It’s an old post by Henry Mintzberg from 2015 but he tweeted it out today and the message is as current as ever. If Mintzberg is retweeting seven year old essays, it’s probably worth paying attention to them. Here’s the essence:
Someone I know once asked a most senior British civil servant why his department had to do so much measuring. His reply: “What else can we do when we don’t know what’s going on?” Did he ever try getting on the ground to find out what’s going on? And then using judgment to assess that? (Remember judgment? It’s still in the dictionary.)
Measuring as a replacement for managing has done enormous damage—undermining the souls of so many of our institutions (as discussed in last week’s TWOG). Think of how much education has been killed by assuming that we can measure what a child learns in a classroom. (I defy anyone to measure learning. You are reading this TWOG: please measure what you are learning.) Must we always deflect teaching from engaging students to examining them?
The principle of “bounded applicability” is one that I first learned from Dave Snowden (and one which Sonja expands on here). Measurement ticks all the boxes for pretending that the world is objectively knowable, and that anything can be quantified. in fact there are indeed probably HR consultants out that that will give you a quantitative analysis of your organizations culture.
Actually I just went down the rabbit hole looking for examples. I’ll save you the trouble. That is to peer into hell. Please do so only at your peril.
Sometimes when I’m teaching Cynefin i will say something about the boundary between Complicated and Complex problems that goes something like this: “The line between these two kinds of systems is important because there is a strong urge to use methods from the complicated domain to “solve” problems in the complex domain, and if you do that, you can create a world that hates humans. There is actually a really easy way to reduce the homeless population to 0, but not if you have an iota or morality in your character.” The most dehumanizing thing to do is to treat cultures, and people, and living human systems strictly by the number, as empirical units of problem or success, to be increased or eliminated. The peril we are in if AI starts making decisions about our lives is that these ways of working are devoid of ethics, or more frighteningly, they are reliant on the ethics of those who program them. Elon Musk’s acquisition of twitter for it’s massive semantic database should have us all wary of technology that learns from that data set.
imposing the ruthless methods of the complicated work onto the complex world is one way we map colonization onto the Cynefin framework. In complexity, culture is what matters and culture is produced by the countless interactions between people creating shared meaning from their stories and experiences. To the complicated system, all this meaning is noise that contributes to an inefficient waste of time and energy. But the energy produced by inefficiency in the complex domains produces warmth, human connection, community, society, relationship Community is inefficient. Thank god.
Long live the inefficient community. And long live measurement by the numbers, firmly nestled into the complicated domain where it can do the most good. And the least harm.
I have a little more than a passing interest in the politics and history of Ireland and Northern Ireland in particular, from whence my father’s family of 17th century Scottish transplants emerged.
One of the blogs I follow on this subject is the Unionist blog Slugger O’Toole which offers very thoughtful commentary on Irish and British politics from a Unionist – but not sectarian – perspective. It is very hard not to conflate the two when discussing Northern Ireland, Glasgow or Liverpool-based football, or Canadian history (yes they all have a Protestant v Catholic underlying animosity). This is especially true if you only know a little bit about what you’re talking about. The more you know, the more nuance you will find.
And so here this morning, buried in this review of a new personal history of Ireland by Fintan O’Toole is a really nice succinct quote about sectarianism:
…here we have the essence of sectarianism, the inevitable by-product not of misunderstanding, but of understanding to the point of caricature without compassion and human respect. Such an environment could only fail to foster a political culture able to sustain the give and take of a mature democracy. It made the recourse to violence more immediate and appealing.
That is really a good and useful description of a dynamic that usually unnecessarily complicates the already complex politics of colonization and conflict. It strikes me that overcoming dynamics like sectarianism is work that can be done by each of us personally in order to engage with the bigger issues of policy and politics that affect all us collectively.
I want to invite you into a story about TSS Rovers FC, a little soccer club I am involved in that is doing amazing things. We are about to become the first semi-pro soccer club in Canada to have a significant amount of supporter ownership. Our initial share offering closes on March 9, and you buy into to this club now here: https://www.frontfundr.com/tssrovers. But read on to find out why i think this matters.
On the morning of August 6th, 2021 I sat glued to my TV screen absolutely riveted by the possibility of Canada winning a gold medal in women’s soccer at the Tokyo Olympics. After a tournament in which the team had dug deep against better teams and bitter rivals, they stood poised to capture a gold against Sweden. Nothing was certain as the match went to penalties, and as a long time supporter of Canadian soccer I found myself consumed only with hope, pleading with the soccer deities that our surse would be lifted.
And then when Julia Grosso scored the winning penalty, she ran into the arms of Jordyn Huitema and I burst into tears of relief, joy, pride, and astonishment.
On May 25, 2018 these same two women had appeared in a match between TSS Rovers and the Whitecaps women’s academy. Both women were on our roster, but Huitema had been loaned back to the Whitecaps for the match, as Bev Preistman was warming up her side for a U20 National Team match. The football was magnificent, and despite Rovers dropping a 3-2 result, the small groups of us there knew we were watching something special.
This country has been begging for a moment like what we witnessed on August 6, or indeed what we have witnessed this year as the Men’s National Team has found itself at the top of the table half way through the final round of CONCACAF qualification for the 2026 World Cup., Unless you were the parent of a player or one of the few involved in the development of talent in this country, all we had been able to do was stand by and watch, cheering from the sidelines, supporting where we could.
But the call has gone out to support Canadian soccer as we take the next step into the international game. Whether it is the call of the women for a professional league in this country, or the glaring deficit of BC-born and developed players on our men’s national team, the time is now to up our game.
When Colin Elmes, Brendan Quarry and Will Cromack had the idea to create TSS Rovers as a USL League 2 and later a WPSL franchise back in 2016, it was a thought based on a dream and a desire to meet this challenge with whatever tools they had. The idea quickly became a reality and it caught my imagination and that of a few local soccer supporters in the Vancouver area, who had long dreamed of investing in something tangible, of meaningfully supporting a team that was committed to do everything it could to build the Canadian game. Determined to play their games at iconic Swangard Stadium, the home of so many National team and Vancouver Whitecaps memories, the dream caught fire. I was astonished at the audacity of what TSS Rovers was doing, and I just had to be a part of it.
It was clear from the beginning they knew that if nothing else, this Dream would only succeed if supporters also saw the need and were given a way to make it happen.
On the basis of this simple and open invitation, The Swanguardians were formed, from a group of die-hard Canadian soccer supporters who could finally taste meaningful involvement in this effort. From the very first match in 2017, when the players assembled the supporters’ section themselves, the club has doubled down on what it means to offer supporters meaningful partnerships in the effort. They included the voices of supporters in the work of the club. Some of us were appointed to the TSS Rovers Advisory Board and in 2019 we began to imagine what it would be like to create a meaningful supporter stake in the Rovers Dream.
After three years of work, imagination, hard yards, and due diligence, we finally arrived at the idea of creating a Supporters Trust to seek an ownership stake in the club. The owners saw the opportunity to offer all supporters a chance to put their money where their mouth is and they made 49% of the ownership of the club available. Through much of 2021, the club and the nascent Trust worked hard to make this next dream a reality.
And we did it. On December 9 I purchased 4 shares in Rovers Football Club Ltd, and our Dream became a reality. Our initial offering runs until March 9 and you can be an owner too.
We have now made history as the first club in Canada to have actual equity ownership offered to supporters. We are one of a handful of clubs in North America that have catalyzed their communities into getting behind the dream of developing local players and moving them into the professional and national team ranks. There is no more tangible way to make a difference for Canadian soccer than investing in it and being a part of directing it, and this is the way to do it.
Until now, supporters of Canadian soccer could only stand by and watch as a small group of Canadian players, coaches, technical staff and investors tried to build the success that our national program has currently found. The establishment of the CPL has given a boost to the men’s game and the women are now loudly and rightly calling for a league of their own.
With the establishment of League1 BC, we now have a semi-professional environment in BC and a place for the Rovers Dream to continue for both women and men. And with the sale of ownership equity in TSS Rovers, the door is wide open for every person who said “we need to do more” to get on board, build on our success and deepen the pathways for players to take our country to the next level.
It is one thing to watch from the sidelines and cheer on our players, and another thing entirely to be tangibly invested in success for the future.
Whether it is that powerful blast of emotions I felt when Grosso and Huitema won their medals, the surge of pride I experience watching Jordan Haynes and Matteo Polisi lift the CPL Championship Shield, or the satisfaction of watching Joel Waterman winning a Voyageurs Cup and playing against the top teams in CONCACAF, that pride is born from the fact that over the past four years, I watched and sang for all of those players in the red and black of TSS Rovers. They answered the call and their success is just the beginning. And we who are connected to them, are riding the energy of their success.
We used to joke that “we don’t know what we are doing” But that has changed. We know exactly what we are doing. We are behind the calls of our national team players to get involved. We are meeting the hunger that supporters have to own a stake in the future. We are serious about the work now, and we couldn’t be more proud to be breaking the ground.
Join us now and be a part of history. There is space on this train for everyone to participate in what we are doing at TSS Rovers. And when we open our inaugural League1 BC season at Swanguard in May, we will do so in front of hundreds of people who are not just ticket buyers, or fans of the game or supporters of the club, but real owners who have purchased a stake in the future of Canadian soccer.
See you there.
Yesterday we were walking an incredible cliff top trail in East Sooke Park, in Scia’new territory on Vancouver Island. The Coast Trail there is rugged along the Juan de Fuca side of the park and although it is well travelled, there are sections across bare rock cliff top when the path is all but invisible. It requires a deeper kind of seeing to discern where the path is, especially if you follow what looks to be an obvious route which can take you to some dangerous places. As an experienced trail walker, I find myself in moments like this looking for evidence that I am NOT on the path. Is there broken foliage? Is the soil compressed and eroded by boots rather than hoofs or water? Are the roots underfoot rubbed clean of bark? Are there any trail markers about? When I find myself answering “no” to these questions I move slower, until the evidence is overwhelming, and I stop and track back to find out where I went wrong.
You can see why looking for evidence to DISPROVE your belief creates a safe to fail situation. If I find a single piece of evidence that confirms my belief that I am on the right track, and I follow it unquestioningly, the results become increasingly dangerous, and failure becomes unsafe.
A lot of my life and work is about paying attention to these weak signals. Whether it is making music with others, facilitating groups, helping organizations with strategy, playing and watching sports like soccer, rugby and hockey, it all comes down to paying attention in a way that challenges your beliefs.
The other day I offered a pithy comment on facebook to the question of “what is the difference between critical thinking and buying conspiracy theories?” and it really came down to this: critical thinkers look for evidence to disprove their beliefs and conspiracy theorists look for evidence to confirm their beliefs.
I think the latter is quite the norm in our current mainstream organizational cultures, even if it doesn’t lead to conspiracy theory. The pressure for accountability and getting it right leaves very little space to see what’s going wrong in the organization. The desire to build on what is working – while being an important part of the strategic toolkit – is not served without a critical look at the fact that we might be doing it wrong.
This is why sensemaking has become a critical part of my practice. And by sensemaking I mean collecting large numbers of small anecdotes about a situation and having large numbers of people look at them together. The idea is that with a diverse set of data points and a diverse number of perspectives, you get a truer picture of the actual culture of an organization, and you can act with more capacity to find multiple ways forward, including those which both challenge your assumptions about what is right and good now and those which discover what is better and better.
Recently in Canada we have been having a little debate about whether celebrating Canada Day on July 1 is appropriate given that fact that this month – National Indigenous Peoples Month, as it turns out – has been marked by a reckoning with the visible evidence of the genocide that has been committed here. While hundreds of thousands of people here are in mourning or grief, and are reliving the trauma that has travelled through their families as a result of the genocidal policies of residential school and the non-consensual adoption of children, many others are predictably coming out with a counter reaction that goes something like this “yeah, well let’s get over it. Canada is still the best country of the world to live in.”
And that makes sense for many people – like me – who live here and have a great life. But as I have been saying elsewhere on Twitter: don’t confuse you having a great life with this being a great country. There is nothing wrong with people having a great life. That is what we should want for all people. But Canada is not a place where that happens for everyone. The story is very different for lots of people who struggle to find contentment and acceptance inside this nation-state. Canada’s very existence is owed to broken treaties, environmental destruction, relational treachery, economic injustice, and genocide.
Paying attention to the weak signals is important here. If all you can see is how great your own life is, and you think we just need to keep doing whatever it is that we are doing that assures that continuity, then we are headed for a precipice. We are headed off an environmental cliff, into a quagmire of injustice and economic inequality that destabilizes everything you have in a catastrophic way.
Listening to First Nations – really paying attention to possibilities – is mutually beneficial to everyone. If one wants all lives to matter, then one has to ensure that every life matters, which means taking the lead from those whose lives have been considered dispensable in the project called “Canada.” And it’s not like they haven’t been out here for the past 250 years calling for a better way. It’s just that the mainstream, largely led by commercial interests who have hungered for and exploited natural resources that never belonged to them, have cheered on the idea that if Canada is good for me, it must be good period.
Let seeing be disbelieving. This country is not an inherently GOOD place. But it could be. It could be great. It could be safe, healthy, prosperous, balanced, creative and monumentally amazing. But it requires us to first question the limiting beliefs we have that it could never be better than this and second to pay attention to the weak signals that help guide us onto a path that takes us there.
It is far too early to celebrate Canada Day. We haven’t yet fulfilled the promise of the treaties and the vision with which indigenous Nations entered into relationships with Europeans oh so long ago, and that vision which is continually offered up to settlers through reciprocity and relationship. If there is anything to celebrate, perhaps it is the fact that we do have the resources to make this country work for all and we have the intelligence and creativity and willingness to do it, but you won’t find that in the Board rooms and the Parliamentary lobbies and the Cabinet offices and the global markets.
It is in the weak signals, the stories and small pathways of promise out there that are born in struggle and resilience and survival and generate connection, sustainability and the promise of well-being for all.
I think this quote really captures my own social justice practice and my own spiritual practice. Ilia Delio is perhaps what we would call an evolutionary theologian and what she says here about “becoming something that is not yet known” says volumes to me:
By evolution, I mean simply that change is integral to life. We are becoming something that is not yet known. To live in evolution is to let go of structures that prevent convergence and deepening of consciousness and assume new structures that are consonant with creativity, inspiration, and development.
Evolution requires trust in the process of life itself. There is a power at the heart of life that is divine and lovable. In a sense we are challenged to lean into life’s changing patterns and attend to the new patterns that are emerging in our midst. To live in openness to the future is to live with a sense of creativity and participation, to use our gifts for the sake of the whole by sharing them with others.
— Ilia Delio, The Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey (Orbis Books: 2021), 220–221, 223–225.
It is hard to stay open to possibility when we are confronting a choice between the familiar and the new. I have always imagined that a world that addresses climate change, one that properly restores dignity and equality and essential relationships to land and sea and between peoples is one that will deliver a better world than the one we have now. But power and familiarity breed intransigence and unless we can truly let go of what we know and fall forward into the theoretically innumerable realities that are better than this one, we remain trapped in these patterns of behaviour in these ways of relating, in these ways of making a living.
We need moments of disturbance to move into new realities, and the more we refuse to accept the painful truths of the status quo, the less chance we have of actually making something better.
We are emerging from 2020, a year that was terrible in so many ways and one in which we saw many stories of governments mobilized to retool systems to create universal programs of health and economic care; stories of mitigated climate impacts and the support for local economies; stories of massive logistical challenges solved; stories of racial equity and justice being foregrounded and new conversations and actions around changing the coercive structures of power that perpetuate injustice.
We have evidence that we can quickly make massive changes that take us into that “becoming” but we remain trapped in the fear that doing so will cause loss and harm to people (let’s be honest, people who look like me) that benefit from the status quo. It might do, but the status quo is such that we are at a moment in history when we have enough wealth to mitigate those losses and usher people into a better world. There will be contraction. We can manage. Some of us have no idea how much resilience we actually have, because we’ve never been tested.
We can’t know what we are becoming, but we have enough evidence to know that the path we have been on and the vector on which we are travelling is heading towards a world where our gifts are increasingly discarded and our regard for life diminished. Perhaps at some point the fear of the immediate reality will outweigh the fear of choosing something different. I wish it weren’t so, that we have to be motivated by fear over love. And we need not hope for this future – it is the hope that kills – but rather we simply need to act now and trust in one another differently, listen to the voices that are at the margins of our world, at the ecotones between the thriving systems of life and the social clearcuts in which we are immersed. Those voices are bringing us the new patterns, the challenges, and the invitations. Hear them, amplify them, exchange gifts, follow them and let’s journey away from this hellscape.