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.
A systems change initiative I witnessed on the weekend.
I think my nomination for LinkedIn post of the year goes to Cameron Tokinwise for this one:
Good reminder for those extolling Systems Thinking from Pelle Ehn at the beginning of his still remarkable 1988 book, _Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts_ – that systems are only ever ensembles considered as systems. Systems are not things in the world, but ways of understanding how things in the world relate to each other. Systems Thinking is a choice to interpret the world as sets of systems.
Cameron Tokinwise on LinkedIn, October 2023
To be concerned about trying to effect system change does not mean that there are systems out there needing to be changed, but that one way to explain why change might be proving difficult is to observe aspects of the status quo as systemically interrelated, and so to try to make (design) a new system, that is, new ways in which those things interrelate.
This is important because systems risk being reified into big, solid things that seem to be unchangeable if you think of systems as really existing out there in the world. The classic example is that Babadook we consider to be Capitalism (as opposed to a variety of social relations – and not all social relations [see https://lnkd.in/gPJ8bdnQ] – we perpetuate).
(And yes, things are bit more complicated when observations of systems are considered to be themselves operations of other systems (the ones doing the observing), making such observations performative, constituting the reality of what is observed, at least in the world of/as experienced by the observer and those other systems with whom/which that observer is in an interdependent (or structurally coupled) relation: von Foerester > Maturana > Luhmann > Wolfe.)
I have just today had occasion to bring that up again, talking with a friend about systems change. Like, what is the system? Who says? What are the parts of it we say are the system and why are some things not considered part of the system? And what are we really seeking to change? And what does change even look like?
I continue to mull over this quote and its implications because so much work in the field I am involved in is about “systems change” or “systems transformation” and as long as I have been doing this work, I can see that saying I’m involved in systems change hasn’t really made anything more clear to me. I reject “root causes” of complex problems because, well, complexity tells us that causality is non-linear and effects are emergent so simply addressing “root causes” doesn’t get a predictable change. The root cause of poverty is simply another problem to address, the root of which is something else. The complex world is made of interrelated and interconnected things that aren’t ranked in a discernable hierarchy and that interact constantly in unpredictable ways.
And yet.
We know that there are stable patterns of behaviour that we can look at and call “unjust” and we know there are stable patterns of behaviour that we can look at and call “more just” (one feature of complexity work is that you can never know if you made the best move, but you can usually know that you’ve made a wrong move).
And so, in a conversation with a friend today, I suggested that instead of saying, “We aim to change systems,” why don’t we just say, “We think a just world looks like THIS, and so this is what we will do more of.” You can’t solve all the problems, even if there was a magical root cause that, if we just zapped it with enough transformation, would result in a just world. All that would happen is that competing forces would arrange themselves around other attractors, and new stable patterns would emerge. It might be that, in the battle between individual greed and social compassion for example we get a period of stability for social compassion for a time until individual greed figures out how to tilt the game in its favour again.
In my personal life, I think the world I want to live in has things like organizations and projects done by teams full of people who love and trust one another and that we make things together that people are generally happy with and that we are participating more in the community by singing together, sharing resources and supporting each other. I don’t have a root cause analysis for how I live my life. I don’t sing in choirs because a root cause of alienation and social anxiety is the collapse of co-creative community institutions, and the more spaces for community co-creation that exist, the more felt sense of belonging happens in the world. No. I sing because I love to sing, even when it’s hard and we make mistakes and dry up in performance and slam our foreheads in frustration because it’s hard to sing a minor seventh interval by ear, and I missed my cue again.
The need for theories of change has always struck me as an unnecessary step to making change. There is no perfect theory of change. I’m fond of quoting Micheal Quinn Patton, who said one day, to my delight, “Complexity IS a theory of change!” Good enough. Now get after it, and if things you do create what you think is a more just and caring world, find ways to sustain those things. And if they don’t, stop doing those things immediately. And you can’t do it all, so pick the things you want to do, that are maybe yours to do uniquely, perhaps informed by what others have said are good things to do and do them. Keep an eye on what happens, but trust that your work will travel well in the world. Once it’s out there, you cannot get it back.
From a lovely video post from Johnnie Moore: “
Sometimes giving instructions, offering advice and explanations or information may not be the best way to help people to progress and grow.
And that sometimes what’s needed is a spirit of playful experimentation and a sense of companionship.
When I coached kids at football, I was the third coach on our team. I am not a great player, so I couldn’t teach the kids deep strategy and techniques. But I was able to help them understand how they were learning the game. We had rotating subs, so when kids came off the pitch, I asked them what they noticed out there and what they wanted to try when they went back out. Sometimes, we debriefed their failures or looked at how they succeeded or what surprised them. Still, because we never had too much time, and 10-year-olds are not into deeper reflective conversations, we would land on simple rules to ground them in what they were trying.
For example, my son, who was playing keeper, came up with the statement “magic hands” to focus on the ball at every moment. He held his hands out in front of him between his eyes and the ball and had the thought that he could pull the ball onto his hands like a tractor beam. His ability to make saves and focus increased because he was always ready to get a hand on the ball, and he found it a very satisfying strategy. I used it myself playing goal in an adult rec league and it also improved my keeping. Partly, I think these strategies are down to obliquity, breaking up the patterns we are trained to do.
Having coaches yelling advice to kids on high alert who are focused on the game around them is never more helpful than having the kids themselves remind themselves what they want to try out there. There is a movement in youth soccer to stop doing this and have silent touch lines. You work on things in practice, and when it’s time to play, you let the kids go out there and solve the problems and learn the game. The debriefing and reflection strategy is really helpful, as are the simple rules – the heuristics – that help a person stay focused on an experiment.
This is a great way to teach people how to thrive in complexity.