A really good post from Chris Mowles that talks about how we seek to outsource our discomfort with uncertainty to an algorithm or a method or a process.
Why is it so scary that unexpected things might happen when we get together to try and achieve something, unless we have things all planned out? Where is the room for the spontaneous, the novel and the eccentric?
Two contrasting recent events have made me think about the technologies that we apply to meeting together, that aspire to create what my late colleague Doug Griffin used to refer to as the doubling of process: feeling that we need a process in order to have a process. The aim is often to make meetings more ‘effective and efficient’, to make maximum use of our precious time together, but perhaps also to render them friction-free and more predictable. For me this is the same kind of instrumentalised thinking that informs AI.
I agree with him wholeheartedly. This is an important challenge to practitioners who find themselves designing interventions. I don't think we need people who are better at their "tools." I think there are other capacities and capabilities practitioners need to develop as they host interventions and work with change. How about you? What do you think?
I’m writing about dialogic containers these days. They are tricky to describe, and in the same way that Mike asserts a sophisticated understanding of systems, it’s important to find helpful metaphor for a dialogic container. As facilitators we are used to using the world “container” to describe something that we can sense, feel or even physically see. The term does not convey the nature of an actual thing, but if you ask people what they mean by container you find yourself in a metaphorical world. And also, it feels like a finger pointing at the moon. Dialogic containers are important to dialogic organizational development. In the Dialogic Organization Development book there are several metaphors employed by several of my co-authors to describe containers. What I’m finding is that we commonly refer to containers in four distinct ways…
Some good links on complexity
Roope Kaaronen’s: The Ecology of Design. A nice introduction to path dependancy, affordances and ecological psychology.
Alicia Juarrero being interviewed by Jim Hutt on her book Context Changes Everything and on how constraints create possibility landscape and constraint regimes.
The Vampire Problem is a thought experiment that demonstrates why it is so hard to act in uncertainty. Maria Popova does her usual brilliant job of unpacking it.
Martina Dimopoulou takes over then Cynefin blog with a fabulous post on salience and how we notice the world and the weak signals within it.
Brian Ponch Rivera takes a deep dive into John Boyd’s development of his thinking behind the OODA loop. It’s an interesting exposition of how a curious learner assembles a framework over time and worth a read for that reason, even if you know nothing about OODA.
Other good things to read and listen to.
The elephant in the room is a subject that never gets old. Cheyenne Coxon talks about how and why to make friends with the pachyderm: “The elephant affects everyone in the room, even if they’re not directly involved in the situation. After a certain point it all becomes so distracting and ridiculous to pretend and navigate around it that something has to give. There’s no real telling on the timeline there, but it becomes a volatile situation that ramps up everyone’s anxiety as they wait for an impending fallout. It actually takes a lot of energy to pretend something is fine when it’s not, and the dissonance it creates in our bodies is an insidious source of stress and poor health for people and organizations.”
Part Two continues the exploration with some reflections on living with the elephant, finding friends and when it’s time to leave the elephant enclosure.
Weak signals from the “breathing grounds.” That term is used by Ramon Kataquapit to describe the precious James Bay Lowlands, a bleak region of estuary and peat lands that ring the southern end of James Bay. It’s Ramon’s backyard and what he says as a youth leader about the future of these lowlands is a weak signal about the dangers of our current federal government’s major projects initiative.
A segment on CBC’s The Current about a new reality show on Netflix based on the Stanford Prison Experiment. I won’t be watching the show. But the segment today had an interview with psychology researcher Jay Van Bevel in which he shares some interesting insights that are relèvent to my triangle tool for understanding dialogic containers. Leadership matters, not just authority or design.
We don’t actually “host emergence.” We host interactions and work with constraints that change what is possible. In human systems, interpretation matters too: how people, including facilitators, make sense of what is happening changes what happens next.
I work with lots of organizations in transition, and always have done. Specifically organizations who leadership is leaving, often representing a transition from a founder to the next generation. These situations are fraught with new and unexpected emotions, states, and situations. The folks that remain find themselves relying on stuff that was invisible before the transition but which is missed now. It is a time when movement forward needs to be slow and deliberate.
Today I read a lovely and heart-filled post from Jasmine Williams at the Interaction Institute for Social Change describing this moment. It's a moment of aporia – "being at a loss" – and a moment which demands that a group and individuals be in a different way. Jasmine writes about the practices she is relying on in these moments including ,
**What's for us will find us
**This is one of those affirmations, mantras, that I keep on a sticky note attached to my computer. It’s a grounding reminder to myself that we will move through this in the way we were supposed to. Whether you believe in fate or some grand design or not, I believe there’s wisdom to be found in returning to a foundational trust in the winding path that leads to the abundant future (however different that future may be from current expectations).
A side benefit of rooting in this reminder is that it’s allowed me to hold on more gently and leave space for the emergent, unexpected, and confronting. How freeing it can be to release the tight hold on an outcome when you trust it will be the right one, reached at the right time, by the right people!
There is an art to this kind of waiting-to-be-found. It requires sensitivity and awareness. It requires quieting and emptying so that one is available to be found. And it also requires slow movement and lots of scanning for possibilities. If what is needed hasn't revealed itself yet, it's a sign to slow down. It will come. I love that these virtual friends are being so transparent with what they are practicing.