Don’t build beautiful things that need to capture life before they are functional. Start with life.
This is an interesting article from Rebecca Roache Aeon today: “What’s so awkward about awkward silence?“
“…conversations are shared endeavours. A conversation is something we’re creating with whoever we’re talking to, and this is undermined if one or other of us is silent for too long. In a 2011 study on conversational silences, the psychologists Namkje Koudenburg, Tom Postmes and Ernestine H Gordijn compared conversations to dancing: the ‘harmonious exchange of information through smooth turn-taking’ in a fluent conversation is satisfying in a way similar to coordinating one’s movements with those of a dancing partner. Dancing, like conversation, becomes awkward when it’s malcoordinated. Koudenburg and her colleagues found that people experience rejection when silence disrupts the flow of conversation. They explain: ‘people are, due to the evolutionary importance of group membership, highly sensitive to perceiving exclusion’. In other words, silences are uncomfortable when they make us worry that we don’t belong.”
I have two unresourceful patterns when I’m engaging in conversation. One is that I spend a lot of time listening and thinking about what is being said. I often have thoughts during these silences, but the conversation moves too fast for me to get them in. I am deeply sensitive to interrupting others and being interrupted and so I am loath to do so. So I sit on my thoughts and sometimes chain them together into the questions or ideas that I offer. I might write notes with me pen to track my thoughts. And sometimes they never come out, and other times they flood out as I try to catch up to everything that has flowed past. I don’t think either of those moves are helpful!
Other times, you can’t shut me up and I will go on and on stringing together thoughts and ideas and questions as they tumble out of my brain when it gets locked in the default mode network. Ideas associate themselves like a Glass Bead Game and they all come out, probably in a not so helpful way. These downloads are often met with confusion in my conversational partners. When I am in this mode it is very hard to regulate my verbiage. I have learned to ask for space and will say things like “I need to just think out loud here for a minute, can you indulge me?” Other times I will invite interruption, welcoming it like a life preserver thrown to a drowning man.
But I generally relish the silences in conversations when we are all in the sam flow. I love conversing in circle where we deliberately slow down the conversation and explicitly use silence as a tool that everyone has access to. In circle there can be unfamiliarity with silence as a part of the conversation, but there is minimal awkwardness per se, because the silence is ritualized and normalized.
Of course I live in a culture much like the one that Rebecca Roache lives in. Silence in conversation – well, in small talk really – is awkward because it isn’t the norm of the ritual of small talk in many Anglo-American cultures. While I understand and enjoy small talk, I like to be in a place with someone where we get deep enough that some silence is welcomed. This morning I ran into a friend on the trail who I ahdn;t seen in a while. We connected with a hello and how-are-you-doing but both of us have history together of going deep around life issues and it quickly went there. We paused and became quiet together and shared important news with one another in a loving, connected way. There was nothing awkward in the silences. The container changed and the silence became a critical part of the conversation.
Roache summarizes her article with the set of thoughts that became clear to me as I was reading her essay:
“Something that emerges from all this is that it’s not silence itself that is awkward (or not). The capacity of silences to be awkward or comfortable is set against our efforts to connect with and understand other people, to be seen by others in the way we wish to be seen, and to be accepted. Running through all the aspects of awkward silence we’ve explored here is a common thread of anxiety about how well we’re engaging in connection and understanding with the people we interact with. In a comfortable silence, like the ones you enjoy with those you know and love, that anxiety isn’t there. With them, you don’t struggle to connect and understand. You’re already there.”
That is the essence. It’s hard to tell what part of this is me and what part is the culture I am soaking in, but I notice the chatter that happens oftentimes becomes a shield against connection. Our world right now is suffering from a deficit of trust. It takes a long time to cultivate connections across differences and early moments of connection – through small talk, mostly in my culture – are so influential in whether or not a channel of openness emerges.
In facilitation practice making space for silences can be important because it may both lead to, and reinforce a deeper connection between people. This is much easier to do in small group facilitation than it is is large group process work, but it can be a useful way to use the power one has as a facilitator. I remember one large gathering I did with about 120 people, and many diverse and simmering conflicts that were rising to the surface. I called for 15 minutes of silence. These people did all have spiritual practices and asking them to be silent was a call to their practitioner selves, but even so many told me how difficult it was to sit in that silence. The result, however, I believe, was a general ability to be willing to slow down and reflect for the rest of the gathering and let the silence do the work of opening up resourcefulness between them.
The awkwardness is information. The response is trust. If trust can grow, the silence can become a powerful part of the dialogue, and the space can do its work.
Here are four key insights from a conversation on designing good invitations for Open Space meetings. This is the real work of hosting self-organization. It’s not JUST about facilitation.
I parked my car this morning in the village and walked down to my favourite coffee place for an espresso. Every one of the three conversations I overheard was about people discussing the pros and cons of ChatGPT. Pros seem to be that “it helped me to know what to ask for when I talked to my car insurance company” and cons are mostly “how do we know that any of this is real?” More seriously I’m sitting near folks who work in the arts and the looks on their faces are of the deepest concern. They use it. For ideas, for a writing prompt, but the times they have used it to write dialogue, they can spot how crappy it is. At the moment.
My earliest post about was Google was from 2002 when it was an insanely useful tool for searching the web. “Google cooking” was a simple game where one entered in a list of ingredients and it returned a list recipes. It was novel at the time. Great for weeknight dinners. Another game was called “Googlewhack” whereby one would try to construct a two word search term that resulted in only one result. You can’t play that one anymore.
The complete enshittification of search engines, combined with web content that has been generated by robots in order to sell stuff is increasing turning web-search an absolutely useless activity. I just use my search engine (DuckDuckGo) as a collection of bookmarks now. It is hard to do any meaningful research anymore, and so we turn to ChatGPT for answers. And ChatGPT is out there learning the questions we ask. Something sits weird with me when I think about how while Google learned the answers we like, and AI is learning the questions we ask.
The questions are important, as is the way we ask them and to whom we ask them. Sonja today writes about the questions that help us discern a direction, which is different from finding a way. Sometimes we don’t even know what the direction is although we can discern that wherever we are right now, somewhere else is better. Thinking about that and talking about it together is an essential human capacity and it’s a pretty fundamental part of how we work with teams facing complexity. There is an art to asking to right kinds of questions and thinking about them together that reveals a deeper level at which affordances and opportunities might exist. Sometimes getting unstuck means drilling down and not reaching out.
Collaborative outcomes are emergent properties of discrete human systems of encounter and meaning-making – “dialogic containers” I call them. If you are a leader seeking a course of action, you might get some good ideas by submitting notes and documents and harvests into a large language model to suggest possibilities. In fact, you could even have your team members do that on their own and bring the output to a meeting to talk about what they have found. My hypothesis is if you continue to do that without involving humans you will end up with an endless set of ideas and possibilities, but you will miss the co-creationi and co-ownership that makes sustained effort possible in a particular direction. I can’t yet see how large language models can surface a consensus that will inspire collaborative action. Deep meaning and commitment to one another is produced by the people within the container who discover something between them that is worth trying, worth pursuing together. Calls to action are far less sustainable than co-creation of a direction. Even if, and perhaps especially if, such a direction is deeply flawed to begin with. There is nothing better than failing together and then finding a way forward to build cohesion.
I might be wrong in the future but in this moment, systems-complexity and anthro-complexity are different and humans experience emergence differently from mechanical systems, even those that are capable of learning. Dialogue practitioners base their practice on this idea; that no matter how great the ideas are, nothing gets sustained in human systems without the intangibles of co-ownership, meaningful engagement, and dare I say, at some level, love.
Detail from a quilt designed and made by the St. Andrews Anglican Church Women Quilter’s Guild. The quilt was made in 1967 in honour of Canada’s centennial year. Keen eyed observers will notice patterns in here that relate to that celebration. The quilt was on display at the Bowen Island Public Library earlier this year, on loan from Joyce Ganong whose mother, Isabel Faulks, was one of the quilters.
Another reflection from the Complexity Inside and Out course we taught yesterday…
Caitlin led us in a check in process that was about slowing down out seeing. Here’s a variation. Try it!
- Pick a view where there is some distance – looking out a window is best. If this is a familiar view, all the better.
- Notice the scene out there. Notice the colours, the landscape, the patterns. Notice movement and stillness. If the scene is familiar, look at what you know.
- You can close your eyes and remember what you see. How does that scene conjure itself up in your mind’s eye?
- Now open your eyes and look again at the scene. Try to notice something you’ve never noticed before or something that you’ve forgotten, or a change to the scene that you hadn’t noticed until now.
- Describe the scene now. Write down obersvations about what you see. What is the overall colour palette? What are the lines you see, of trees or buildings, horizon and sky. If you saw this scene in a flash, how would you recognize it?
You can add different variations to this exercise, but the point is to notice how we see things as patterns. Our mind conjures up a scene of large blocks in it and details aren’t always apparent. Sometimes we have to see things with new eyes, or a naive perspective.
I reflected yesterday that I was once walking through the forest here on my home island, following a path to the village with my brother who was visiting from Toronto. Bowen Island is very different from Toronto. He stopped us next to a very large Douglas-fir tree and said “Look at that! It’s huge!”
All the trees around here are huge, especially if you aren’t familiar with the forest. But I looked again at this tree – one I passed hundreds of times to and from the village – and noticed that it was actually an old growth tree. How could I tell? The pattern of bark is different, the branches are thicker and more gnarly and look like the trunks of younger trees. My brother’s eyes found anomalies in the pattern I had formed of my home forest, and I used my own pattern recognition skills to identify why the tree he spotted was an anomaly.
This, it turns out is an excellent thing to do when you are looking for other patterns in familiar contexts, like your business market or your team culture or the school system you work in or the services you offer to community. Be careful not to assume that the patterns you can see is the sum total of the reality available to you.
This isn’t new. But you can never over-practice awareness.
There is a neat game called Geoguesser that is based on the Google Street View database. You download the app and get started and it throws up an image from somewhere in the world and you have two minutes to guess where it is. The closer you get to the actual spot, the more points you get.
You’re not supposed to cheat by using Google maps to look up land marks. It entirely depends on the pattern recognition that you bring to the game. What language is that on the side of a truck? What does that street sign say? What kind of palm trees are these? Is that dirt road red or dark brown? Is that a white ring around the power pole?
Really good players of this game have thousands of details stored meaning that they can discern the location using macro clues first, and then narrow things down with decision trees, like how the shadows are cast, entire websites have sprung up devoted to these pattern markers that help people quickly identify the location. There are competitions culminating in the GeoGuesser World Championship. You can watch these competitions live. They are amazing.
And the kind if undisputed champion of this game is rainbolt, a man full of so many patterns, that his guesses are almost always pinpoint accurate.
Watch him host five great players finding obscure locations. They are engaged in constant pattern finding. It’s kind of amazing and it’s very cool to have them articulate the way they are seeing these landscapes. Specific knowledge helps them make generalizations and they connect what they know and use abductive reasoning to guess the location.
Back when I first experienced Open Space Technology, at a conference in 1995, the thing that immediately caught my attention about the process was how it was a perfect, simple set of constraints to enable self-organization. It sent me down a rabbit hole of learning about self-organization and complexity and I became captivated with the patterns I saw around me, and specifically with dissipative structures.
Ilya Prigogine coined the term dissipative structure. In layperson’s terms it refers to a structure that persists in time despite its components constantly changing. The classic example is a whirlpool. When you pull the plug on a bathtub full of water, the water forms a whirlpool as it head down the drain. The whirlpool is an emergent structure and a pattern that persists over time, held in place by constraints such as gravity, the size of the drain hole, and way bigger forces like air pressure and where you are on the planet.
If you just look at molecules of water, you would have no idea that they could form a whirlpool. The water molecules that drain out of your bathtub all participate temporarily in forming the whirlpool but none of them initiate it. When they leave, they have no memory that they were in it. You cannot take a random water molecule and discover whether it has ever gone down a drain. And yet, the pattern persists and is real. What gets dissipated is the energy and matter that travels through the structure.
In human systems, we see related kinds of structures everywhere too. Learning about these kinds of patterns, which I did initially through Fritjof Capra’s book The Web of Life, made me seek out analogues around me. The pattern of “dissipating structure” was interesting, and because I had focussed extensively on culture in my undergraduate studies, I finally had a useful way of looking at cultures and how they seemed to exhibit both stability and constant change. People, energy and material flow through the culture but they are entrained to behave in a larger scale structure that has some persistence, but which is also sensitive to changing. This was how I ended up coming to complexity theory, through my exploration of these ideas.
Cultures are not dissipative structures in the technical sense that Prigogine describes, and there seems to have been quite a bit of controversy over the years about whether social structures qualify as thermodynamic structures. Because I’m not a physicist I will say they are not, but this idea makes a good metaphor and helps me to explain how we work with emergent structures and persistent patterns in organizational and community life.
Seeing this pattern led me into the margins of participatory leadership work, facilitation, and ultimately dialogical organizational development. These ways of working were all concerned with creating the kinds of containers that enable emergent meaning. Sometimes these containers are temporary, like meetings, and sometimes they are persistent, like organizations, teams and communities. If you’ve ever tried to change an organizations culture you’ll recognize that it is very much like sticking your hand in a whirlpool. You’ll get some temporary disruption, but unless you change the enabling constraints, the whirlpool will reestablish itself the moment you stop interfering.