I adore Alicia Juarerro’s work. So much so that I just watched a short video and spent the last hour writing about it. Here’s what I’m learning
Alicia Juarrero is a philosopher whose thinking about causality, complexity, action, and emergence has been critical to some of the ways in which folks like Dave Snowden have thought about this field. Her book Dynamics in Action is a really important read, packed full of thinking about complex systems and constraints. It’s a hard book to get into – indeed advice I have had from others is “start in the middle” (a helpful enabling constraint) – but worth the read.
But if reading philosophy is not your idea of a fun pandemic activity and you’d like a tiny primer into her work, I strongly encourage you to watch this 27-minute video of her presenting on emergence, constraints, and closure. Watch it first and then come back to these notes, for I am going to summarize her ideas and bring them into more common applications. I’ll probably end up carving massive holes in her thinking – so feel free to correct my takes here – but here’s what got me thinking.
Juarrero presents on three main topics, emergence and constraints, context-free and context-sensitive constraints, and closure.
Emergence
Here are her main points:
- Nature uses constraints to generate emergence and sustain it. Constraints both limit and enable.
- Evolution selects for resilience, adaptability, and evolvability.
- Resilience is sustained by micro-diversity.
- Ecosystems are sustained by distributed control rather than governing control. The key is in the links.
- The emergence of novel practices – innovation – cannot be caused, but novelty can be enabled. You do this by catalyzing conditions that allow innovation to occur.
- Think of constraints as phenomena that change the likelihood of things, and the probabilities of what is going on.
SO the conclusion from this section is pretty straightforward. One cannot simply say to people “INNOVATE!” and expect emergence to happen. In order to create the conditions for novelty, one must change the interaction between the people in the system. You can do that in any number of ways, by changing a constraint. Everyone will be familiar with what happens when you are given a task with a constrained amount of time in which to complete it. The pressure of a deadline sometimes creates the conditions for novel practice. By cutting your available time in half, you will discover that a solution that requires an hour will not work, and you may discover that you can find a way to do the task in 30 minutes.
Folks are. discovering this all the time right now. Being forced to work from home is suddenly creating all kinds of novelty and innovation. Many people are discovering that the commute is simply not worth it. Some are finding that they cannot do their work from home and so must find new jobs or new ways to do what they did before. Being forced to isolate has created the conditions for emergence and innovation, and not all of it is successful. Complexity-informed governments have created temporary universal incomes to enable people to be safe to fail. This is not the time to force people to “stand on their own two feet.” If you want people to stay at home, you have to enable them to do that in order to disrupt the pandemic, otherwise, they will have no choice but to head out looking for jobs, thereby increasing the spread of COVID-19.
Context-free and context-specific constraints
This is important and dense stuff, and Juarerro gets this from Lil Gatlin who wrote about it as far back as 1971, but here are the main points:
- In a system, the probability that something will happen vs. something else happening is due to constraints.
- A system with no constraints is “smooth,” in other words there is an equal probability of anything happening.
For example, if I give you a random number sequence like 761893826544528… what do you think the next number will be? In a random system, there is an equal probability that the next number will be between 0-9.
Now If I give you this number sequence: 123456… there is a much higher probability that the next number will be a 7. Why? Because the way to make some things more likely than others is to provide constraints. In this case, the constraint is your bias that the number sequence is not random and you are entrained to expect a 7.
So then what of constraints. Juarerro says:
- All systems come with built-in probability: it’s more likely to be one thing or another. Probability is determined by two types of constraints: context-free and context-sensitive.
- A context free-constraint is like a bias, or an assumption, or a preference.
- A context-sensitive constraint is something that is conditional on a state in the context.
For example, you might say “I like walking on the beach” and that is a context-free constraint that might help you get a date. But a context-sensitive constraint like “If it is raining, I hate walking on beaches” is helpful for your date to know so they don’t invite you out for a beach walk on a rainy day, thereby ruining the chances of romance.
(“But you said you liked to walk on beaches!” is not an endearing thing to say to a waterlogged and miserable partner)
This is useful for innovation because a context-free constraint – like a shared purpose – can help give a sense of direction to work. Developing a new shared purpose will cause some things to be more likely than others. If you decide to stop farming and start building cars, you will be unlikely to be found buying seeds, discussing the weather, or thinking about crop yields. You will be more likely to be focused on supply chains, manufacturing efficiency, engineering, and roads. But in both cases, the higher level context-free constraint is the need to make money.
Context-sensitive constraints begin to give a system coherence. A context-sensitive constraint creates an interdependence or an interrelationship between to parts of a system. Hating rain makes one’s mood dependant on rain, and that can govern or enable a whole set of behaviors. If you end up with a friend who loves rain and one that hates rain, the probability of enjoying each other outdoors on a rainy day decreases radically. But it also means that two people may find that they both love being indoors playing board games while it is raining outside. Sustainable long term relationships are dependant on people finding novel ways of being together as their context-specific constraints change. This is called resilience: the ability to maintain coherence while changing.
Juarrero then talks about some useful kinds of constraints:
- Linkages and relationships: innovation requires interaction and collaboration and interdependence among what will become the components of a larger system.
- Catalysts: things which, given their presence, make other things possible. Catalysts act to break patterns or to create new ones and can sometimes become attractors in their own right.
- Feedback, especially positive (reinforcing) feedback between parts in a system which increases the likelihood of emergence.
- Rhythm, gait, cadence, sequence, order, and timing – temporal constraints – which are very helpful context-sensitive constraints that make things interconnected and interdependent in time as well as space.
In my work as a facilitator and a consultant that helps people innovate, I catalog these attractors with the ABCEI acronym, standing for Attractors, Boundaries, Connections, Exchanges, and Identities. These constraints can all be found active in systems and sets of problems. When people tell me that they are “stuck” we can usually find some of the constraints at play that are causing that state of affairs. Once we have put our finger on something, it’s a good idea to try catalyzing that constraint to see if we can break it or tighten it as need be, to create the conditions in which another course of action is more probable.
For example, today I was coaching someone to use Zoom. She had read the documentation and watched videos, but she had context-specific questions about the application. Clearly she needed more connection with someone who had more experience than she did. So I tightened that connection with her and focused the exchange of information. I started by giving her a tour and I showed her things, but when when I was going too fast she slowed me down, and ask me how she could do those things. Responding to this new constraint on our session – her desire to learn hands-on – I shifted her identity and handed her the power to host our meeting and she took a turn making breakout groups. The whole session took a funny turn when we ended up chasing each other through ten breakout rooms we had created.
By the end of the session, she had enough information to be able to schedule and host a Zoom meeting. She took on the mantle of “Zoom host” an identity that an hour previously, we didn’t even know existed.
Learning like this is emergent and one can work with constraints to discover new ways to teach, new ways to learn and play, and new things to do to address old problems. Constraints-led learning is major field of pedagogy and my friend Mark O Sullivan, a football coach with AIK in Stockholm, is one of the leading proponents of this way of learning skills and teaching the complex sport of football.
Closure
The last part of Juarrero’s talk is about closure, the essential dynamic that makes emergence possible. She says:
- Loops create novelty and innovation. When a loop closes, what emerges is cohesion and cohesiveness.
- Autocatalytic, circular causality and closed positive feedback loops generate novelty.
- Parts interact and when the loop closes, an emergent whole is created, and when that loops back it influences the parts: cultures, systems, organizations, communities, identities,. These are all cohesive and influence parts that come into the system.
Stuart Kauffman’s work on evolutionary biology and autocatalytic systems describes this process beautifully. Essentially the ancestors of all living things are small contained systems of molecules that act on one another. A interacts with B to create C and C interact with A to create B, and suddenly you have a coherent system that “creates itself.”
At the cultural level, look at the way that feedback loops and closure create communities online, for better or worse. In highly partisan contexts, “echo-chambers” are simply autocatalyzing social systems, where biases are reinforced, shared purposes are strengthened and new identities are formed and stabilized. This can create such deep attractor wells into which people fall, almost like cults. Family members can no longer relate to them, they become unable to work with people who are different than they are, especially those who are considered “the enemy.”
Closure creates identity and landscapes of mountains and valleys that Juarrero talks about toward the end of her talk. A mountain might represent an idea that is unthinkable – having dinner with your racist uncle – and a valley might be a much easier, more preferable, and more possible outcome, such as going to a rally for racial justice with your friends. The way in which constraints have closed and looped and fed back information to you in your life will determine which of these two scenarios is most probable. When you choose dinner with your uncle. everyone will express surprise. They never saw that coming. You must have climbed a mountain to make that possible.
Juarrero ends with a really important point about what happens with context-specific constraints operate in a closed system: you get identities, cultures and mindsets, which themselves become context-free constraints for new things entering the system. If you have ever had the experience of moving to a new place you know this well. On our island where I live we have a “Newcomers Guide” that talks about practical realities of becoming a Bowen Islander. It contains a helpful mix of tangible facts – like where the school is, and how to check the ferry schedule. But it also contains insider information about the emergent characteristics of Bowen Island life that have grown out of our interactions with each other and our environment over many decades. These include things such as “Someone flashing their hazard lights in the rearview mirror is not being a jerk. They are a firefighter on their way to a call” or “Don’t ask online for whom an ambulance siren was sounding…” The original guide was written in 2016, and I can already see where things need changing, although the heuristics by which one shod live here, seem robust enough for now.
Like everything associated with complexity these three simple concepts – emergence, constraints, and closure – are easy to see, difficult to unpack, and powerful in practice. Go read and listen to Alica Juarrero though, and be grateful, as I am, that someone as brilliant as her has done the heavy lifting for us.
I live on an island, literally. It is a small community located near Vancouver, home to 3750 people in the winter and perhaps 5000 or so in the summer. Living on an island attunes one to the realities of working with bounded spaces. There is really only one way in our out of here, through the ferry, so it is a good chance to explore and learn about self-organizing systems. And as anyone who has visited an island knows, every one has its own unique culture and character, developed through decades of living in tightly connected, tightly bounded community.
During the pandemic, all I can see are islands within islands within islands, as each of us retreats into heavily bounded spaces, contained within other heavily bounded spaces and so on. Holonic containers repeating at fractal scales. Our word is organizing itself to defeat a virus that can permeate all but the most impermeable boundaries, and for a complexity worker, it is fascinating.
Complex adaptive systems consist of agents operating within bounded spaces. The five main factors that influence self-organization in complex systems are:
- Connections between agents in the system and the Exchange between those agents.
- The Identities that those agents have, in any given context.
- The Attractors and Boundaries that form the spaces in which agents interact. These contain and constrain the behaviour of the agents in the system.
The world is fractal at the moment meaning that these systems are nested within one another; the whole of one system becomes a part of a higher level space. Levels look like this:
- As a person, I try to keep the virus from entering my body
- I am in a relationship with two other people in my home and we are trying to keep the virus from entering our home. Our Chief Public Health Officer calls these “bubbles,” defined right now by people you can touch.
- Our bubble lives in a community and we must be very careful to keep at least two meters away from other bubbles so that we can keep the virus from entering our bubble. “Don’t connect the bubbles” is the heuristic here.
- Our community is very highly contained, being an island, and we have to do everything we can to limit the connections and exchanges we have to other communities.
- All of us together are living in a province that is itself contained and has limited connection with other provinces in our country. As a result, differences are appearing in how each province is handling the crises. and so far ours is doing fairly well.
- Our country is also bounded and contained, with very little international travel, and so we are also starting to see differences in how different countries are handling the pandemic, even close neighbours like Canada and the US. Anyone arriving in our country to stay must self-quarantine for 14 days and that is an order that is enforceable.
- And then of course, here we are on earth, perhaps yearning for an escape to a cleaner place, but no such place exists.
So it is clear that the two main factors influencing the pandemic are boundaries and connections at this point. Managing these is what we are doing now. Public health is about influencing behaviour, and as behaviour is an emergent property of people interacting within systems, it can only be influenced by changing the conditions for self-organization. Health authorities are applying tight constraints on Boundaries and Connections in order to influence behaviour and within each of the various levels, in the hopes that behaviours will change and we will ‘flatten the curve.” The challenge, as always, is that you cannot predict what will work and what won’t, so you need to try things and see what happens and adjust. Lots of adjustment has been going on and we can see a gradual tightening of Boundaries and narrowing of connections. Just as you are supposed to wash your hands and not touch your face, people in communities are expected to keep physically distant from one another and stay at home as much as possible.
Application in practice
By all accounts, this is working in British Columbia, where I live. All of our nested holons are engaged in the same project so that even with outliers who are disobeying the public health orders and recommendations, we are generally operating at the moment within the capacity of our health care system. Of course, things can change very quickly and so our daily reports have contained a mix of the carrot and the stick: praise at the efforts that are paying off, and a dire warning that we have not yet reached our peak and that the choices we make now will determine how many people literally live or die in the next few weeks and months.
Our only metric that matters is the curve. Exceeding the capacity of our health care system to provide care will trigger a massive escalation in this crisis meaning even tighter constraints. Currently, we are managing well, and we haven’t had any major tightening of constraints since March 18 for the general population.
As a case study, the way the British Columbia government has handled the pandemic is an excellent example of managing in complexity. I put this down to our Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry. Dr. Henry is trained in public health and preventative medicine, which is itself a complexity field. She was the operational lead in Toronto during the SARS epidemic in 2003 and she subsequently worked on the ebola and H1N1 outbreaks. She knows her stuff.
Her advice to British Columbians has been a mixture of heuristics – wash your hands, don’t touch your face, practice physical distancing – and orders that make it illegal to gather in groups larger than 50, and by law officers have been empowered locally to enforce physical distancing orders around much smaller groups in public places. This shows excellent use of what we try to teach with Cynefin: the proper application of the right use of constraints and practices for the type of situation at hand, with sophisticated monitoring, openness to change, and decisive action. My confidence in her is unparalleled. This is what a top rate complexity-informed leader looks like. Her actions and her influence have been widely praised and as a result of her leadership at this moment, people in our province generally feel safe.
What I worry about now
From a complexity perspective, the worry is what might happen to the connections and boundaries that are currently the most important constraints at play. In general, the tighter you make a constraint, the more catastrophically it fails and so there is a fine art to finding just the right balance to manage the disease and not provoke widespread social unrest. Even though we would all be 100% safe if we were locked in our houses and forced at gunpoint to stay there, this would probably provoke a massive social reaction that would defy that order en masse, creating the perfect conditions for 100% of the population to contract the virus. Likewise, a too lackadaisical attitude will not be effective in keeping people separate. There are already concerns that the March 18th order needs to be tightened to groups of less than 50. At this point, I think everyone would agree with that. The major boundary violations have been happening in house parties which is very dangerous as one infected person at a party will almost certainly infect everyone else who will take the virus home to their own generally tightly constrained bubble. Within bubbles, we don;t have boundaries, so the virus spreads by jumping across a boundary at one scale and finding it’s way into a bubble at a lower scale.
This has massive implications especially for people whose ability to adhere to orders and practice good heuristics is compromised by poverty, disability, or disempowerment. A general population health approach allows for flexibility in the system so that in principles, those who cannot adhere to the highest standard can nevertheless do their best. Our federal government emergency benefit, which looked initially like a $2000 a month income supplement for any who need it, now appears to be excluding up to a third of workers in our country. This is NOT the time to exclude people who would otherwise need to go out into the community to find work. The simplest solution would be to make that benefit available to all, to protect renters and homeowners from losing their homes during this period and housing homeless people properly in empty hotels instead of on uncomfortable cots in conventions centres and hockey rinks. Our society’s unequal in-bred distrust of the poor and disabled will have massive consequences if we don’t get this right.
At the best of times our system lets hundreds of thousands of people fall through the cracks. These days what will also certainly fall through the cracks is the virus we are trying to contain, simply because we don’t trust poor people.
On our island, we have asked that no one come and visit us, as we try to limit the connections with the outside world. This is because within the bubble of our island we have self-organized practices and systems that are working to care for our community. We are a small island, tightly connected, and our community crisis infrastructure is very small. People coming to live in the summer homes, or coming to visit for the day don’t know the protocols that have developed here and many small communities are reporting that visitors are more cavalier than residents are. Indeed this article names the problem of uncontrolled connections between bubbles as a major issue for small towns. (The lede phrase “wealth is the vector” is a powerful statement of the truth). Small communities are fragile social ecosystems. An outbreak of COVID-19 on our island, for example resulting from a visiting infected boater who doesn’t understand or follow our social practices, could ravage our General Store staff and would have a catastrophic consequence. We would quickly run out of food options and have no choice but to make more frequent trips to the mainland, thus increasing the exposure and overall exchange bandwidth for the virus to move.
Other constraints are also playing into this. Our island is an interesting Attractor for people who have been cooped up in their homes for months and the weather is changing. It will be very hard to stop people visiting on the ferry or on boats and so our ferry company has begun making serious discouraging announcements about visitors to small islands and our tourism association has been ramping up the message. With a sunny long weekend coming up, I believe that we need to make ourselves less interesting as a catalyst. I imagine the provincial government will be driving home that message too. Already ferry runs between the mainland and Vancouver Island have been massively reduced, with several reserved only for cargo. Entire routes have been shuttered.
Identities too become an important aspect to play with. We see our provincial government and health officer praising British Columbians and reminding us that we are all in this together. they are trying hard to get everyone to belong to the same team, and showing the results is a good way to reinforce that identity. Using wartime metaphors, while not especially helpful, nevertheless have the effect of getting folks into a serious mode of action. Our health officer sprinkles her messages with calls to be diligent over one’s own role, and have kindness and compassion for others. She refuses to condemn people for momentary or temporary violations of physical distancing practices (she says “you don’t have the full picture of what your neighbour is up to, so don’t be quick to judge”) but has no qualms using her authority to enforce orders against house parties and large outdoor gatherings.
It’s interesting times to be sure, but it has been a living and breathing example of how complexity thinking is providing the best way through the pandemic. I hope you are currently living in a jurisdiction where your decision-makers understand this, and I know many people are not. To you, my friends, all I can say is make sure YOU take a complexity-informed view of the situation and keep your bubble as tight as a little rocky island.
I’m in trouble. In the best way. So get ready for a long and rambling post about geeky dialogic philosophy and complexity practice.
I’m a little bit known in some communities as a person that is writing and working with the notion of “container” in dialogic organization development. The word and concept itself comes from a lineage of thinking about the spaces inside which dialogue takes place, and there is certainly lots written about that. I think I first learned the term from the work of William Isaacs whose classic work, “Dialogue,” is a seminal reference in this field. He describes a dialogic container as the “sum of assumpitions, shared intentions, and beliefs of a group.”
While that was the first place I learned of the concept of container in dialogue, my learning about it was also informed by reading about complexity science, and especially learning about dissipative structures and autopoiesis, two key concepts in self-organization in living systems. Furthermore, I learned of the notion of sacred space in both Christianity and indigenous ceremonies, especially the Midewiwin, to which I was exposed in my University years. Finally, my thinking about container with respect to complexity has been heavily influenced by both Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang‘s work, as they have explored how these concepts and dynamics from the natural sciences show up in human systems. In this context, Dave’s work on enabling and governing constraints is incredibly useful and Glenda’s broad palette of tools helps us to illuminate and work with containers.
So that is a brief survey of where my understanding has come from. I find the concept incredibly helpful in understanding the dynamics of self-organizing systems and it helps us to find places to intervene in a complex system with a rigorous approach to explore and change the patterns of self-organization and emergence.
So I use the word “container” with a very specific meaning, but it’s not a meaning that is shared by everyone and it definitely not a meaning shared by folks who have a history of being contained. Occasionally I get scolded for using the word, and I own that. We must be VERY thoughtful about language in this work so this is a long post where I think about the implications of this troublesome word which is used to describe a useful concept badly.
The word and concept are useful in understanding and describing dialogic practice. But it has some SERIOUS baggage because in contexts of oppression and colonization the history of colonization, enclosure, and imprisonment is entirely the history of containing people; on reserves, in jails, in schools, in groups defined by race and marked by lines, in ghettoized neighbourhoods, in a million places in which people are contained, enclosed and deprived of their agency and freedom to create and maintain boundaries.
In these contexts, the word “container” is often heard as a reference to places that are created by people with the power to contain others, and very often they contain people who have a lesser amount of power to change or free themselves from that container.
It is true and important to note that any discussion about how to manage dialogic spaces – containers – is entirely dependant on the power one has to create and influence the boundaries, and manage the connections and exchanges. Creating a dialogic container is an act of privilege. Using the word “container” will almost always trigger a negative reaction in people that have been SUBJECTED to containment, against their wills, against the interests, and in the service of depriving them of power.
Liberation movements all over the world in all moments of history are about creating alternative spaces to the oppressive culture and conditions of the present. These are expressed in all kinds of ways. In land reform movements, for example, colonized lands are recovered and returned to their original owners. In movements to free people from enclosed and coercive spaces like exploitative labour, prisons, residential schools, oppressive child welfare practices, or human trafficking, alternative spaces are built for equality, justice, freedom, learning, self-actualization and growth. And the metaphor and reality extends to spaces where people change the language to talk about their conditions and create spaces where conversation, dialogue, and organizing can happen in a way that draws a line between the oppressive practices of the past and the liberating spaces of the future. Socially constructed narratives can provide alternative stories that begin to link, connect, and differentiate people in a way that helps them organize their conditions of freedom.
So one major problem with this troublesome word is how it works in English. The word “contain” can be brutal, because in English it is a transitive verb that is not continuous, meaning that it implies an action conducted upon a object and then arriving at a resting place, where the object is contained and the action is done. That is a troubling truth of the word “container” and partially explains why it rests so uncomfortably on a dialogic practice that is intended to create spaces of generatively, creativity and life. It objectifies the object of it’s action and it acts upon that object to bring about a final conclusion. There is a lot buried in the particular grammatical function of the word. There is no room in the English definition of the word for self-organization and emergence.
Truthfully, the space required for dialogic practice needs a type of verb that doesn’t come so easily to English: a collectively transitive verb that is generative, continuous, and describes something that changes in its use. I suspect, having been a poor student of Anishinaabemowin and a bit of Skwxwu7mesh snichim, that there are maybe such verb forms in these languages. In my long study of the Tao te Ching, I’ve come to understand the concept of “yin” to be this: the form that life takes, in which creative energy is contained so it can do it’s work. It is created and changed in its interdependent relationship to what happens within it, like the way a river bed both holds the river and gives water its form of “river” instead of “lake” and is changed by the river being in it. It implies “receptivity” to creative energy. In Japanese where there is a sophisticated vocabulary for these kinds of spaces, “ma” (?) might be the word I’m looking for: a word that my friend Yurie Makihara defines this way: “Ma is the time concept expressing the time between something and other thing. We say how to create Ma is really important to encourage you to speak or “it’s kind of nice to have this kind of Ma.” For me Ma is the word to include some special sense to say, so we don’t use it just to express the time and the place.” Even though Yurie’s English is quite good, it’s clear that translating this into English is nearly impossible! But I think you get a sense that Ma is a collective sense about the shared time and space relationships that create a moment in which something is possible. Ma describes that moment, in a spatial way.
So. As is often the case, I’m left with the hidden poverty of English to give me a word that serves as both verb and noun and that is highly process-dependant. Over the years folks have suggested words like “nest” “hearth” and “field” to describe it. These are good, but in some ways they are also just softer rebranding of the word “container” to imply a more life-filled space. The terms still don’t ask the question of who gets to create, own and maintain the container nor do they fully capture the beauty and generativity of a complex adaptive structure in which meaning-making, relationship, healing, planning, dreaming both occur and act to transform the place in which they occur.
If we cast our eyes about the culture a bit wider, they quickly land on the word “space.” We use the word “space” a lot in social change circles, but it has its own troublesome incompleteness. The problem with “space” is that it often tends to turn attention towards what is between us and away from the boundary that separates us from others. This can be the way in which creating space for social change can fall victim to an unarticulated shadow: inclusion always implies a boundary between what is included and what is not included. Many social change initiatives falter on an unresourceful encounter with the exclusion that is implied by radical inclusion. A healthy social system can speak as clearly and lovingly about this boundary as it can about the relationship within the system. And for me this is the important part of talking about dialogic practice. So I can understand the helpful neutrality of the term “space” because it can be a result of a tight and impermeable boundary or it can simply be what we give our attention too as we come into relationship around attractors like identities, ideas, purposes, or needs. It can beautifully describe the nature of the “spaces in between.” But it still doesn’t do enough for me to describe the relationship between the spaces and the forces – or constraints – in the system that give rise to a space and enable self-organization and life. Still, it’s a pretty good word.
So perhaps what is needed is a true artistic view of the problem, to look away from the problem and towards the negative space that defines it. That is indeed what I have started doing in my work, by focusing more on the factors that influence self-organization and emergence and less on naming the structure that is created as a result of those factors. This is a critical skill in working with complexity as a strategist, facilitator, manager, and evaluator. These constraints include the interdependent work of the attractors and the boundaries which help us create a “space” for sensemaking and action, whether dialogic action or something else. There is a place where you are either in or out, and there can be a transition zone that is quite fluid and interesting. There is also an attractor at play, which can be a shared purpose, a goal, a shared identity, a shared rhythm or something interesting and strange and emergent that brings us into relationship. Anywhere you find yourself, in any social space, you can probably identify the attractors, the boundaries and perhaps even the nature of the liminal space between completely in and completely out.
This brings us back to the power conversation, rather more helpfully I think. If we let go of the “container” and focus instead on the factors that shape it, we can talk about power right upfront. Attractors and boundaries are VERY POWERFUL. They are created by power and maintained and enforced by power and the negotiation about their nature – more or less stable, more or less influential, more or less permeable and mutable – is by definition a negotiation about power. As a facilitator one carries a tremendous amount of power into the design of dialogic spaces. The most energetic resistance I have ever received in my work is always around the choices I made and the nature of the attractors and boundaries I am working with. I have been told I am too controlling, or not controlling enough. I have been told that we aren’t asking the right question (“who are you to say what we should be talking about?”). I have been removed from my role because what I was doing was far too disruptive to the group’s culture and norms of how they work, and in enforcing the disruption, I was actually depriving people of accessing the power they needed in the work.
(See the stories from Hawaii here and here and this story from Nunavik. Being an outsider with this power is perilous work.)
So yes, the terms we use to describe dialogic spaces matter. Finding a word to describe these spaces is important, and this is an important piece of critical pedagogy for anyone teaching dialogue and facilitation.
But don’t let your work rest on the definition of the space. Understand where these spaces come from. Actively work to invite more self-organization and emergence into these spaces that are in service of life, love and liberation. Become skillful at working with boundaries and attractors, limits and invitations, constraints that enable life rather than govern outcomes, and get good at knowing what kinds of relationships and constraints are the best fit for what is needed. That is what we need as we co-create spaces of radical participation and liberation and to transform the toxic use of power and control so we get more and more skillful at inviting us all into life-affirming moments and futures.
What do you think?
Last month Caitlin and I worked with our colleague Teresa Posakony bringing an Art of Hosting workshop to a network of social services agencies and government workers working on building resilience in communities across Washington State. To prepare, we shared some research on resilience, and in the course of that literature review, I fell in love with a paper by Michael Ungar of Dalhousie University.
In Systemic resilience: principles and processes for a science of change in contexts of adversity, Ungar uncovers seven principles of resilience that transcend disciplines, systems and domains of action. He writes:
In disciplines as diverse as genetics, psychology, sociology, disaster management, public health, urban development, and environmental science, there is movement away from research on the factors that produce disease and dysfunction to analyses of capacity building, patterns of self-organization, adaption, and in the case of human psychology, underlying protective and promotive processes that contribute to the resilience of complex systems.
The same is true for my own practice and development around complex facilitation. From a resilience standpoint, my inquiry is, what are the facilitation or hosting practices that help create containers that foster resilience and capacity building?
Ungar’s principles are as follows:
- (1) resilience occurs in contexts of adversity;
- (2) resilience is a process;
- (3) there are trade-offs between systems when a system experiences resilience;
- (4) a resilient system is open, dynamic, and complex;
- (5) a resilient system promotes connectivity;
- (6) a resilient system demonstrates experimentation and learning; and
- (7) a resilient system includes diversity, redundancy, and participation.
I think it’s a moral imperative to build resilience into strategic dialogue and conversations, whether in a short hosted meeting or in a long term participatory process. Participatory work is always a chance to affirm the dignity of human beings. Furthermore, many people come into participatory processes suffering the effects of trauma, much of it hidden from view. While facilitation is not therapy, we cannot practice a “do no harm” approach if we don’t understand patterns of trauma and the way resilience strategies address the effects. Creating “safe enough” space for people to engage in challenging work is itself a resilience strategy. Do it well, and you contribute to long term capacity building in individuals and collectives.
I find these principles inspiring to my complex facilitation practice, because they help me to check designs, and make choices about the kinds of ways I intervene in the system. For example, just off the top of my head, here are some questions and insights we could use to embed our processes with more resilience, related to each principle.
Resilience occurs in contexts of adversity
- Ensure that a group struggles with its work. Don’t be afraid to overload individuals for short periods of time with cognitive tasks (evidenced by confusion, contorted faces, and fatigue). But don’t let that cognitive overload create toxic stress in the system. Your boundary is somewhere between those two points.
- Avoid premature convergence (a Dave Snowden and Sam Kaner principle). Create the conditions so that people don’t simply accept the easy answers without going through the struggle of integrating ideas and exploring emergence.
Resilience is a process
- A resilient system is constantly growing and changing and achieving new levels of capacity, and able to deal with harder and harder stresses. Build-in some adversity to every aspect of organizational life, and you will build capacity building into the organization.
- There is no “final state” of capacity that is acceptable, and so good leadership and facilitation continue to design processes that work the resilience muscle.
- Don’t undertake a “capacity-building project.” Instead, make capacity-building a collateral benefit of engaging in a participatory process.
There are trade-offs between systems when a system experiences resilience
- Watch for the way resilience begins to shift power dynamics and authority in a system. When a group can manage itself well, it requires different support from leadership and different methods of management.
- If the “operating system” of the organization in which a resilient team doesn’t keep pace with the capacity built in the team, a break can occur. Attend to these connections between the resilient parts of the system (that survive by being changed) and the robust parts of the system (that survive by being unchanged).
A resilient system is open, dynamic, and complex
- To my point in a previous post on complex facilitation, you have to work in a complex system with a complexity approach. That means eschewing tendencies to control, closed boundaries, fixed approaches and known outcomes.
- Work with the properties of containers to encourage emergence and self-organization
A resilient system promotes connectivity
- Many of the dialogic methods we use with the Art of Hosting are premised on the fact that everyone in the system is responsible for participating and that relationship is as important an outcome as productivity.
- Working with stories, shared perspectives, diverse identities, and multiple skills in the same process builds connection between people in a system. Solving problems and overcoming adversity together helps individuals become more resilient and connected to each other.
- Any process hoping to survive over time needs to have explicit attention paid to the connections between the parts in the system.
A resilient system demonstrates experimentation and learning
- The very first inquiry of the Art of Hosting community was something like “What if learning together was the new form of leadership we need now?” A good marker of a resilient team or organization is its ability to fail, recover, and learn. Many organizations say they do this. but few actually pull it off.
- Create work in which individuals enjoy solving problems and take pleasure in getting things wrong.
A resilient system includes diversity, redundancy, and participation
- A forest without these features is a tree farm. An organization with these features is a machine.
- Diverse perspectives and lived experiences present opportunities for change and development. They challenge existing ways of doing things and disrupt in helpful ways.
- Redundancy is a feature of living systems. Never be afraid to have the same conversations twice. Or three times.
- Aim for full participation in every meeting. If a person is not participating, the group cannot benefit from their knowledge, experience, or curiosity.
These are just my initial musings on Ungar’s work. They validate many of the practices and methods used in the world of participatory leadership and the Art of Hosting. They also challenge us to make braver choices to create spaces that are harder than we might want them to be so that participants can struggle together to build capacity for change. I truly believe that communities, organizations, and people that develop resilience as a by-product of their work together will be best equipped to face increasing levels of uncertainty and emergence.
Part three of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action.
3. Use a talking piece
Think about any conversation you have ever had. If it ws a good conversation, there was a purpose or a question or a topic that was compelling and interesting to the people taking part. You may have found yourself “leaning in” and listening with curiosity, offering your own stories and perspectives, finding commonalities and exploring difference. In our natural setting as human beings, conversation sis easy and a wholly natural way of exploring ideas and making sense of the world. If so you have found yourself in a dialogic container, a social structure with a centre and a boundary and all kinds of things happening inside.
So much of organizational life though runs counter to our instincts, and even when there is an important need for a conversation we can find ourselves resistant to it. The timing doesn’t work naturally, or the conditions aren’t conducive to the natural flow and participation of a good conversation. There are many times when we need to stop what we are doing and enter into a space where we can pay attention to each other. Good dialogue practice helps us to do that by creating a container which encourages speaking, listening, sense making and decision. in times of conflict or stress, a thoughtful method that allows everyone to speak and be heard is essential.
A simple method for every facilitator is using a talking piece: some item that can be passed around a room and allow the person holding it to speak while others listen. The talking piece, and its rules and rituals, structures the process and creates the container. Every facilitation tool, agenda, or set of guidelines and principles functions to structure process. Every facilitator decision functions like a talking piece. When Toke added this one to his list of “little helpers” it was with the caveat that such a tool needed to be chosen and used with great care and consciousness about how it would affect the group. As a facilitator you wield a lot of power and it’s quite difficult to strike the right balance between too much freedom, which doesn’t provide creative constraints, and too much control, that throws people into apathy. Learning how to strike the balance is a practice, which means that you get better at it the more you do it and reflect on it. There is no answer for how to strike the right balance, but here are a few principles that might be helpful.
Host the process in a way that allows the group to do the work themselves. As much as possible, stick to creating the conditions for people to do their own work. Don’t tell people what to do or what they will feel. Try not to be the person interpreting the words of participants or the overall insights of a group. Instead create good process that allows people to make contributions, listen and learn and mitigate their personal impact on a collective conversation.
When things go awry, pause and go back to the simple question: “what’s happening?” Conflict is inevitable. Things go off the rails. People get angry and hurt. The facilitator makes mistakes. Remember that when these things happen, you are not alone. You are allowed to reset, to take a breath and move to a higher level conversation about what’s happening. Early in my facilitation career I hosted a meeting which felt like pulling teeth. No one was participating, there was very little creativity and it was stifling. I made the mistake of believing that it was my job alone to fix the situation and the more I tried, the more desperate the situation became. Finally, I realized that I was not alone in the room. There were thirty other people there I could ask for help. I stopped and asked the question “what is going on?”
To my relief one of the participants said “This is not the conversation we want to have right now. You keep asking us to do work that no one is interested in.”
“What should we be working on, then?” I asked. The participants all shouted out the topic they were expecting to be discussing. And so I pivoted the conversation there and said “okay, let’s talk about that then!” and away we went. As a facilitator, you don’t have to have all the answers. If the process you have designed isn’t right, ask folks to help you get it right.
Create a container for conversation using ABIDE. A few years ago I published a paper on using Dave Snowden’s ABIDE framework to design and host dialogic containers. I have since grown to really appreciate this framework and have altered it a little to blend in some of the work from Glenda Eoyang’s CDE model from Human Systems Dynamics. I now have an acronym that neither of them created, but which is insanely useful.
ABIDE points to five things you can change in the structure of a container that will change the interactions of the participants. I would say that every good facilitator and leader working in complexity knows this. Learning this helps you to be able to shift patterns without dictating the outcomes and is an essential step for facilitator development to move beyond simply using tools. I’ll write a longer piece about this later, but here is my current version of these five important characteristics that constrain group behaviour.
- ATTRACTORS. These are things around which patterns are organized in a system: a story, a question, a powerful person, even the physical focus of attention in the room.
- BOUNDARIES: These are things that constrain a system, including physical space, time, money, and mandate Basically these are lines within which a meeting operates.
- IDENTITY: Identities are deep patterns that shape behaviour, and we often wear them unconsciously. They can be formal roles (leader, manager, administrator), archetypes (bully, victim, hero, elder, child), or social constructions rooted in norms around race, gender, class, and other distinctions.
- DIFFERENCES: Difference and sameness can flavour a conversation radically. Too much of one or the other can sap the energy from a container. Homogeniety can create massive spots of unawareness, and complete diversity can become a Tower of Babel.
- EXCHANGES: These are things that flow in a system, be it money, power, ideas, information, or knowledge.
When conversations are stuck it’s often because one of these things is creating a pattern that is unhelpful. Shifting one of these things can shift the whole process.
Be mindful of how you use constraints. Decolonize constraints as much as possible. A container in one context is an enclosure in another. This is an important consideration. In the literature on dialogue, much has been written about “containers” and it has become a technical term in the field. All human process happens within constraints, but different peoples have different experiences of what it is like to be constrained, especially by others. It is very easy to use the term “container” and have it become a colonizing concept. In Indigenous communities, containers can be conflated with the reservation system. In Ireland, the word can evoke the pain of enclosure, the legal process whereby the land was privatized and colonized by the British Crown. And yet in both these contexts, containers for life giving conversation are well understood using terms like “nest” and “hearth.” As with all tools, be mindful of where you are and how you are using it, and how your words will land.