My friend Marcus Jenal published his latest weekly newsletter in which he muses over a few questions related to complexity, strategy and taking a stance. He doesn’t have a comments section enabled on his blog (hint! hint!) so I’m going to respond a bit to what he wrote here and we can have a conversation in this space.
Too often, I fall into the trap of questioning every new insight I have and asking myself if that insight goes deep enough. Every insight is still biased through my cultural coding, my upbringing, my context, etc. Yet by the very nature of being human we will never reach a place of ‘pure’ unbiased understanding. So we need to strike a balance between self-critical reflection and believing that we found some ground that is solid enough to step on and move forward.
It’s like the metaphor of crossing a river on foot. We make a careful step to check if the next stone is stable enough to step on or not. If it is, we make the step and then check which direction we can go from there. If we get stuck, we move a few steps back. But if we never trust the stability of the next stone, we will not move at all. And yes, sometimes we might fall into the water but that’s ok. We can pick ourselves up and start again.
This is one of the biggest blocks I see with folks who are new to complexity work. There is a tension – a polarity even – between needing to move and needing to know. I think that tension is generated by standard problems solving practices that begin with the Cynefin framework’s Ordered Systems formula of “SENSE – ANALYSE – RESPOND.” You start by gathering information you can about the system, have an expert analyse the data and tell you what to do, chart out a path forward and then execute. That is what most problem solving in business and organizational life looks like and it permeates design thinking and action practice.
When I’m teaching people to work in complexity, it’s good to use tools and metaphors that draw on their own experiences in the rest of their life. I am firmly of the belief that human beings are innate complexity workers but our organizational life squishes those capacities out of us, or relegates them to the sidelines of our non-work lives, to hobbies, games, parenting, gardening, cooking, art, and other activities of daily life. In places where we are safe to fail, we can try all kinds of things at our own pace and comfort. We are not paralysed by the fear that someone will yell at us for getting it wrong, or worse, we will be fired, demoted, or thought less of. So many organizations and leaders I work with are paralysed by fear. Ofet they figure out how to download that fear on to their teams and always have someone else to blame if things go wrong. That’s a lot of the work we do when trying to open up leadership practice.
“Why are we stuck?” ask many leaders. “How do you reward failure?” I ask in return. And thus begins the conversation.
These days I just point people to this EXCELLENT Liz and Mollie cartoon to illustrate this:
So yes. We need to act without information. We take up some, have a sense of where we want to go, and then move and the cycle begins.
That leads to the second part of Marcus’s post:
I am re-watching the two conversations between Nora Bateson and Dave Snowden on ‘When meaning looses its meaning’ (Session 1, Session 2) together with a group of friends who are both interested in Nora’s and Dave’s work. We are having fabulous discussions after watching bits of the conversations. While Nora and Dave try hard to agree with each other, of course they have their differences. And these differences are somehow reflected in my own thinking about how to be and act in the world, which I’m expressing in my weekly emails – particularly the dilemma of if/when/how to act. In very strongly simplified terms, Nora advocates for broad, open, purposeless spaces to make connections and relationships that will then sprout into change in whatever way, while Dave sees the possibility of catalysing certain attractors and shifting certain constraints in a more intentional / purposeful way so that new, more desirable things emerge (he calls this ‘nudging’ the system). While it is more obvious with Dave, both have an idea of how a more desirable world would look like: more people would accept that ecological and complexity thinking are better ways to engage with the world than industrial linear thinking. Both, Nora and Dave, take a stance, which allows them to become thought leaders.
It has been lovely watching Nora and Dave dance together and as Marcus rightly identifies, the differences, held in a generative tension, are the interesting bits. I think the tension about direction of travel that Marcus has seized on here is an important polarity to navigate in complexity work.
Direction of travel matters. Call it a moral compass, call it a shared purpose, a shared vision, or a sense of what is right and good, but INTENTION, as Alicia Juarerro will tell you, matters. It serves as an attractor for action and so if you are planning to move, you better be aware of your intention, especially if you think you are just hanging out in a purposeless space. In complexity, there is no space that is free from context. If I am just hanging around with a soft gaze waiting to explore something, that is not an empty space of thinking. My eyes and ears and heart are conditioned and constrained by my history. And that is why Nora’s ideas of “warm data,” as I understand them, are helpful. It helps to populate the purposeless space with enough diversity and possibility that it can be intentionally purposeless.
I learned that a long time ago when I was thinking about Bohmian dialogue in the context of alos developing my practices of invitation. Bohmian dialogue is intentionally open, and, as Harrison Owen once said, “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.” That is true and it is alos true that there is always intention in the invitation, and whoever comes has arrived there by virtue of the history of connections that led them to discovering and responding the the invitation. Spaces can be open, but they are never unbounded. Awareness of the boundary conditions is helpful for understanding what is possible and why what happened was “the only thing that could have.” Complex systems have history and that history matters.
So I think this difference that Marcus has found presents us with a nice space to manage within when we are working in complex systems. A range of openness of direction of travel from broad to narrow. At a certain point if you treat the direction of travel like a target you have drifted into the complicated domain in Cynefin, which is fine, if that is truly what you are doing. But targets are not the same as vectors and they inspire very different patterns of behaviour.
Oh and on Marcus’ last question…
PS: I’m not 100% sure what the difference is between ‘taking a stance’ and ‘taking a stand’. Even English native speakers could not really explain it to me consistently.
…I answered him by email saying essentially that a “taking a stance” is a position that you take to prepare for action, and you optimize your ability to engage well to whatever is coming. It’s preparing to move. “Taking a stand” is getting ready not to be moved, to dig in and resist whatever is coming. One could even say it’s another way of thinking about the resilient vs. robust form of dealing with change.
Lots of good stuff coming through the pipe lately. Here are some links for your attention:
AI is running our lives and we need to find ways to deal with it.
- A conversation with LamDa, an artificial intelligence, and the implications of this transcript. The stuff seems like science fiction, but so much of our lives are starting to be mediated through AI bots. We are heading for a reckoning with our ethics, and I’m not entirely sure that the folks with their hands on the technology levers of power are equipped for the job. Make philosophy and ethics a required part of STEM curricula? Please?
- Perhaps as an antidote, or a vision of what could be, Harold has a nice piece about managing in complexity and the need for what he brilliantly calls “permanent skills.”
- And because Harold is such a must-read much of the time, here’s another piece on how he navigated information wars and expertise during the first two years of the pandemic. Paying attention to signals and having well curated streams for receiving good information is very very difficult, and not something that most of us have the time and experience to do. And so we are preyed upon by single viewpoints that have a lock on our dopamine production, feeding confirmation bias and disconnection. Harold’s writing, as always, seeks to bring the most brilliant human capacity of sensemaking into this work.
Being a better facilitator
- Nadia and Corinne remind us of the power of invitation. I have blogged about this stuff for decades, but I never tire of reading simple,well thought out pieces on this. Share them with your clients and groups you are working with, because they help to spark the conversation that will lead to designing good group process.
- Beth Cougler Blom dusts off her preparation protocol for in person meetings and finds that it needs an upgrade. Useful to me as I have been quite slow to return to in person work, and I’m mostly okay with that. So that means I need to be really conscious when preparing space for in person meetings, and reports from the front line are welcome!
Geek out on some sports and complexity theory
- Some of the most exciting work to me in applied complexity is happening in the sports world. This is a truly OUTSTANDING twitter thread from Phillip O Callaghan charting hours worth of reading on nonlinear pedagogy and constraints led approaches to sport, which has implications for all the ways in which we teach complexity in complex settings. Honestly, this is a course syllabus.
- Here is a really good piece on how the former Australian cricketer Greg Chapelle managed his cognitive load and attention to enable himself to make decisions in a environment that required both hear and wide situational awareness. Fascinating discussion on how we find strategies for managing ourselves in novel cognitive environments, and how so much of the tools we need are already available to us, to be exapted from other parts of our evolutionary journey.
And I leave you with a lovely quote shared by Euan:
[People] go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
– St. Augustine
That’s probably enough for you to get stuck in for a few weeks.
Yesterday was spent working with my friend and colleague Ciaran Camman yesterday on a design for a workshop on evaluation in complexity. We had the utter joy of being able to be together, having a high bandwidth human experience, which enabled us to really dive into some interesting existential questions after which we were famished and so we retreated to Kulinarya Filipino Eatery for dinner, feasting on Crispy Binagoongan and Batil Patong.
The food was great and as usual our conversation wandered all over the place and at some point – possibly when we were standing outside a small rehearsal space listening through an open window to a jazz combo swinging nicely inside, the thought came to me: “forget about your theory of change…what is your theory of stability?”
It occurred to us that in the non-profit and philanthropic world, we are constantly asked for a theory of change which is intended to explain how our intervention will change things for the better. There is a trap in this of course, that these theories are often linear and predictive, which is the antithesis of complexity as a theory of change, and in fact, in most cases the only answer to the question “Please describe your theory of change?” should rightly be “complexity.” I even wrote a post about that once which should serve as a companion to this one.
Interestingly however, I have never heard anyone ask “What is your theory of stability?” and that strikes me as a fundamental question to address fs one is to be making change, especially in a complex system. For instance, if you are looking at a set of unhealthy patterns in a system, like racial discrimination or persistent and chronic poverty or disparate health outcomes among different populations, it strikes me as really important that you talk about WHY you think those situations are stable over time. What is your theory about what keeps them in place? This is important because what you believe about how to create stability will affect HOW to design and act to create new stability. And that can be fraught with category errors.
To me this is where the work around constraints really hits home. And so to recap, typically I introduce this work with folks as:
- Connections. Links between agents in a context
- Exchanges. What flow across the connections between agents and how it flows.
- Attractors. The forces in a system that inspire or influence patterns of behaviour
- Boundaries. The forces that create a context or a container for behaviour
When we spot stable patterns in a system, we can look at the constraints that are keeping them in place and try changing one or more to see what kinds of results we get. That is the essence of complexity as a theory of change. But what is the mechanism used to create stability?
Cynefin is helpful here as it describes different types of systems and different kinds of ways to both make change AND to stabilize things. So here is a Cynefin framework with the constraints and action language rephrased to help us think through a theory of stability for a project:
As always, knowing which domain you are working in will help you think about how the problem you are working on is constrained. From there, I think it’s worth asking “How do you think the stability in this situation is functioning?” It is very important to note that if you are indeed working in complexity, you need to avoid taking action to disrupt and stabilize the system as if you are working in the complicated domain. Is that situation really be held together by someone who is controlling things and pulling the strings?
The question is not “What is the root cause of the fentanyl crisis?” but rather “What is maintaining the stability of the fentanyl crisis? And how?” One could be tempted to answer something like “someone is controlling the drug supply, or is actively preventing us from making that supply safer.” In complexity, your theory of stability is as much a hypothesis as your theory of change, and it seems crucially important that we begin change initiatives by also questioning whether we have the stability mechanisms right. In a complex and emergent context it is highly unlikely that the emergent phenomena that we are trying to change are produced by a single actor doing a single thing. And yet, I recognognize the seduction of that thinking, which critically influences the action I will take.
So that’s important for starting, but a theory of stability is alos critical for understanding how any positive work done in the initiative will be sustained. Funding cycles, for example, are powerful periodic attractors for change making meaning that they often dictate the time frame in which a problem needs to be solved and they alos dictate the pace and cadence of the work to solve it. They also dictate the stability strategy.
Many foundations are happy to fund a community group that is aiming to double literacy rates in vulnerable communities and will support a set of interventions to do so. But when the goal is hit, the work doesn’t end, and who is willing to invest in a stability strategy that is also complex? High literacy rates are maintained in some places not because there is a well funded literacy program. Literacy is an emergent outcome of privilege and wealth, among other constraints, that help maintain a stable pattern of high degrees of literacy. There are certainly deeper and less visible constraints that enable concentrations of wealth and privilege including historical policy choices that limit access to housing finances, like redlining certain neighbourhood and people to restrict their access to credit.
So when you find practices that support increased literacy rates, what are the constraints that you can work with to enable the continued emergence of these outcomes? And what happens if, after the intervention funding ends, the needle starts turning downward again?
So I’m just thinking out loud here but the takeaway from this post is this:
- Think about your theory of change
- Think about what domain your work lies in.
- Look at the patterns you are trying to change and ask why they are stable to begin with.
- Test ideas to shift these patterns AND test your ideas about stability.
- Consider changing not only the conditions of the system you are working with, but also changing the ways by which beneficial patterns are stabilized and maintained.
Thoughts?
Our Complexity Inside and Out course is now in full swing and after 3 of 7 sessions we have covered some of the basics that make up our understanding of complexity theory and some of the core practices to affect change in complex systems, both inner and outer.
One of those strategies of course is through shifting constraints. To work with self-organization and emergence in a system, finding the constraints that enable behaviour and creating different ones can have the effect of shifting the behaviour. Not always of course – we have to pay attention and monitor what we are doing – but these are the promising places to get a start.
Based on work from Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang, the constraints I work with are these, listed in order of ease to work with:
THe Connecting constraints of
- Connections between agents in a system
- Exchanges that flow across those connections
And the containing constraints of
- Attractors around which behaviours or actions coalesce
- Boundaries that define the context for actions
There are two other constraints which come to us from Snowden’s field of anthro-complexity and they are Identity and Dark constraints, both of which are a sort of subclass of the above. Identities create or maintain coherent connections or containers and the Dark constraints are simply the nones we don’t know about and which only reveal themselves in real time.
It’s not always easy to spot these in the wild as you are learning about them, but this article in The Conversation is a good example of thinking about managing complex behaviour. Every October in Ontario there is a traditional homecoming week at universities in which former students return and current students party. The flocking behaviour of students in these times creates emergent behaviours at the grouplevel that are not immediately present at the individual level, and the authors provide a handy link to one research paper that explains this.
The response to behaviour like this is typically banning certain kinds of activities, which, in Cynefin terms, is a misapplication of governing constraints aimed at control to self-organizing behaviour. What is needed instead are constraints that enable the emergence of different behaviours. It is hard to spot these because with events such as the ones described in the article, the tendency is to want to squash the problem.
But a harm reduction approach first begins by identifying the fact that there will always be these behaviours and always be these problems, and the way to address them is to create adjacent possibles (a Stuart Kauffman term) which invites the system to an alternative state. Such possibles cannot be too far away from the current state, but they must not be too close to the current state to be rendered ineffective. For example, proposing that students only consume alcohol in sanctioned places with oversight from police and campus security is likely to fail. Few students will love to party in such a heavily surveilled way. On the other hand, allowing students to party anywhere and then providing a ntip line for any issues that might come up is a weak response that is unlikely to affect the behaviour.
So the authors propose an oblique strategy, which is an excellent approach to complex problems. First, the say that students need to be empowered to co-create harm reduction approaches to these issues to create safety in a public health and gender-violence context. It is unlikely that on their own students will come to a meeting to co-create these, or if they do, their authority to enact the approaches may be compromised by their perceived identity of “goody two-shoes.” So instead the authors propose a new attractor in the field, a for credit course that is about generating harm reduction approaches but which alos teaches skills needed to address and manage public health issues:
Conversations are a good start, but a systemic approach that integrates understanding of these events and taking action through curriculum is essential.
One of these strategies could be creating a university credit based multidisciplinary course that is aimed at proposing solutions for how students could gather and celebrate in a safe — including COVID-19 safe — manner that reflects their own, and community values.
The students would learn (among many things) how to address diffusion of responsibility and gender-based violence. It would provide them with opportunities to learn about city bylaws, police costs and potential challenges to the health care system of large student gatherings.
The instructors could be an advisory team of mentors including members from the city, police, first responders and university experts. This initiative would challenge students to research the problem and be an active part of the solution.
Co-creating solutions with students by providing them with opportunities to lead with support and guidance will empower them to take ownership and responsibility when it comes to implementing positive change. If they lead the new way forward, students will come and be together in a way that meets their needs.
Backed with the power of the university to sanction this approach, makes this new attractor for action stronger. REQUIRING students to participate in this exercise would be too rigid a boundary, but for students that are charged with under age driking violations for example, they may be required to participate in these discussions in a restorative process designed to using their lived experience and also having them make amends.
Working with constraints gives us lots of ideas about how to shift things. The key is implementing what you can and watching for change. As for this example, what a great case study. I will see if I can follow up with Craig and Kolomitro about what happens with their ideas.
I think this quote really captures my own social justice practice and my own spiritual practice. Ilia Delio is perhaps what we would call an evolutionary theologian and what she says here about “becoming something that is not yet known” says volumes to me:
By evolution, I mean simply that change is integral to life. We are becoming something that is not yet known. To live in evolution is to let go of structures that prevent convergence and deepening of consciousness and assume new structures that are consonant with creativity, inspiration, and development.
Evolution requires trust in the process of life itself. There is a power at the heart of life that is divine and lovable. In a sense we are challenged to lean into life’s changing patterns and attend to the new patterns that are emerging in our midst. To live in openness to the future is to live with a sense of creativity and participation, to use our gifts for the sake of the whole by sharing them with others.
— Ilia Delio, The Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey (Orbis Books: 2021), 220–221, 223–225.
It is hard to stay open to possibility when we are confronting a choice between the familiar and the new. I have always imagined that a world that addresses climate change, one that properly restores dignity and equality and essential relationships to land and sea and between peoples is one that will deliver a better world than the one we have now. But power and familiarity breed intransigence and unless we can truly let go of what we know and fall forward into the theoretically innumerable realities that are better than this one, we remain trapped in these patterns of behaviour in these ways of relating, in these ways of making a living.
We need moments of disturbance to move into new realities, and the more we refuse to accept the painful truths of the status quo, the less chance we have of actually making something better.
We are emerging from 2020, a year that was terrible in so many ways and one in which we saw many stories of governments mobilized to retool systems to create universal programs of health and economic care; stories of mitigated climate impacts and the support for local economies; stories of massive logistical challenges solved; stories of racial equity and justice being foregrounded and new conversations and actions around changing the coercive structures of power that perpetuate injustice.
We have evidence that we can quickly make massive changes that take us into that “becoming” but we remain trapped in the fear that doing so will cause loss and harm to people (let’s be honest, people who look like me) that benefit from the status quo. It might do, but the status quo is such that we are at a moment in history when we have enough wealth to mitigate those losses and usher people into a better world. There will be contraction. We can manage. Some of us have no idea how much resilience we actually have, because we’ve never been tested.
We can’t know what we are becoming, but we have enough evidence to know that the path we have been on and the vector on which we are travelling is heading towards a world where our gifts are increasingly discarded and our regard for life diminished. Perhaps at some point the fear of the immediate reality will outweigh the fear of choosing something different. I wish it weren’t so, that we have to be motivated by fear over love. And we need not hope for this future – it is the hope that kills – but rather we simply need to act now and trust in one another differently, listen to the voices that are at the margins of our world, at the ecotones between the thriving systems of life and the social clearcuts in which we are immersed. Those voices are bringing us the new patterns, the challenges, and the invitations. Hear them, amplify them, exchange gifts, follow them and let’s journey away from this hellscape.