Over the past several weeks, Dave Snowden has been writing a very extensive series of long blog posts that serve as a watershed declaration of the state of his work thus far in the field of anthro-complexity. The posts both define what the field is and make sharp distinctions about what it isn’t, especially in relation to practices, ontologies, and theories that sit adjacent or close to it. I believe this represents a moment where Snowden is making a strong declaration about what anthro-complexity is, and being very deliberate about pulling it back from interpretations that seek to fit it into pre-existing understandings of complexity. Anthro-complexity is a new approach to complexity in human systems, and these posts are a strong statement of what that is.
In the course of these posts, Dave has focused in part on the Art of Hosting, among other approaches to working in complexity, and has named me explicitly as someone who has been trying to work within the field of the Art of Hosting to bring my own practice more in line with what I have been learning about anthro-complexity over the past 15 years or so, since I was introduced to Cynefin.
The entire series is very important to understand the context, and it is very long and dense stuff, but it’s important to understand some of the context. You can start the most recent series on the channel and the estuary here. For these posts I am going to write, I encourage you to read the two most direct posts about the Art of Hosting:
These posts have helped me to reach an important moment in my own thinking, and I promised to respond to them personally and messily, so I’ll do my best here, probably in a series of posts. I am just heading out on a three-and-a-half-week walking holiday, so I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to get to, but long walks do offer a chance to ruminate.
So here is the first of what will likely be a number of posts on this topic.
First, thank you, Dave, for naming me, and for naming the Art of Hosting as a practice field, and for putting some deeply important questions to me and to us. These are questions that help guide and deepen our understanding of the field we work in. The Art of Hosting field is a broad one, spanning every continent, made up of people who arrive from many different traditions and levels of experience in the worlds of facilitation and change-making. Originally, the field was formed by folks moved by their experiences in social change, new metaphors of organizational leadership and systems change, and large-group facilitation methods. We are, and always have been, a community of practitioners first, and so the field has taken on the feel of a place where methods and tools are top of mind. I think the world sees the Art of Hosting as a collection of tools and practices for convening dialogue, and I don’t think that is incorrect. But it presents a problem that Snowden has identified, and it’s one we have to deal with.
The basic problem is this: while we use the language of emergence and complexity in the Art of Hosting, our use of methods and pre-designed processes, and our emphasis on “hosts,” means that we run the risk of not always being coherent with our own claims about emergence. Our approach to hosting conversations that matter certainly acknowledges emergence and can create conditions in which emergence happens, but it does that largely because humans operating in any constraint regime will create emergent outcomes. The question is whether that emergence is relevant to the field out of which these people come, or whether it is a distortion brought about by the container in which people are gathered and in which we convene conversation. A powerful conversation on its own is not helpful if its effects cannot survive contact with the system that it seeks to change.
The critique is important because it raises a question of epistemic justice, and I don’t think we answer that question very well: whose knowledge is being surfaced, and under what conditions? Are we enabling the distributed intelligence of the system to become visible, or are we shaping what can be said and heard through the design of our processes, invitations, and harvests?
If the conversations we convene are to truly matter, they must be coherent with the field in which they are situated. More than that, whatever emerges in those conversations must be able to travel back into that field and interact with it: shifting patterns, enabling action, and surviving beyond the temporary conditions of the container.
The issue, then, is not whether to convene, but how to do so in ways that remain accountable to the field. We need to be aware of the constraints we introduce, conscious of the power we hold as hosts, and attentive to whether what emerges is actually usable once people return to the systems they inhabit. And we need to be constantly critiquing our positionality.
Dave’s work lately has been to discuss systems as geological features. He locates the work of anthro-complexity firmly in the metaphor of the estuary, and yesterday his post very helpfully described the Art of Hosting (as a body of work) as a delta. These are two different kinds of systems, and the distinction is important. I want to quote from that post at length:
Art of Hosting is the delta of the leadership and organisational field. Over two decades and across dozens of cultural contexts, Toke Møller, Monica Nissen, and the community they built have produced real moments of collective intelligence, genuine emergence, and authentic contact. The practice carries real generosity and real craft, and this post takes that seriously.
But the delta has been building. The hosting aesthetic, the circle, the open space, the world café, the council, the harvest: these are now a recognisable repertoire, instantly legible to anyone who has spent time in that world. And a repertoire is a structure that precedes the encounter. The hosting team designs the invitation, shapes the container, holds the process, and harvests the outputs. The circle looks leaderless. The architecture is not.
Chris Corrigan, who has engaged generously with this argument in previous conversations and stated plainly that he is trying to change Art of Hosting from within, deserves acknowledgement here. That is the most intellectually honest position available to a practitioner committed to a tradition they have also diagnosed. It is exactly the move Griffin made with Stacey and the matrix: following the argument toward its conclusion, regardless of the professional cost. The question is whether the tradition as a whole is willing to follow that argument, or whether the delta will continue to accumulate.
The delta’s generativity is real. The flood plain moments, the occasions when Art of Hosting breaks through its own container and something genuinely distributed happens, are not accidental. They are what the tradition has been reaching for, and they occur. The problem is that the method cannot reliably produce them, cannot fully explain when they occur, and cannot sustain them when they do. The hosting team is still in the room. The design is still prior. The harvest is still shaped by hands that arrived before the conversation began.
In order to fairly deal with this critique we must honestly look at the ways in which it is true. And so to all my friends and colleagues in this field, I invite you and us to find the genuine questions in here that help us deepen our practice and rise to the challenge posed by serious questions of epistemic justice, legitimate change, and a deeper understanding of complexity and its dynamics.
My experience of reading Dave’s posts lately has been at times feeling a bit defensive but on the whole (and especially after yesterday’s) more akin to what a delta might feel during and after an autumn king tide, when it is overwhelmed and inundated by the sea and the rain. When the deluge stops and the tide ebbs, one finds that the landscape has been gently rearranged and new patterns of flow and precarious stability arise. I find myself in somewhat familiar location, but standing on new ground and needing to re-navigate and re-orient myself and my practice. I genuine experience of estuarine thinking. As I have been doing so over the past few days (during which I was also co-leading an Art of Hosting training) I found myself operating with heightened curiosity and inquiry.
I’ll write more about these questions, and especially as they relate specifically to how I understand the practice of the Art of Hosting, the usefulness of methods (including harvest), the importance of dialogic containers and how anthro-complexity helps us make better change. Stay tuned, and enjoy the view.
We are just about to begin Day Two of our bi-annual Art of Hosting here in Vancouver. Yesterday, we introduced participants to the four-fold practice of the art of hosting (presence, participation, hosting and co-creation) as a generative framework for designing participatory meeting and supporting participatory leadership, and we also taught the Chaordic Path, as a way into confronting the dynamics of self-organization in meetings.
This teaching in particular is a bit of a gateway into complexity theory, as it is intended to help participants confront issues of control and self-organization in facilitation and leadership. For many people coming to the practice of hosting, where we place an emphasis on working with constraints rather than intervening in events, the idea that groups of people can be self-organizing within constraints is sometimes a challenging notion. The idea that we might design dialogic containers thoughtfully to encourage work that is useful, rich, affirming, novel, and full of diversity, difference and novelty is desired, but is tricky in practice.
For me, the dance of chaos and order and the confrontation with the potential of self-organization I found in Open Space in 1995 was mind blowing. It transformed my facilitation practice from being a person whose job was to control conversations, make sure that they “stayed on track” and “dealt with” conflict. My job had been to reframe people’s words and help people listen to each other and write longs lists of things on flip charts. That’s okay I suppose in a communications workshop, but in meetings? Hmm.
At the same time as I had been facilitating groups that way I hated being facilitated in this way. I didn’t want someone reframing things I was saying. I didn’t want differences mediated between myself and another person; I wanted to work those out together. I didn’t need someone else to tell me to listen to another person with curiosity. And if something was to go up on a flip chart, I needed it to be in my own words, especially if the facilitator working with us didn’t know anything about the context they were working in.
After 30 years of hosting conversations very differently, I still get clients calling me to facilitate conversations by, essentially, inserting myself into a set of human dynamics that they are unable or unwilling to participate in. It is not the folks that are excluded or unheard in organizational or community dynamics that are calling me. It is often folks whose agendas are not finding a fast enough route to implementation because there is resistance in the field.
My work is often to help those folks discover what is actually happening. This resistance is information and it tells us a lot about what is possible and what isn’t. Running roughshod over resistance is possible, but unethical. Exploring the nature of the field of relations is a pre-requisite to discovering the affordances for action.
(I once had an employer group contact me to see if I could facilitate the employers’ agenda regarding labour relations issues becasue the unions they worked with were always being unreasonable. When I asked to call the union reps to talk about the issue they told me that wasn’t part of the work and they simply needed me to find a way to get the union to back off their demands and grievances and forward to employers’ agenda. Of course I declined the offer to work with them).
Perhaps it goes without saying, but I think there are a lot of implicit actions of control built into the unexamined role of the facilitator. When folks ask me to deal with difficult people as if I have some magic wand, I’ll often ask them “how would you like to be treated if someone didn’t like what you had to say?” I think in general, most folks are not in favour of being controlled by others, but there is some residual idea out there that facilitation or leadership comes with permission to control conversations, conflict, and dissent. It can be a useful practice for those of us who lead or work with groups to reflect on these questions.
Enabling self-organization and co-creation of a container that can hold conflict is the better – and harder – way. But a group that learns to work with difference and hold conflict generatively while also dealing with harm in a relational way is a resilient group. It becomes a group that can host itself and that doesn’t require a facilitator at all.
To paraphrase Derrida, “the moment of facilitation is a moment of madness.”
Dave Snowden concluded his six-part series on the Channel and the Estuary this week. He used gangster movies and TV Series to illustrate the different kinds of contexts in which people are sense-making. The series contrasted the categorical ambiguity and gradients represented by the ecology of a tidal estuary with the managed and ordered passageway through uncertainty represented by the marked channel. The metaphors are meaningful for coastal people, and anyone who has had to navigate these kinds of marine ecosystems. The point is that navigating in the estuary and in the channel requires different approaches to sense-making.
The whole series deserves to be read and thought through, as it is an important declaration of what “complexity thinking” really is and what it requires from the complexity practitioner. It is also a warning against the way in which we receive the world in a pre-channeled, dredged state, made easier for us; “facilitated” one might say, especially by the digitization of our experience, which has dredged and channelled the world and offered us pre-designed categories of experience.
Dave’s series contains an embedded tribute to those whose lot in life requires them to practice estuarine thinking in a world of pre-cut channels. It recognizes the loneliness that such people sometimes experience and the separateness they often feel. It is also a call to action for an approach to organizational life that treats complexity as a context in which we are required to deploy “estuarine thinking.” These are lost capacities – exiled capacities, if you like – and we lose something essential if they disappear.
I have been wrestling with this series from the perspective of a person who hosts conversations in organizations and communities. Dave’s work has deeply shaped the way I view and practice facilitation over the past 15 years or so. It has left me in a liminal space of practice. I try to locate myself adjacent to those in the ‘facilitation’ world, those who are dialogic practitioners, and folks who are exploring the implications that complexity has for their practice. I say adjacent because I am aware that although I use the language of facilitation, dialogue, and hosting, I find that much of the practice in these fields fails to confront the complexity of human groups and systems. We all have work to do to build our practice around Dave’s invitation, not just in these posts but in his work in general as it relates to complex facilitation.
The thing about complexity is that once you see it you can’t unsee it, and Dave’s refection on the gangsters and business mavens from Guinness, Peaky Blinders and The Godfather had me noticing similar patterns in the stories I was encountering. Last weekend, we attended a screening of the 1961 version of the film West Side Story, which is unbelievably contemporary in many ways, not the least of which is that it explores what happens when people are born into a world of tight constraints not of their making. I have never seen the film or the musical, so this was all new to me. There is A LOT I can say about this film, and perhaps it deserves a whole other post to explore some of the themes, but one scene stood out to me in particular, and I think anyone who engages in facilitation (or community development or consulting or organizing) might find it beneficial to watch this and reflect.
The two gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, are locked in a struggle against each other, divided by ethnicity, neighbourhood, history, and class. Tony, the former leader of the Jets, falls in love with Maria, the younger sister of the Sharks’ leader. Their love crosses the boundaries of gangs, race, history, and tradition. Both gangs sing about the constraints of their worlds: childhood trauma, exclusion, racism, homesickness, loyalty, and the struggle to belong. At a critical point in the film, both gangs agree to meet at a dance in what they consider ‘neutral’ territory.
The dance is run by a social worker called Glad Hand, played beautiful by John Astin. Glad Hand, armed with his clipboard and his whistle, has some activities planned for the dance, and he naively tries to mix up the crowd of teenagers, probably so that they might have a different kind of experience of getting to know one another. His design for the evening is almost totally ignorant of the contexts that make it impossible for this dance to have any kind of success. It is a well-intentioned effort that goes terribly wrong. You can see the painfully earnest effort on Astin’s face, convinced that he is bringing a hopeful and helpful evening to this group of poor immigrant youth.
In the key scene, Glad Hand organizes the teenagers into a circle dance. the idea is that the girls walk one way and the boys walk the other and when he blows the whistle you have to dance with who ever you are standing in front of. He says “form a circle. Boys will be on the outside, girls will be on the inside.” Action, one of the Jets who has the best, most cynical quips in the films asks “And where will you be?” Glad Hand chuckles nervously with an awkward smile and ignores the question.
It takes a few moments for anyone to move into the circle. There is no trust between the teens and Glad Hand and everybody is HYPER aware of the dynamics in the room which Glad Hand has just gleefully ignored in favour of his plans and his clipboard. He has tried to create “safe” space and the gangs understand this as “neutral” space, which is a very different thing. “Neutral” requires that you keep your guard up and restrain your instincts. While Glad Hand is committed to civility, the gangs are actually committed to an uneasy peace in a social field that is filled with tension.
As the circle dance begins Glad Hand is clearly waiting for his chance to impose a predetermined outcome, where the Sharks girls will end up with the Jets boys and vice versa. It’s transparent and manipulative. The kids in the dance are looking anxiously around themselves, scanning the room and knowing exactly where they are in every moment. Glad Hand blows his whistle when the circles are lined up perfectly for his agenda. Immediately everyone catches on to what is happening. They stop, look around and break the exercise and go back into their couples and groups, and the dance disintegrates into a ritualized gang war, with the two sides doing their own thing more divided than ever. As the circle breaks down you can see the police officer running to Glad Hand and clearly reprimanding him for the situation he has created. This is the last we see of the social worker.
This is deeply familiar to me, and perhaps you too. For many of us the facilitation journey starts with tools and methods. A devotion to these creates a situation in which the context and pre-existing constraints are pushed into the background. When a group rebels against what I am doing. my experience has been that it is almost always the result of my own ignorance to what is happening in the group. These are hard lessons to learn, but important. It’s why I wrote the series on theory, to recognize that the dialogic containers in which we are working are embedded in multiple constraint regimes and landscapes of context which exert a more powerful influence on the present moment than a facilitated method.
Dave’s recent series pushes us to understand the capacity needed not only to enter into the ambiguous and uncertain space of complex situations, but to navigate once we are there. It calls me to a practice of constant self-reflection, knowing that in any situations it is impossible to map the next step, and recognizing that the channel markers I encounter are often the ones I have put down before, to protect myself, to avoid the messiness I can’t handle, to steer the group into a place where I am most comfortable or hopeful. Channels are not bad in and of themselves. But one cannot lose sight of the estuary in which the channel is dredged.
Relentless self-awareness is critical to leading in the estuary. Being aware of where we are in relation to what is happening, and knowing how to respond to the steadily changing context is the capacity. It is not often what people are contracting you for; so often the client wants certainty and structure and guidance. What is needed in complexity instead is a kind of learning scaffolding that for developing the capacity that people have for being in the estuary. Dredging a channel does not mean that we are no longer navigating in the salt marsh. On the contrary, it may well rob us of the ability to be able to do so.
Earlier this month, Cynthia Kurtz announced that she was re-launching her Participatory Narrative Inquiry practicum courses. This a really good opportunity to discover this set of practices and approach to working with stories.
I was part of her first deep dive cohort a few years ago and it really was good.It stretched me and grounded me in this approach. Cynthia is intending to offer these course three times a year starting in May. If you are curious about PNI, the introductory course is the way to go. If you'd like to apply PNI to a small project, the PNI Essentials course will help you do that.
For a bigger project using NarraFirma, the Deep Dive course is what you need. It's important that you have a project in mind and ready to go for this course, because after all these are practicums. You'll learn at a steady pace over 20 weeks with Cynthia and a cohort of co-learners. This is a significant investment of time, but it is well structured and incredibly useful and resource-rich useful learning.
I'm really glad she is offering these programs. Spread the word and consider joining one to learn directly from this font of knowledge and wisdom. Cynthia's work is powerful, practical and will almost certainly fill a need you're curious about, especially if you are a regular reader of this blog.
From Dave's post today on the relationship between anthro-complexity, Human System Dynamics and the OODA Loop.:
If orientation is constitutive of observation, and if the relevant unit of analysis in most complex situations is not the individual but the community of practice, the organisation, the institution, then the question becomes: where does collective orientation live? The answer is not inside any individual generative model. It is distributed across the epistemic landscape, the structured field of what is perceivable, thinkable, and actionable within a given community at a given time, prior to any individual act of observation or deliberation.
An epistemic landscape is not a shared mental model. It is not a consensus. It is the pre-reflective background that makes certain things available for perception and certain kinds of thinking possible before anyone decides to attend to them. It has terrain: available distinctions that make certain differences legible, narrative structures that make certain sequences of events coherent, inscribed artefacts that hold certain patterns stable, silences where distinctions have not been developed, and differences therefore do not register. Moving through it does not feel like a constraint. It feels like the world’s natural shape.
This is tremendously geeky stuff, but important reading. As he has been exploring these ideas in chapter-length essays, he is bringing clarity, for me, on the role and position of the practitioner within the field in which the practitioner is working. These observations and declarations about the nature of epistemic landscapes, contexts, and constraints are important.
Interventions that work on the landscape itself are of a different kind. You cannot do it by training people to think differently within existing categories, because the categories are what you are trying to change. You cannot do it through after-action review, because after-action review operates within the narrative structures the landscape already makes available. You have to work obliquely, through the practices, artefacts, distinctions, and narratives that constitute the background before anyone starts deliberately attending. This is harder, less amenable to programme design, and less visible as an intervention. It is also, in conditions of genuine complexity, the more consequential one.
Dave's essays are so timely for me assignee January I have been thinking a lot about how to make this same point within the dialogue tradition that privileges the container as the primary space of change. I think dialogic containers are very important but I believe that without understanding them in the context of the many layers of context – landscape, substrate, form of life, constraint regimes – we can only have limited effect in "making change." And because dialogic containers are important places of encounter and the spaces in which people feel and experience change most intimately, they become seductive. They seem to be the easiest places to control and contribute which gives everyone a warm fuzzy feeling, but without attending to the larger scales of context and the affordances and avoidances that appear there, deeper structural change is impossible. Facilitation will not save the world, nor will hosting or any other kind of dialogic practice. Not alone, and not without attending to context.
Dave concludes:
We still have much to do in anthro-complexity, both in terms of our own methods and in market acceptance, to make the shift from containers to landscapes and to substrate management. We’re not there yet, and the pressure from purchasing executives with Augustinian expectations can require compromise for survival. But we’ve started the journey, and the invitation is open for others to join.
This is the work.