I parked my car this morning in the village and walked down to my favourite coffee place for an espresso. Every one of the three conversations I overheard was about people discussing the pros and cons of ChatGPT. Pros seem to be that “it helped me to know what to ask for when I talked to my car insurance company” and cons are mostly “how do we know that any of this is real?” More seriously I’m sitting near folks who work in the arts and the looks on their faces are of the deepest concern. They use it. For ideas, for a writing prompt, but the times they have used it to write dialogue, they can spot how crappy it is. At the moment.
My earliest post about was Google was from 2002 when it was an insanely useful tool for searching the web. “Google cooking” was a simple game where one entered in a list of ingredients and it returned a list recipes. It was novel at the time. Great for weeknight dinners. Another game was called “Googlewhack” whereby one would try to construct a two word search term that resulted in only one result. You can’t play that one anymore.
The complete enshittification of search engines, combined with web content that has been generated by robots in order to sell stuff is increasing turning web-search an absolutely useless activity. I just use my search engine (DuckDuckGo) as a collection of bookmarks now. It is hard to do any meaningful research anymore, and so we turn to ChatGPT for answers. And ChatGPT is out there learning the questions we ask. Something sits weird with me when I think about how while Google learned the answers we like, and AI is learning the questions we ask.
The questions are important, as is the way we ask them and to whom we ask them. Sonja today writes about the questions that help us discern a direction, which is different from finding a way. Sometimes we don’t even know what the direction is although we can discern that wherever we are right now, somewhere else is better. Thinking about that and talking about it together is an essential human capacity and it’s a pretty fundamental part of how we work with teams facing complexity. There is an art to asking to right kinds of questions and thinking about them together that reveals a deeper level at which affordances and opportunities might exist. Sometimes getting unstuck means drilling down and not reaching out.
Collaborative outcomes are emergent properties of discrete human systems of encounter and meaning-making – “dialogic containers” I call them. If you are a leader seeking a course of action, you might get some good ideas by submitting notes and documents and harvests into a large language model to suggest possibilities. In fact, you could even have your team members do that on their own and bring the output to a meeting to talk about what they have found. My hypothesis is if you continue to do that without involving humans you will end up with an endless set of ideas and possibilities, but you will miss the co-creationi and co-ownership that makes sustained effort possible in a particular direction. I can’t yet see how large language models can surface a consensus that will inspire collaborative action. Deep meaning and commitment to one another is produced by the people within the container who discover something between them that is worth trying, worth pursuing together. Calls to action are far less sustainable than co-creation of a direction. Even if, and perhaps especially if, such a direction is deeply flawed to begin with. There is nothing better than failing together and then finding a way forward to build cohesion.
I might be wrong in the future but in this moment, systems-complexity and anthro-complexity are different and humans experience emergence differently from mechanical systems, even those that are capable of learning. Dialogue practitioners base their practice on this idea; that no matter how great the ideas are, nothing gets sustained in human systems without the intangibles of co-ownership, meaningful engagement, and dare I say, at some level, love.
Detail from a quilt designed and made by the St. Andrews Anglican Church Women Quilter’s Guild. The quilt was made in 1967 in honour of Canada’s centennial year. Keen eyed observers will notice patterns in here that relate to that celebration. The quilt was on display at the Bowen Island Public Library earlier this year, on loan from Joyce Ganong whose mother, Isabel Faulks, was one of the quilters.
Another reflection from the Complexity Inside and Out course we taught yesterday…
Caitlin led us in a check in process that was about slowing down out seeing. Here’s a variation. Try it!
- Pick a view where there is some distance – looking out a window is best. If this is a familiar view, all the better.
- Notice the scene out there. Notice the colours, the landscape, the patterns. Notice movement and stillness. If the scene is familiar, look at what you know.
- You can close your eyes and remember what you see. How does that scene conjure itself up in your mind’s eye?
- Now open your eyes and look again at the scene. Try to notice something you’ve never noticed before or something that you’ve forgotten, or a change to the scene that you hadn’t noticed until now.
- Describe the scene now. Write down obersvations about what you see. What is the overall colour palette? What are the lines you see, of trees or buildings, horizon and sky. If you saw this scene in a flash, how would you recognize it?
You can add different variations to this exercise, but the point is to notice how we see things as patterns. Our mind conjures up a scene of large blocks in it and details aren’t always apparent. Sometimes we have to see things with new eyes, or a naive perspective.
I reflected yesterday that I was once walking through the forest here on my home island, following a path to the village with my brother who was visiting from Toronto. Bowen Island is very different from Toronto. He stopped us next to a very large Douglas-fir tree and said “Look at that! It’s huge!”
All the trees around here are huge, especially if you aren’t familiar with the forest. But I looked again at this tree – one I passed hundreds of times to and from the village – and noticed that it was actually an old growth tree. How could I tell? The pattern of bark is different, the branches are thicker and more gnarly and look like the trunks of younger trees. My brother’s eyes found anomalies in the pattern I had formed of my home forest, and I used my own pattern recognition skills to identify why the tree he spotted was an anomaly.
This, it turns out is an excellent thing to do when you are looking for other patterns in familiar contexts, like your business market or your team culture or the school system you work in or the services you offer to community. Be careful not to assume that the patterns you can see is the sum total of the reality available to you.
This isn’t new. But you can never over-practice awareness.
There is a neat game called Geoguesser that is based on the Google Street View database. You download the app and get started and it throws up an image from somewhere in the world and you have two minutes to guess where it is. The closer you get to the actual spot, the more points you get.
You’re not supposed to cheat by using Google maps to look up land marks. It entirely depends on the pattern recognition that you bring to the game. What language is that on the side of a truck? What does that street sign say? What kind of palm trees are these? Is that dirt road red or dark brown? Is that a white ring around the power pole?
Really good players of this game have thousands of details stored meaning that they can discern the location using macro clues first, and then narrow things down with decision trees, like how the shadows are cast, entire websites have sprung up devoted to these pattern markers that help people quickly identify the location. There are competitions culminating in the GeoGuesser World Championship. You can watch these competitions live. They are amazing.
And the kind if undisputed champion of this game is rainbolt, a man full of so many patterns, that his guesses are almost always pinpoint accurate.
Watch him host five great players finding obscure locations. They are engaged in constant pattern finding. It’s kind of amazing and it’s very cool to have them articulate the way they are seeing these landscapes. Specific knowledge helps them make generalizations and they connect what they know and use abductive reasoning to guess the location.
Back when I first experienced Open Space Technology, at a conference in 1995, the thing that immediately caught my attention about the process was how it was a perfect, simple set of constraints to enable self-organization. It sent me down a rabbit hole of learning about self-organization and complexity and I became captivated with the patterns I saw around me, and specifically with dissipative structures.
Ilya Prigogine coined the term dissipative structure. In layperson’s terms it refers to a structure that persists in time despite its components constantly changing. The classic example is a whirlpool. When you pull the plug on a bathtub full of water, the water forms a whirlpool as it head down the drain. The whirlpool is an emergent structure and a pattern that persists over time, held in place by constraints such as gravity, the size of the drain hole, and way bigger forces like air pressure and where you are on the planet.
If you just look at molecules of water, you would have no idea that they could form a whirlpool. The water molecules that drain out of your bathtub all participate temporarily in forming the whirlpool but none of them initiate it. When they leave, they have no memory that they were in it. You cannot take a random water molecule and discover whether it has ever gone down a drain. And yet, the pattern persists and is real. What gets dissipated is the energy and matter that travels through the structure.
In human systems, we see related kinds of structures everywhere too. Learning about these kinds of patterns, which I did initially through Fritjof Capra’s book The Web of Life, made me seek out analogues around me. The pattern of “dissipating structure” was interesting, and because I had focussed extensively on culture in my undergraduate studies, I finally had a useful way of looking at cultures and how they seemed to exhibit both stability and constant change. People, energy and material flow through the culture but they are entrained to behave in a larger scale structure that has some persistence, but which is also sensitive to changing. This was how I ended up coming to complexity theory, through my exploration of these ideas.
Cultures are not dissipative structures in the technical sense that Prigogine describes, and there seems to have been quite a bit of controversy over the years about whether social structures qualify as thermodynamic structures. Because I’m not a physicist I will say they are not, but this idea makes a good metaphor and helps me to explain how we work with emergent structures and persistent patterns in organizational and community life.
Seeing this pattern led me into the margins of participatory leadership work, facilitation, and ultimately dialogical organizational development. These ways of working were all concerned with creating the kinds of containers that enable emergent meaning. Sometimes these containers are temporary, like meetings, and sometimes they are persistent, like organizations, teams and communities. If you’ve ever tried to change an organizations culture you’ll recognize that it is very much like sticking your hand in a whirlpool. You’ll get some temporary disruption, but unless you change the enabling constraints, the whirlpool will reestablish itself the moment you stop interfering.
I think it was 1986-87 academic year that I truly fell in love with the idea of culture. That was the year I began my BA in Indigenous Studies at Trent University and it was during a time when Indigenous cultures in Canada were going through a generational resurgence after recovering from 100 years of state-sponsored cultural, physical and intellectual extinction. I was able to be a witness to communities and organizations recovering by growing deep into traditional practices, and younger generations receiving the teaching of Elders and using them to create new political movements, organizations, economies, governments, and health and well being in their communities. I loved the idea of culture as the ground for this work and loved watching people work with it, and indeed being a part of cultural shifts and and catalysis. Culture was like magic. It appeared bigger than all of us, it shifted and changed and it enabled things to happen. Or not.
I so fell in love with culture that I did an honours thesis in my fifth year that compared two national Indigenous organizations in their attempts to root their operations and structures in traditional cultures. One did it by using artifacts and trappings and firm structures that ended in arguments about orthodoxies and heartbreak, and the other did it by creating a relational, caring, and connected context in which a unique but thoroughly Indigenous way of being emerged.
So early on I learned that culture is emergent, that it transcends individuals and specific artifacts and practices, that it is a context that shapes relationships and behaviours and that it is the product of relationships and interactions over time. Norms of behaviour can’t be dictated, they can only arise.
Since then I would say that the heart of my work with organizations and communities has been working with culture. The sources of joy and the sources of pain are the multiples contexts in which we live our lives. I’ve worked in one-off settings and multi-year large scale systemic settings. I’ve worked with large teams and with little groups of change-makers. And we’ve tried it all, from magic methods to the “this will finally solve it” conference, to multi-year narrative sense-making projects. I’ve spent decades surfing the rise and fall of supporter culture around the soccer teams I’ve been a part of. I’ve spent nearly 25 years living on an island with its own unique slant on the world, creating social enterprises, supporting community economic development and making community through music and play.
About a year ago on the Art of Hosting Facebook group someone asked about changing culture in a very large organization and which methods are best. For some reason that post appeared in the feed that I rarely check, and I responded to it. But because I’m never going to send you to Facebook, I thought I would catch this sketchy set of insights and share them here. This is a back of the napkin kind of list, but these are truths that I will no longer doubt in my work with organizations and communities. So here’s what I’ve learned about “culture change.”
- It takes years.
- Your work will be non-linear and unpredictable.
- All states are temporary.
- If it is necessary for senior leaders champion and support change work, it will only be sustained as long as they don’t succumb to their anxiety and fear of uncertainty and unpredictability.
- You cannot change culture directly, but you can work to change the way people interact with one another and see what kind of culture emerges as a result.
- Learning together is often a good way to approach many different strategic and cultural issues in an oblique and open way.
- If change of any kind in the organization or sector is predicated on the people needing to transform and be different then you are colonizing people. Don’t do that.
- Whatever you think is happening is only ever a part of the full picture.
- Whatever you think you have accomplished is only ever a piece of what you have actually done.
- It will never go according to plan.
Context changes everything. This used to be a forest.
Alicia Juarrero is the source of so much great thinking on the role of constraints in complex systems. Her two books, Dynamics In Action and Context Changes Everything are brilliant discussions of the role of intention and how constraints shape complex phenomena. They are philosophical texts, and so are slow reads, but well worth the effort. You can find many videos of her sharing her insights on You Tube and elsewhere. She is generous with her time and enthusiastic about her work.
Last week I sat in on a seminar she gave for The Prometheus Project. I expect the video will be up on their “Past Voices” page soon. Here are a few thoughts that struck me from that session.
Dr. Juarrero’s work has been deeply concerned with how intention works as a constraint on action in complex systems. Her thinking underpins much of the way I have learned to think about complexity through Dave Snowden’s work, and most of us who are not philosophers have likely come to her work through Dave.
She used a term in the seminar which I have overlooked in her writings to described stable or coherent phenomena in complex systems: a “constraint regime.” Constraint regimes are phenomena which display coherence even in a dynamic and changing system. Disspative structures like whirlpools are good examples. There is a higher level order imposed on all the water molecules that enter the constraint regime of a whirlpool and they are entrained into becoming a part of that shape. There is nothing inherent about the shape of a water molecule that determines that it would eventually become a part of a whirlpool. This high level order is imposed by constraints on the system that cause the molecules to create a whirlpool shape until they flow through the constraint regime and down the drain. The whirlpool maintains a stable presence until all the water is gone, despite the parts of the system being in constant exchange. Watch some videos of laminar flow to see this stability in astonishing clarity.
This is not a new observation, but Dr. Juarrero’s contributions to this field place the influence of context on constraint regimes into the order of causes for behaviour in a complex system, which bucks the general trend in sciences that only forces between external bodies can cause action. Constraints create coherence in complex systems. Coherence can also look like identity. We are different people in different places. I’ve often used the example that, when gathered with our families, we are very different people than when we are in a business setting or a social setting with friends. There are actions available to us in one context that are not available in another. So context changes everything.
My own work with dialogic containers seeks to understand these phenomena as essentially constrain regimes that emerge out of encounters between people who are making meaning together. When those containers become stable over time – such as in a family for example – they can create dynamics in which our behaviour is highly path dependant, and the paths on which it depends can include the neurological pathways that are activated when we are in a particular context. What we are learning about the neurology of trauma and epigenetics confirms this. Our brain is wired by trauma and influenced by its interactions with environments to produce an identity that has a particular coherence, if not static stability, in particular contexts. When my father was alive and I was in his presence, I was the son of a father, in a relationship that grew and changed over time but had a certain stability. When my father died, I found myself at a loss as the son as a father. Who am I now? And who am I in a teaching environment, singing in a choir, sitting on my own, in the supporter section of my football team? All of these are different containers – constraint regimes – and when we are meaning-making in these places with others I call those dialogic containers.
I like the idea of constrain regimes to describe the class of structures that impart top down causality on a complex system. Dialogic containers are one kind of constrain regime.
In the seminar last week Dr. Juarrero talked about how we make change in complex systems by working with constraints. She had a few great answers to questions about working with constraints. She avoided going down the rabbit hole of working with a definition of complexity, because there simply isn’t one that works all the time, but she did say that the way to work with emergence is through FEEL. We feel when something isn’t right or needs changing and we take action on what feels better. Her pithy advice for leaders is helpful: if things are stable you need to stay in the centre and maintain stability with fail-safe processes. But fail-safe process DO fail, and when they do it is a catastrophic failure, as Dave Snowden says. So when things grow turbulent and more complex (or indeed chaotic) you need to move to the edges and manage in a safe-to-fail way from there, looking for what is coming, working from principles rather than procedures, and attending to the uncertainty. Leadership is context dependant. This is the great lesson of Cynefin as well.
Dr. Juarrero addressed the urge to map systems and try to understand root causes. When presented with a systems diagram – a picture of nodes connected by arrows – she said that such diagrams have some very limited usefulness but they have to be actively interrogated with questions such as:
- What is in the white space in which the diagram is situated?
- What is NOT mapped?
- What is the nature of any given connection between the nodes?
- What are the nodes? Do they change? How?
- Is everything I am looking at stable?
Such diagrams also have a very short time limit. Try mapping the traffic on the street in front of you, or a given moment in a soccer game and then drawing certain conclusions from that.
The advice for dealing with turbulence in stability is to develop relational safe-to-fail practice into your system. That makes you better equipped to sense and notice what is happening in the context that surrounds you. The context is so important to the system in which you are working. If things are collapsing inside your system, but the context is stable, you might bring stability to your system from the high order. For example, emergency response relies on stable and predictable interventions being imposed from outside the place of immediate collapse. If your system is stable and the context is unstable, you may find yourself losing your stability quickly and in surprising ways. The fall of the Assad government this week is an example of that. No amount of order and control could overcome the contextual turbulence that caused his family’s regime to fall. Establishing institutional order in Syria is now the challenge facing that country and the region as a whole, because instability exists at nearly every scale in the Middle East at the moment.
If you are working in a stable system that is embedded in a stable context, making change is going to be very hard. Change needs to proceed along the vectors of rule and policy making. Financial systems are an example of this. A chartered bank in Canada operating inside of a well regulated legislative regime, which itself is embedded within a global financial order is essential for the stable smooth functioning of financial systems. Making changes to that system are very difficult and they are highly ordered. Catastrophic change is held at bay by this incredibly stable set of constrains regimes, but when it comes, it comes like a tsunami.
Finally change making in a turbulent system held within a turbulent context is hard, because what you are probably trying to do is seek some order and predictability and it isn’t available. The lives of refugees and migrants and chronically homeless folks who are in motion are like this. With no power to create order, they are at the whims of those that do have the ability to impose order and control. For them, life is a constant state of chaos, sustained that way by a constraint regime that constantly undermines their stability, in some cases out of pure cruelty.
Some of this is new to me, some of it is stuff I know, but am just being reminded of. People like Alicia Juarerro continually keep me learning.
I have time to integrate think about this stuff and will be bringing it into our course on Working in Complexity Inside and Out, where we introduce new material as we learn, test and stabilize ideas about how to work with complexity. The next offering of that course starts in February.
A detail from a surf board on display at the Nazare Surf Museum, Nazare, Portugal.
If you have been working with me over the past five years or so you will have heard me reference and use the work of Cynthia Kurtz in the work we are doing. Among other things Cynthia is the originator of NarraFirma, the software I most often use for narrative work on complex topics. She is the author of one of my favourite papers on Cynefin, The New Dynamics of Strategy which she wrote with Dave Snowden back in 2003. She wrote her own books on Working With Stories and Confluence a brilliant book about her own approach to working with complexity. Last month she posted some news about her current work and life. She is in the process of downloading her work into four different versions of Working with Stories, and thinking deeply about a transition in her life and work. I encourage to read her post.
Cynthia has been a key mentor in my own life and work, especially as the pandemic changed our approach from in person to online. Last year I took her practicum course on PNI which deepened my appreciation for the depth of these tools that she shares. NarraFirma in particular has been a godsend as a tool for me to work with my clients. Because it is open source and Cynthia and her husband Paul have their hands on the code, any updates or bugs I have experienced with the software get corrected right away.
So I thought I would take a moment to offer folks an introduction to her work and point you to the resources that she has shared. Cynthia is an incredibly deep and generous thinker and has made it her life’s work to provide accessible tools to people struggling with complex challenges because at the core of human community should be the delight in the way we work with our stories.
Her work on complexity
Cynthia began her work in the world as a biologist studying social behaviour in animals until an injury in the field prompted a career change. Already pre-disposed to curiosity about complexity and with some skills as a programmer, she teamed up with her husband Paul Fernout to write environmental simulation software to help people learn more about the natural world. Later, seeking more security, Paul took a contract job at IBM and showed Cynthia a job posting relating to organizational storytelling and she applied. Her skills as a researcher, and knowledge of social dynamics through her science background quickly became the foundation of her work.
Cynthia worked at IBM as the company was discovering complexity and the role of storytelling and her ideas found a rich ground alongside many other researchers and thinkers who were helping to explore and develop the field. The paper she wrote with Dave Snowden from this time, The New Dynamics of Strategy, starts with a deep dive into theory and why complexity challenges conventional forms of decision making. It then goes on to describe the Cynefin framework in detail and discusses how to use it with a series of practices and applications. Together this represents a pretty comprehensive foundation for understanding the role of Cynefin and the methods for using it when it comes to strategy and decision making. The paper itself contains Cynthia’s ideas on control and connection which are key aspects of her own sense making framework
Although her work is deeply informed by theory, it wasn’t until 2021 that she finally published a book that describes her approach to understanding complexity, or more precisely, the relations between self-organization and intentional organization. The book is called Confluence and it describes a set of tools and approaches for thinking about the intersection of organizational planning in a self-organizing world. True to form, it is not just a theory book, but a book of well-documented thinking tools illustrated by stories and knowledge gleaned from a wide swath of human experience. It’s a delicious and lingering read. It cuts close to the bone. The last section addressing conspiracy theories might be one of those things that saves democracy. (It also helpfully addresses jargon and complexity theory in an incredibly thought provoking way!)
While it took her a long time write Confluence, she has been a productive and generous blogger for decades and her thoughts, ideas, ramblings and clear gems of wisdom are collected at her blog, Story Colored Glasses.
Working with stories
Cynthia’s focus in the world has been consistently on the role of stories and narrative and so her work has been driven towards the deeply practical. She has created, co-created or piloted dozens of methods for working with stories in groups, many of which are standard practice in our field now. Her magnum opus is Working with Stories in your community or organization and is a comprehensive introduction to her own research method, Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI). Working With Stories (WWS) has a whole website devoted to this book and some of her latest iterations, which include a simplified version and an advanced version, a collection of story forms and will soon also include the fourth edition, which she is currently preparing.
WWS is a constant companion on my desk and there is a lifetime of learning in this book. I’m astounded at Cynthia’s capacity to document her own process and her knowledge and present it in accessible ways. That isn’t to say that the material isn’t dense and rich. This approach is not simple to understand or work with until you have unschooled yourself a bit in research methods, epistemology and facilitation. But as a body of work it is immensely transformative for research, engagement and strategy.
WWS is a worthy investment of time and money and is a useful guide to anybody seriously working with story, social patterns and change making in complex settings.
Software for working with stories
Cynthia’s interest in uncovering patterns and connection in stories along with her training in statistics and her experience in programming led her to create the early programming behind Sensemaker Explorer while she was at Cognitive Edge. Later she and Paul Fernout created their own software for gathering stories and discovering patterns. Eventually their efforts became NarraFirma, an open source software package that is really a project management tool. NarraFirma includes hundreds of screens and tools to plan and carry out a PNI project, including the ability to create story gathering surveys, perform catalysis on the results, prepare materials for sense making sessions, and reflect on and report on projects. One of the best features of NarraFirma is the context specific help screens that enable users to not only navigate the software but learn about the practice as they are doing so. I’ve never seen anything quite like NarraFirma.
Although the software is free to use and requires only a WordPress site to install as a plug in (my preferred option) it takes several days to really learn how to use properly and years of experience to use well. When you use NarraFirma you are not just building a survey tool for story collection, but you are immersing yourself in Participatory Narrative Inquiry. I have done probably thirty or more projects, from one time story collections for strategic planning or engagement around complex issues like opioid use and crisis response to a four year long inquiry into changing workplace culture. Every time I dive in I learn more about how to work with this approach. The software not only helps me run my project, it makes me a better practitioner as I’m doing so.
I’m immensely grateful to Cynthia for putting her work out in the world and I highly recommend anyone interested in this field explore her thinking, offering and tools.