially if the work is unfamiliar.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti is doing some compelling work, which will probably take a whole day for me to dive into and understand. Here is a presentation about her reflections of a year of working with AI to address the collapse of modernity:
Toward the end of my book Outgrowing Modernity, I began a speculative engagement with artificial intelligence guided by a compass rooted in meta-relationality, a stance and praxis grounded in the factuality of entanglement. Meta-relationality challenges the modernist framing of separability and insists that all systems, including AI, are embedded in the relational metabolism of life. From this perspective, AI is not outside nature, but already part of it—co-constituted with human, ecological, historical, and institutional forces.
I recognize that AI is a highly polarizing and often triggering topic. This work does not position AI as inherently good or inherently bad. Nor is it an attempt to defend, romanticize, or condemn AI as a category. Instead, it is based on a wager: that it is possible—and necessary—to hold both the very real harms of AI and its (increasingly narrow) transformative potentials at once. The question becomes: what might emerge if we remain in that tension long enough to learn something we didn’t already know?
She is asking some good questions.