Surfboards inside the museum at Nazaré, Portugal, all of which have ridden the biggest wave in the world.
Things I have found while surfing. Have a look at these, and maybe leave a comment about which link grabbed your attention and what you learned there.
(PS…the headlines are links! Click for more)
John Coltrane’s ideas behind “A Love Supreme.”
I adore this piece of music. I think I first heard it about 20 years after it was recorded, which was nearly 60 years ago now. It is a high form sacred music piece, as important and meaningful as anything that Bach created (it is the season of the Passions, after all) and it so perfectly captures Coltrane’s theology and perhaps every artist’s theology. This article is worth a look for how Coltrane thought about the work and the way he used form as prayer.
Imagining Yourself in Another’s Shoes vs. Extending Your Concern: Empirical and Ethical Differences
An interesting paper about the contrast between The Golden Rule and the idea and practice of what Eric Schweitzgebel calls “extension.” In the paper, Schweitzgebel writes:
“A different approach [to The Golden Rule] treats concern for nearby others as a given and as the seed from which care for more distant others might grow. If you’d care for a nearby child, so also should you care for more distant children. If you’d want something for your sister, so also should you want something similar for other women. This approach to moral expansion differs substantially from others’ shoes / Golden Rule thinking, both in its ethical shape and in its empirical implications.”
This reminds me of the Buddhist practice of Metta, and is food for thought for someone like me who places stock in The Golden Rule.
Every Dr. Johnny Fever DJ break woven into a single show.
If you were a music fan and maybe also if you were involved in radio in the 1970s and 1980s (both of which are true for me), then WKRP in Cincinnati was a must-listen to show. And you had to see the original versions, because the music they played was great but the producers couldn’t afford to syndicate it all, so in re-runs, all the original tracks are just filler tunes and not the originals.
But here is some genius. Someone has taken all of Dr. Johnny Fever’s DJ breaks and announcements and cut them into a three hour show. It contains the live audience laugh track, but it is otherwise a BRILLIANT project and elicits much loving nostalgia for me.
The Implosion of the Retirement Contract
I love a good policy discussion. I admit to being at a loss about how to address inequality and inaccessibility to basics like food, housing and education in a country that thinks of itself as “an advanced economy” and has no political party that is willing or able to make fundamental changes. But policy choices dictate the constraints that create outcomes like unaffordable good food, inaccessible housing and clipping student debt. This paper talks about an interesting underlying assumption that keep property prices high (and therefore also rents).
In nearly all liberal democracies, it is quite normal to treat “property” as “the ideal retirement asset for homeowners, with high house price growth helping downsizers release cash to fund their golden years.”
The Cluetrain Manifesto was a gamechanger for the early web. Those of us that were blogging back at the beginning of the century all knew about it and if your work extended into the organizational world, reading Cluetrain just laid bare how poorly prepared your company or agency or government was to deal with the oncoming onslaught of conversation, creation and disruption to the ways communications, marketing and organizations worked. Cluetrain is 25 years old now and it’s interesting to think about what is different now. Community is largely gone, for one thing.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ritual
Ted Gioia should be a must-read on everyone’s list. He writes on music and culture, and everything he says is thoughtful, skillfully economical, and insightful. He points you to pieces of music you would have never found. He provides takes on culture that you aren’t going to get anywhere else. This piece is so insightful about what it takes to live with boundaries that make our lives meaningful in an era where our attention has been nearly completely colonized.
The Origin of Last Summer’s Maui Wildfire
It’s hard to overstate the impact of the fire that destroyed Lahaina on Maui last summer. Having been there in February and witnessed the destruction myself, it is profoundly sad. To make matters worse, the fires ripped open a wound on Maui that private interests have rushed in to heal. The community is now in serious danger of being lost to outside owners and investment companies who have predatory designs on the land and property that was destroyed by the fire. Locals are in danger of forever losing their home places because there is no public support that can compete with what the wealthy interests are offering. It’s a shit show. In this article, Cliff Mass undertakes an analysis of the causes of the wildfire.
Raise energy and reduce ‘meeting fatigue’ by making meetings optional
My mate Mark McKergow has a research-supported idea for lowering cognitive fatigue for online meetings. It’s simple enough, but it requires managers to let go of control and let the work speak for itself. And it requires organizations to loosen up on the samara of accountability culture that is killing many of the workplaces I am working with.
Evaluation is one of those things that become a massively problematic constraint on a project if one doesn’t understand it, or worse, fears it. My friend Ciaran Camman is offering his course on Evaluation called “Weaving it In” and you should go to that. To get ready for that though, let this whimsical discussion whet your palate.
Back in the late 1990s, when Toke Møller and Monica Nissen were mentoring a group of Kaos Pilot students, they went to visit Dee Hock in California to learn about his ideas of the chaordic organization and the chaordic lenses that help organizations stay focused on a minimal necessary structure that allows for coherence and emergence. It was a useful contribution to the budding set of participatory leadership practices that were emerging amongst the early Art of Hosting developers.
After that, Dee Hock’s chaordic lenses got expanded a little and became the “Chaordic Stepping Stones” which we have developed further in the Art of Hosting community, so-called because they slow down the planning conversation and allow one to find secure places to stand in the flow and swirl of planning in complexity. The stepping stones give you places to rest and look around with a little bit of intention and provide you and the people you are working with with a set of conversations that help to make some decisions/ I’ve often described it as a project management tool for the times when “you don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t know where you’re going.”
One of the things that distinguishes it from other planning processes is that we don’t start from vision or purpose; instead, we start from a sense of the current moment, what was called the need, and what I now call “the necessity.” Naming this is critical because current conditions limit what is possible. Too often, strategic planning starts with aspirations, which can either be so abstract that they are useless for guiding concrete action and decisions, or they are aspirations without paying attention to whether it is even possible to move from here to there.
Necessity is embedded in the present moment. When someone feels like “we have to do something,” they are responding to something in the present moment. It is always the first conversation I have with a client: what is happening right now that compels us to do something? In this sense, necessity is truly the mother of intention – a phrase that came to me this morning and is too good not to comment on. Intention – what we mean to do, what we think should happen, and what we want to commit to, provides the affordances that make a purpose concrete and avoids the aspirational aspect of purpose statements that avoid the reality of the situation and take us into a process that is too vague and diffuse to be effective.
PS: I have an online course on chaordic design you can take on-demand that goes into this planning tool in more detail.
Someone asked me the other day about how to use constraints in facilitation and I thought I’d jot some quick thoughts down here.
Let’s start using terms from Cynefin. Group work falls on a scale between ordered tasks and unordered tasks (or complicated and complex). The first question I ask myself in designing a container for facilitation is, “how much emergence is desired in this field?” In most of my work, I’m working in highly emergent situations, but for folks working around issues like safety or legal issues, there may be a prescribed outcome that the group needs to work towards. And of course, there is a mix along the way, and a lot of work happens in the liminal spaces between these two kinds of work.
If the purpose of the gathering is emergence, then you use enabling constraints to create the conditions for emergent outcomes. If the purpose of the gathering is a fixed goal or target, then you use governing constraints to discourage emergence.
All group work is constrained. In other words it is not possible for “anything” to happen in a group, and every choice we make with the power we have has hosts/facilitatiors or leaders in a situation constrains the work. It behooves us to make ethical decisions about the constraints we use to structure group work. NOT thinking about these constraints, or not thinking enough about them, can result in a fatal lack of awareness. We can end up over-or under-structuring a meeting such that unintended consequences become quickly catastrophic to the purpose of the gathering.
What do constraints look like? Here’s a short set of lists of the thing facilitators typically make choices about when they are setting the conditions for a container.
Connections
- Who are the people in the room and how do we connect them together? How do we break or lessen connections? How can we diversify connections?
- What information, resources or artifacts are important to connect to people and the purpose of the work? What do folks need to know to participate well?
- How much should folks in the gathering be connected to the outside world? How deeply do they need to be connected inside the gathering?
Exchanges
- What are the ways in which we will share information in the gathering? Stories, data, opinions, interests, facts, dreams, experiences?
- How does power work in this space? Who has it and who does not? What do we need to do to work with it well?
- What is the nature of exchanges in the system? Collaborative, learning, debate, confrontation and conflict, appreciative, critical, supportive, dismissive?
- Which media will enable exchanges in the space? Writing, drawing, body movement, song, play, reflection…
Attractors
- What purpose is at the centre of the work?
- What questions will we use to guide conversations? How open or close are those questions?
- Do we need a single focus for the meeting or the conversation, or is this a space for multiple foci? How will we enable those conversations to happen?
- What hidden attractors are in the room that may cause the group to self-organize in unhelpful ways? These are things like status, privilege, history and so on that form powerful centres around which people will make choices about their participation. Left unspoken, these attractors are powerful dark constraints in the system that can produce surprising results.
Boundaries
- What are the time and space requirements that limit our work, for the meeting as a whole and for specific parts of it?
- Who is in and who is out, and how do we make that determination?
- What are the barriers to participation, and how are they helpful or hindering?
- What topics are allowed or not allowed to be raised?
- What personal and social boundaries need to be created or maintained or dissolved?
- What safety needs have to be met for physical, emotional and psychological safety? How do we create the conditions for resilience in the container if people are required to stretch themselves away from their comfort zone or into a space that starts to feel challenging to them?
Where there are degrees of complexity or emergence in the container in which you are working (which is a lot of the time for most of us), your initial design choices will inevitably adopt and evolve over the course of the meeting. Each of these constraints is emergent and while we can start with choices, changes to those choices come fast and think. Sometimes you need to tighten a constraint by, for example, shortening the amount of time needed for an activity. Other times you need to break up groups that are falling into premature convergence together and perhaps getting “too cliquey” for the work at hand. In other cases, what looks like a “clique” is actually a group taking responsibility for its own safety, and in fact, you shouldn’t break it up.
There is so much more to say on all of this, but by way of tying the notion of my four kinds of constraints to facilitation, does that provide some clarity?
About HOW to do that? Consult my post on some of the basic competencies one needs to develop to work with complex facilitation. It ain’t easy.
A few months ago, I was immersed in teaching complexity within the framework of the Art of Participatory Leadership program (AoPL). Essentially, AoPL is the application of the Art of Hosting within leadership contexts, extending beyond traditional facilitation and hosting scenarios. With a strong emphasis on personal practice and the use of complexity tools, AoPL encourages a deeper exploration of the connections between the Four Fold Practice, complexity, and dialogic containers – topics I’d previously addressed in my chapter for the book ‘Dialogic Organizational Development‘. My recent revisit to these subjects has sparked fresh insights.
In one of these sessions, a spontaneous thought emerged: “Leadership is all about managing interactions to get results.” This notion, inspired by Dave Snowden’s idea that culture is the product of interactions within a system, made me reflect upon the history of my own fascination with containers.
Throughout my life, I’ve found myself drawn to the concept of containers, primarily, I believe, due to an aversion to controlling interactions between people. This leaning was what initially attracted me to open space technology as an empowering meeting process. It didn’t dictate how people were going to interact, but instead provided conditions conducive to fruitful and creative connections. It left agency with the participants rather than centralizing control with the facilitator – something I’ve always preferred to avoid. Open Space is built on the ideas of self-organization and is therefore a natural method to use in complex environments, to invite groups to organize around important conversations and ideas for which they have the energy and agency to host.
This interest in open space led me to the realm of complexity science and various writings on self-organization, including work on networks, emergence, and community organizing. These concepts strive to vest power in the hands of those actively involved in the work, a principle that resonated deeply with me and steered me towards anthro-complexity and the application of complexity science to human systems.
It was in this field that I discovered William Isaacs’s seminal book on dialogue. Isaacs was among the first to describe the dialogic container in the context of organizational life. This deepened my interest in the topic, leading to my connection with Gervase Bushe in the early 2010s. Our collaboration eventually resulted in an invitation to contribute a chapter to the book he was editing with Bob Marshak, a key text in introducing dialogic organizational development to the world.
Interactions, containers, patterns, and emergent outcomes are all characteristics of complex systems. Both Snowden and Glenda Eoyang offer valuable, and different, insights into how constraints create conditions for emergence. However, the lesson that resonates most with me is the idea that, in complex situations, we can only work with the constraints to increase our chances of creating beneficial patterns.
This approach to working with containers and constraints can be challenging and risks verging into manipulation, especially when massive amounts of power and data are involved, such as in large social media companies. There is an ethical imperative to maintain transparency when working with constraints, a principle fundamental to this work.
In my chapter for Bob and Gervase’s book, I discussed the Four Fold Practice as a guiding framework. It helps leaders focus on four key patterns that make conversations meaningful, while also nurturing an environment that fosters the emergence of these patterns.
This practice grew from the observation that presence, participation, hosting, and co-creation are essential elements of meaningful, productive conversations. Importantly, these patterns should not be imposed but rather fostered through well-crafted containers.
Rather than dictating “be present now!”, we can shape spaces where presence naturally occurs and feels appreciated. Instead of compelling participation, we aim to cultivate processes that promote deep engagement through authentic and impactful invitations.
The same principles apply to hosting and co-creation. We shouldn’t impose facilitation roles onto individuals; instead, we should craft environments in which people comfortably host each other on various scales – from open-space, world café, circle to intimate one-on-one interactions.
Similarly, forcing people into co-creation isn’t the right approach. Instead, we must provide them with the necessary tools, conditions, constraints, and challenges to stimulate collaborative creation and achieve desired outcomes.
I strive to uphold these principles from the Four Fold Practice in every facilitation – to create conditions where the patterns of presence, participation, hosting, and co-creation naturally emerge.
This exploration into the realm of leadership, complexity, and dialogic containers has been a journey of discovery, reflection, and evolution. My fascination with containers and how they impact interactions, outcomes, and ultimately culture within a system continues to grow.
The intersection of complexity and leadership in the context of dialogic containers is a rich tapestry of insights and practices that can greatly enhance our effectiveness as leaders, facilitators, and change-makers. The journey is ongoing, and the learning never stops.
How do these reflections resonate with you? I’m thinking of writing more on the idea of containers, and would welcome your thoughts and questions about the topic.
Four things conspiring here today.
- I had lunch with a friend/student, and we had a long conversation about what it means to “hold space.”
- This post from Michelle Holliday in which she finds herself Rethinking Self-Organization.
- Working with Cynthia Kurtz, who published Confluence a couple of years ago, which is a framework that helps create a thinking space for the intersections of organization and self-organization.
- Getting ready to teach our next cohort of Complexity From the Inside Out.
So before you dive into this post, go play Horde of the Flies at Complexity Explorables. Play with the sliders. Find a way to lock all the dots in one super stable state. Find a way to ensure endless randomness. Find a way to have the dots self-organize such that patterns emerge, persist for a while, and then change. Play with trying to control the system. See if you can get desired results.
Now, what’s going on here?
There is a relationship between organization and self-organization. Systems self-organize within constraints. Without constraints, anything is possible, which makes it far more likely that complete nonsense will occur, utter chaos. But with too many constraints in a system, nothing will emerge, and the system will be locked into one steady and stable pattern with no possibility for emergence, adaptation or evolution.
This intersection between organization (the deliberate application of constraints) and self-organization (what happens inside a constrained space) is really the whole world in which facilitation and leadership play. It is the world of complexity. As Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz wrote with a nod to Alicia Juarerro in “The New Dynamics of Strategy” back in 2003:
Humans are not limited to acting in accordance with predetermined rules. We are able to impose structure on our interactions (or disrupt it) as a result of collective agreement or individual acts of free will. We are capable of shifting a system from complexity to order and maintaining it there in such a way that it becomes predictable. As a result, questions of intentionality play a large role in human patterns of complexity.
Kurtz, C & Snowden, D (2003) “The New Dynamics of Strategy: sense making in a complex-complicated world” in IBM Systems Journal Volume 42 Number 3 pp 462-483
This remains one of the critical insights about anthro-complexity that is the basis for how I look at facilitation and leadership.
Practically speaking, the implication here is clear. Anyone working with a group will find themselves creating a temporary space inside of which some degree of self-organization will take place and outside of which one’s influence is limited. The job is to manage the constraints in the system, which means primarily creating a container formed of boundaries and catalyzing attractors, which creates a context for connections and exchanges between people inside the container. Once the container is set, one monitors it and, if possible, works with the constraints to take what is happening in a positive direction of travel.
THIS IS A PERILOUS UNDERTAKING. It is fraught with power dynamics, ethical questions, moral quandaries, conflicting value judgements, surprising results and crushing failures. There is always a chance that people will have a peak experience of their life, and it’s also possible that someone will experience traumatic and lasting harm. Along the way, you might even get good work done, if the existential crisis doesn’t eat you first. If you think leadership (or facilitation, parenting, or being a citizen) is easy, you haven’t lived.
Many of us get into facilitation because we want to help create a better world. Creating the conditions for good creative work, productive dialogue, and good relations is one way that can happen. The shadow side of this is that we often get VERY attached to what happens in the containers we create. More attached than we think we are. We want things to go well, we want people to be safe, we want a good outcome, and we want every voice to matter and for people to exercise their power and leadership. We cannot guarantee any of those things, let alone that any of them will go the way we want. Too often, facilitation and leadership situations fail on the reefs of good intentions. Things grow very controlling and prescriptive. And yet…
And yet, the work of holding space is not a flakey woo-woo concept. Holding space means two things. First, it is about creating and holding a boundary, or as Dave Snowden famously puts it when describing the complexity approach to hosting a children’s birthday party: “We draw a line in the sand known as a boundary…and we say to the children ‘cross that you little bastards and you die.'”
Second, it is about creating probes inside this container that influence how people behave inside it. When it appears that one of the probes has become a beneficial attractor, we find ways to stabilize it. And when one starts producing non-beneficial behaviours, we destroy it right away because emergence and self-organization can make bad things worse, and as any parent or gardener knows, you need to learn to nip things in the bud.
That’s what facilitation is. And it’s a lifelong practice where you will get that balance wrong a lot of the time. In fact, I would say that MOST of the time, I get it “wrong” because no matter where you start, as soon as the people enter the room, shit gets real, as the kids say. It’s all about how one adjusts to the situation. Hence, you need to build flexibility and adaptability into the process design, and keep a careful watch on what is going on, both in the container around you and in the container inside you, because THAT one is often the one that creates the most trouble.
Buy and read Cynthia’s book if you want a guided tour through the very deepest implications of this simple intersection of organization and self-organization. I’m going to bring the essence of her ideas into this upcoming cohort of Complexity Inside and Out because I think it really helps us explain the terrain upon which leadership, management, facilitation and coaching all take place. And I think it also presents an honest take on facilitation and leadership and how those roles are related to issues of control, constraint, creativity, emergence and self-organization.