Part 1 is an introduction to this model.
In the first post on this model, I introduced the basic model. In this one, I want to explain the way I think about the lines and the spaces between them
The big moves
The “two loops” referred to in the model’s name refer to these two arcs that essentially represent the rise and fall of influence over time. In the original, as I encountered it, only the bottom arc had labels for four big movements of an emerging system. They were the original Name, Connect, Nourish and Illuminate, based on the movements named by Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley in a pamphlet called Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale, which described the Berkana Institute’s approach to social change. The system took on a different form in each of these locations on the map. Naming was what “pioneers” (later changed to “innovators”) did. Innovators are in the wild, tinkering with new forms of being and not necessarily doing it with others. Once they create a shared identity – a name, like “Regenerative Economics” or “New Heretics” or “Decolonizers” – it is easier to find each other, and they can begin to connect. Connecting happens in Networks, where individuals connect and share information, usually pursuing their own ends. But when folks find each other and decide to team up, what can begin to emerge is a shared purpose and Nourishing that centre that, in addition to doing individual work, creates a Community of Practice. Get some big wins, and it might be possible that your community of practice evolves into a System of Influence which can Illuminate possibilities and hold the power and resources to help people transition from the old to the new.
It is always tempting to stigmatize the legacy system as run by a bunch of stuck-in-the-mud-old-timers who resist change. But truthfully, those who manage and lead the legacy system can often feel the same about the self-styled social innovators who want to “tear down everything around them” but haven’t yet understood what they are doing or what it takes to maintain something and even institutionalize it. So much intergenerational rancour comes from this dynamic. Naming the phases of the legacy system was an attempt to give it some recognition and respect. After all, the emerging system, if all goes well, will turn into exactly this kind of system, and in due course, will be replaced again. So it’s useful to know what it takes to keep a system in place to provide stability over time.
As systems begin to thrive and become predominant systems of influence, they attract leaders whose job is to steward and protect these systems and ensure continuity and stability. Banking systems, energy systems, and social systems that require a continuity of care of people all need good stewards who actually do their job by resisting massive changes. But there comes a time when all systems have outlived their usefulness and will begin to crumble. In this time, there is a decision point when it becomes clear that death is inevitable, and in that time, the best thing to do is welcome death by hospicing the system and helping it to die well. That means ensuring that folks can easily transition to the new system and that things that won’t make it over the bridge can compost well and be used as nutrients for the parts of the new system that require resources to get established.
Globally, we are in such a time right now with energy systems and economic systems too. There are also changes to democracy that are happening as authoritarianism and populism begin to erode democratic institutions and former democracies start to collapse into oligarchies, warmongering pariah states, and populist regimes incapable of robust governance.
The small moves
The two loops are constantly interacting on different scales and in different ways. The lines matter on this map, and so do the spaces. This is less a linear description of what happens next and more a map that can describe and illuminate what is needed at different times. So as we look at the small moves on the map, think about them and where the other loop is. Realize that the “higher” a loop gets, the more it tends to ignore the positions below it, whether those are inevitable parts of its future or the moves of the other system. Influence gives you privilege. The legacy system is rarely aware of how it came to power, what it took to grow, and indeed at what cost. Likewise, the emerging loop seems always to be aware of what the legacy loop is up to, but rarely has the full picture, and very often, people in the Name and Connect spaces often actively try to dissociate themselves from the legacy system, even as they continue to depend on it for their food, money, energy, services and institutional power. The whole
And so a healthy system has folks in all these places all existing simultaneously and actively engaging with other parts of the system. When I have people map themselves onto this diagram, I often see situations where it’s all just innovators or stewards. This represents a risk to efforts because it means that the cluster of people I am working with are not in a relationship with the world around them. They are likely to experience some catastrophic failure because they just can’t see what else is happening.
At any rate, we started naming different points on the map over many years of teaching and working with this model. These points represent leadership moves that are often required in this moment. Here’s a brief description of each, starting on the legacy system. Think of these labels as places where you are more likely to have conversations and where certain skill sets will be really welcome.
The Legacy system
The Stewarding phase of the legacy system is where leaders have conversations and undertake actions aimed at structuring, stablizing and resourcing operations. This is where institutionalization occurs, systems, policies and processes get formalized, and scaling is locked in. Innovation can continue to happen, but organizations here are generally invested in fail-safe planning rather than safe-to-fail planning. Risk is managed. These activities require good traditional managers, and a lot of the work here is done by people who traditionally fall into the “expert” class in the complicated domain of Cynefin.
Once the legacy system hits a peak, uncertainty begins to accelerate. This is a sensitive time in the legacy system because the rise of experts can often cause leaders to believe that we are immune from the changes that more volatile organizations suffer from. There is a desire to believe that everything we have done in the past will continue to work. At this point, you will feel the current stirring below you as the emerging loop takes shape. If you are engaged in good strategic scanning, you will have the situational awareness to know that the context is changing so being able to plan and work in multiple futures is very useful here. If you are a fossil fuel company, by the 1990s, if you hadn’t begun the transition to becoming “an energy company,” you were probably placing yourself at a massive disadvantage. Unsurprisingly, scenario planning was developed in industries like oil or the military, where operational uncertainty was causing established ways of doing things – along with massive amounts of wealth and lives – to be put at risk.
As the legacy system’s influence begins to fade, a period of struggle begins. Realists can see the writing on the wall. Denialists refuse to accept the evidence. Power complicates the conversations. If those who control resources refuse to accept the changes occurring, the system will be starved of what it needs just as it collapses. Collapse of the old in service of the new is inevitable. We see this with churches over the past 1900 years of Christianity. Forms of the church have come and gone over centuries while the religion has endured. Christians still gather around roughly the same stories and philosophies, but the form is very different. I have seen churches close and squander their legacy because those controlling the resources refused to accept this change. Promising that anything can be made great again is a form of denialism. If what you are really stewarding is life, purpose, the provision of energy, governance or services, then you can still do this in different forms in ways that help the transition from one for to the new. Still, only those who hold power and resources can see the writing on the wall. Hosting shadow and fear, working with emotionally charged conflicts and exercising a graceful use of power are all key leadership moves in this stage. Without this, a legacy system will experience a painful death at best, or cause a civil war at worst.
When the inevitable is largely accepted, hospicing, harvesting and honouring the system’s death is a kind thing to do. It allows those served by the system to move as easily as possible into the new emerging system. The Hospice and Transition phases go hand in hand, as anyone who has witnessed a good death will know. In the energy world, Just Transition is all about this. It is about letting go of the old ways we have powered the planet and ensuring everyone can cross over into the new ways. The kinds of backlashes we see to alternatives to fossil fuels are a good indicator that we are not yet in a health transition zone. Politicians and large financial interests will continue to hold on to their beliefs even at the cost of the planet’s health or the prosperity of their citizens. Watching the premier of Alberta rail against electrification is a betrayal of her responsibility to use her province’s creative and financial resources to continue providing energy and jobs to the world. Lines like “heat pumps don’t work in an Alberta winter and EVs are useless rural vehicles” are not rationales for abandoning electrification. Instead, they represent a failure of imagination that serves only to protect fossil fuel capital interests. The Alberta workforce, trained as it is in the infrastructure of oil and gas, is well placed to transition to industrial-scale electricty production in the province. Refusing to seek opportunities because you disagree with the premise is a great way to get left behind.
A seamless transition from one system to another requires a tone of stuff to go right. At the simple level it looks like the transition those of us in our 50s and older made from typewriters to personal computers. As long as computers ran on punch cards or other interfaces, they would not be widely used by the public. Creating a user interface that looked like the one on my typewriter meant that the transition from typing to word processing was pretty seamless. I love that my keyboard still has a “return” key. I doubt many folks in their 20s know why it is called that!
Transition in social systems like health and education and child welfare is really tricky, because you need to provide a continuity of care from one form to another. In Canada, the rise of public health care would have been a massive transition and doctors, hospitals, government bodies, and all the institutional support in place in the 1960s would have been needed to support the continued quality of care for patients even as the funding and governance models in the system were being transitioned from private to public. I’ve seen how tricky this is in providing Indigenous education, health, and child and family services. The necessity for a change to decolonize these fields is always urgent, but the pace needs to move at the speed of the clients.
When a legacy system really does die, the best thing that can happen is for the resources of that system to be repurposed and reused by the emerging system. Watching the rail system in North America be ripped up after trucks and highways became the primary ways of moving cargo across the land was heartbreaking. We are now in desperate need of rail corridors both within cities and between them and that means a massive reinvestment in re-creating infrastructure that we already had. Grieving what is gone and creating choices for what comes next is a beautiful way to support transition. In my work with large Foundations, I can see this happening. Money made in previous generations is held in trust for what comes next. If governments refuse to provide the support for innovation and development, foundations may be able to.
The Emerging system
While the legacy system is the dominant way of doing things there is always innovation happening in its midst. Folks must steward the legacy system aware of where the seeds of change are happening around them. Developing sophisticated sensing practices and being in active connection with folks who are not a part of the legacy system helps to ride the journey of living and dying well. The Naming phase oif the new happens when those labouring away outside of the mainstream find each other. These are often folks who have left the legacy system “walked out” or people who have been “left out” because they were never included in the first place. Those folks are always hard at work developing energy solutions, health care, new forms of food production or cultural revitalization. It is a lonely place until you find others to work with. THis is the world of safe-to-fail work and building prototypes of the new system. The trajectory of this curve is down to begin with because there is far more failure and frustration involved in large-scale innovation than when the legacy system is investing in incremental improvements. There are very few resources available; beyond that, the legacy system will often try to crush you. You might even find the heads of fossil fuel companies leading global conversations on climate change. While such power does need to be a part of the solution, everyone knows that the way to suppress a coup is to seize control over the process.
Naming alone doesn’t generate the ideas that are needed. Good relational work helps to keep people together during the struggle. Building trust and tolerating difference with grace is really important here. Any of us involved in social movements will know what lateral violence comes from the narcissism of small differences as social movements splinter and split like a Monty Python skit.
As innovators find each other and loose connections are woven together, networks start to form. Networks are powerful ways for individuals to support their purposes. Held well, a network enables the sharing of information and ideas, but it doesn’t sustain a level of stability without a central purpose. So when networks are created and supported to create new systems, keeping it together is an important move. That involves finding ways to repurpose resources from the legacy system that are finding their way into innovation, and it also means supporting people who have experienced many failed efforts at change.
When networks mature, and a shared purpose appears, Communities of Practice are the first inklings of new stability as an emerging system coalesces into a System of Influence. Communities of practice require participation and management, meaning that nascent structures that sustain the energizing purpose at the centre of the work start to appear. As Mary Parker Follett wrote 100 years ago, “common purpose is the invisible leader,” and indeed, it is that that requires continual Nourishment.
Increasing structure and stability creates more influence for new ideas invites others, and attracts the investment needed to make the new stable enough to be a destination for the Transition. So as these structures begin to appear, trustworthiness, experience, and security help a system to become the System of Influence that Illuminates possibilities and the opath forward. By now, choices have collapsed. Once a new energy source has been determined, others will likely fall away. Electric vehicles for example, are not new at all. Still, the internal combustion engine dominated the car market in the early 20th century by the way systems of power and resourcing became stabilized creating the economy of scale needed for these machines to become the default engines of our time.
Once the transition happens, the new system stabilizes and becomes the legacy system for the next cycle and on it goes.
Next, I’ll chart a bit of the model’s provenance and how I came to it. Like most of the tools and maps I work with, these are co-created by communities of folks making sense of their work in the world.
It occured to me this morning after I posted that piece on affordances last night, I haven’t really blogged about the two loops model of change in living systems. That’s kind of a surprise to me because for the past 15 years or so this is one of the models that has formed a deep part of my practice in working with organizations. Like the Chaordic Path, it is a simple way to grasp deep and complex topics and a good way to introduce groups to concepts that explain more deeply how complex systems work.
(You’ll see me refer to this diagram as a map, model and tool throughout. I suppose it is all of these in different contexts).
So perhaps I’ll make this a series of posts on the two loops. I’ll start with a basic description of the model and then perhaps explore some aspects of application and some stories. If you have been to an Art of Hosting workshop with me, you probably have a version of this description in the workbook, so this won’t be anything new. If you want to see me teaching this online, there is a video here: The Two Loops Model of Change in Churches, which is from a webinar I gave to the Edge Network of the United Church of Canada in 2014. One of my favourite facilitation stories comes from using this map with the United Church, and I promise to share it. We disrupted an intergenerational conflict, and the process was so unexpected and oblique that the Moderator of the time, Gary Paterson, who was in attendance, picked it up and spent the last 18 months of his two-year term doing over 50 workshops using the model to examine the ways the Church is dying (and living). Whenever one uses a model or a map like this, one needs to adopt it for the context, but anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of Churches can see how this is useful on a number of different levels.
At any rate, here’s the basic overview
The two loops model is a map of how change works in living systems. It charts the movement and relationship between systems of influence and emerging systems, and it is a helpful tool that invites leaders to reflect on where their organization is in this lifecycle and what kind of leadership is most useful.
This map was initially created in a swirl of community conversations in and around the Berkana Exchange around the turn of the century. It was first published by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze and called “The LIfe Cycle of Emergence” and is colloquially known as “the two loops model.” Back in the early 2000s when I was doing many Art of Hosting workshops with the Berkana Institute, we incorporated this work in our teaching, especially when we were working with teams embedded in a shared context. As a result, the picture you see above evolved, capturing the many stances and approaches needed to work in different areas of the map.
In living systems, change doesn’t happen in a linear or predictable way. The new forms are born within the old forms and they emerge in the midst of the legacy system. For us to cultivate and work with the life cycle of emergence, leaders need to muster the resources of the legacy system to support the emergence of the new while at the same time navigating the emotional terrain of simultaneous loss, grief, disappointment, creativity, excitement, and rigour.
This map tracks the emergence of new systems at every scale, from the personal through to teams, organizations, communities, societies and the planet.
At the heart of the map is the relationship between the “legacy system” and the “emerging system.” As systems ascend in their power and influence, leaders who can stabilize and structure the system for long-term sustainability are put in place. As long as systems are thriving, these stewards focus on maintaining and managing the long-term health and sustainability of the system.
But change is inevitable, whether it is internally driven or coming from the external context in which a system exists. As changes begin to play against the system, the system loses its fitness and ability to sustain itself and enters a period of decline in its influence. This is a very painful process as many people will try to hold on to what has been lost, and those who wield power unresourcefully can sometimes become more controlling as they use their power to attempt to sustain what is in decline. Without good hospicing of a dying system, this can result in pain and the inability to use the resources of the legacy system to support what is emerging..
The new is always with us, but it is rarely visible to the leaders who maintain the legacy system. It is often championed by outsiders who experiment with new forms and new practices. These outsiders are sometimes people who have left the legacy system to discover something else, and they are often also people who were never included in the legacy system and created new ways of being at the margins of the mainstream.
Leadership in times of fundamental change – whether it is the reorganization of a team or department or whole-scale social changes in demographics, economics, or social systems – requires us to build and foster connections between the legacy and emerging systems. As the emerging system is developing, leaders can support experimentation and safe-to-fail work, allowing for learning about what the new system can look like. Before even naming the new systems we can discover the affordances for change that already exist by seeking patterns in the system that are coherent with a preferred intention for change. There are no guarantees that change will occur down any of these particular affordances, but working with emergence requires us to probe and explore to find out what might work. Often leaders need only go to the margins of their system to learn about promising practices that may later appear in the new iteration of their system. Connecting people into networks and nourishing communities of practice with the resources that are channelled from the dying system can make change work smoother and less conflict-riddled. Many systemic shifts are made worse by the conflict between the two loops, where the legacy system leaders try to hold on to what they have always done, and the leaders of the emerging system, who are shut out of access to the power and resources of the legacy system, organize in opposition to what has gone before.
In living systems like forests, the old nourishes the new and willingly gives itself to the emergence of the next form of life. In human systems where such transitions are accomplished with grace, creativity and energy, it is often due to the leadership that guides the lifecycle of emergence by creating spaces for connection and resourcefulness, which allows the rest of the people affected by these systems to transition seamlessly to the new.
Think of how computers have replaced typewriters as an example of how, over the period of about a decade, users were able to transition to a new way of doing the same things, but with more power. Everything about writing has changed, but we still use the same keyboard, and it became the primary way most people could transition from typewriters to computers.
For leaders, the two loops model helps to begin to understand a non-linear theory of change and helps us to assess where our strengths lie and what connections and capacities we need to develop to work with emergence.
A quick note here to connect a key idea from complexity work with the two loops model of change that I’ve used essentially as a theory of change in living systems ever since I started working with it back in the Berkana Institute days when we were looking for ways to explain why networks alone weren’t the answer to change work.
Just a warning. This is a theory-heavy post, and I recommend you read the linked papers and blogs to dove deeper.
What is unique about the model pictured above (and click through if you’re reading this on email, as the featured images don’t appear in the email version of these posts) in terms of traditional change models is that the seeds of the new system is indicated as starting within the existing system. Like any living system, the future comes from a connected disruption with the current and the past. An elephant will not produce a codfish as its offspring, nor will a thistle grow from an apple seed. Living things over time can change and be changed by their environments and relationships, but they are more likely to evolve along some lines rather than others. A cod fish and an elephant (and indeed a thistle and an apple tree) may share a common ancestor 1.6 billion years ago, but that ancestor at some point differentiated itself into several Kingdoms and Phyla and Families with different characteristics shaped by the relationships inherent in its environment. Living systems have a history and those histories are carried forward as “affordances.”
I first learned about affordances through the work of Mark O Sullivan and his application of the theory to learning football, a complex sport requiring complex learning strategies. But these ideas have been around for a long time. In ecological psychology, the concept of affordances comes from J.J Gibson and is summarized nicely in this paper by Hugo Letiche and Michael Lissack:
The term “affordance” was first coined by the perceptual psychologist J.J. Gibson (1977, 1979); it referred to actionable properties between the world and an actant (person or animal). To Gibson, affordances are relationships. They exist: they do not have to be visible, known or desirable. Affordances entail the possible relationships amongst actors and objects; they are properties of the world. For instance, affordances are what objects or things offer people to be done with them. Affordances are bestowed by the environment. They are what it offers, provides and supplies. Affordances invite activity, reaction and point to possibilities. An affordance is a relationship between something in the world and the intentions, perceptions and capabilities of a person or persons.
— Letiche and Lissack, Making room for affodances
Affordances are important because, as they say in the paper:
Affordances can bring us from a possibility space to an activity. In the relationships between persons and situations, the move from activity to consciousness and back again, can be co-shared and co-experienced. Affordances are in effect ‘complementary relating contrarieties’, providing the non-dualist logic needed in social complexity studies. One will be drawn out by affordances, made to do thin
— Letiche and Lissack, Making room for affodances
The two loops model of change represents this space as the beginning of the line of the new and the space out of which it emerges. When we are looking for the weak signals of what might be the next state of a system or its replacement, we need to look within the present for the patterns of stability and the patterns of volatility that give us a clue about what to nudge, what to strengthen and what to disrupt. If we want to bring new relationships and patterns of behaviour into being, we can try to interact with these patterns to see which provides the greatest affordance for the direction in which we want to travel.
And so a critical part of using the two loops model is to spend a lot of time occupying that space in the nascent, unformed moment before the new begins to take shape. Study the stories and patterns of behaviour and the desire lines that limit and enable the evolution of the new from the cauldron of the current state of things. Affordances are rarely visible; they can be felt, perceived, apprehended, noticed and worked with. They show up as tendencies, habits, possibilities, opportunities and surprises.
I was struck by Daniel Miller’s research on Skerries, a small seaside town in Ireland which he discussed on the BBC’s Thinking Allowed podcast this week. The town he is describing is almost EXACTLY a match for Bowen Island, where I live right down to the demographics, the community dynamics and the fact that we don;t have a swimming pool, a theatre or a hotel and we do drink A LOT and have a cocaine problem. He wrote a book about his research but I was struck by the deep parallels between our two villages. In thinking about the commonalities it strikes me that the homogenous nature of our ethnic and age demographics, language, wealth levels, and isolation from but proximity to a major centre and the major constraints that generate such similar profiles on the surface of it. I can think of other places I’ve been too like Mahone Bay in Nova Scotia, Vankleek Hill in Ontario, Sooke, BC and probably Knowlton, Quebec that probably fit the bill too.
There is a reason for this consistency. The fact that two towns so far away on the globe exhibit such similar characteristics is remarkable but it is a testament to the power of global capitalism that created a class of English speaking upper middle class and wealthy people from similar professions and worldviews and fed us all memes (the original definition) that resonate with the lives we lead. Even the fact that I am subscribed to Thinking Allowed is a part of this phenomenon.
Me and some friends “villaging” back in 1996 or so at a session at The Irish Heather in Vancouver. That’s me blissed out on the bottom right of this photo. We are playing traditional Irish tunes together.
Barbara Holmes today in a post at the Centre for Action and Contemplation:
It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to survive. For many of us, villages are a thing of the past. We no longer draw our water from the village well or share the chores of barn raising, sowing, and harvesting. We can get … almost everything that we need online. Yet even though our societies are connected by technology, the rule of law, and a global economy, our relationships are deeply rooted in the memory of local spaces.
Villages are organizational spaces that hold our collective beginnings. They’re spaces that we can return to, if only through memory, when we are in need of welcoming and familiar places. What is a village but a local group of folks who share experiences, values, and mutual support in common? I’m using the word “village” to invoke similar spiritual and tribal commitments and obligations.… When there is a crisis, it takes a village to survive.
In each generation, we are tested. Will we love our neighbors as ourselves, or will we measure our responsibilities to one another in accordance with whomever we deem to be in or out of our social circles? And what of those unexpected moments of crisis, those critical events that place an entire village at risk? How do we survive together? How do we resist together? How do we respond to unspeakable brutality and the collective oppression of our neighbors?
Our lifelong efforts to map our uniqueness do not defeat our collective connections. Although I’m an individual with a name, family history, and embodiment as an African American woman, I am also inextricably connected to several villages that reflect my social, cultural, national, spiritual, and generational identifications. These connections require that I respond and resist when any village is under assault.…
— Barbara Holmes. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/a-collective-response/
I like this idea that connection alone doesn’t equal community. Connection alone is not enough to create spaces where we make meaning of our lives or generate meaning and life with and for others. Instead, there is a need to enliven the space of connection with purpose, shared identity, and meaning.
I am working on a book on dialogic containers, and it really comes down to the principle that what is “contained” in these kinds of contexts is “meaning.” I once heard Jennifer Garvey-Berger use the term “life-giving contexts” in a webinar, and it really struck me that THIS is what we are trying to do when we are working with “containers” in dialogue and participatory leadership work. It is not enough to hand each other a business card or place an organization’s pamphlet in the centre of a circle. That does not create a dialogic container; it does not create a life-giving context for action.
Villages, as Barbara Holmes points out, DO. And a village is not merely a collection of uninhabited houses. It is an emergent identity of a place of human life. You may live in an apartment building, but do you live in a village? What is the difference between your building and a village? What can you do to make it more village?
The answer to that question is the essence of dialogic organizational and community development. The answer to that question leads you to meaning-making together.