Part 1: Introduction to the model
Part 2: A deeper dive into the model
The two loops model emerged from many years of conversations amongst people working in the Berkana Exchange and their friends and mates in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As my friend Tim Merry pointed out on a comment at LinkedIn, the model itself was an emergent framework of how organizing happens on what we called back then “trans local” communities of practice. The Berkana Exchange was made up of many learning hubs around the world in places like Zimbabwe, South Africa, Senegal, India, Brazil, Mexico and Canada. These learning centres supported all kinds of experiments in living and the Art of Hosting took root and was co-created and developed in many of these places too, notably at Kufunda Village in Zimbabwe and The Shire in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Part of the origin of the two loops model was from the network making sense of itself and trying to understand what was required to create and sustain these kinds of experiments in an increasingly connected way. In the early 2000s there was so much talk about the way in which networks enabled by the open web were bringing people together and making interesting new forms of activism and organizing possible. Berkana was at the forefront of this lived inquiry and at some point prior to 2010, Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley published a pamphlet called Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale, summarizing the Berkana approach to developing leadership in communities, which sought to build on the promise of networks by discussing the role of emergence and how to support communities of practice so that they can grow into systems of influence. Although this diagram above is not in the published document, the “Name-Connect-Nourish-Illuminate” pathway was named.
My earliest photo of a skecth of the model in my handwriting from 2009
I’m trying to remember when I first encountered this model. This is probably the earliest version of it I have in my photos, dated March 9, 2009. At that time, I was working a lot with Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony, Tim Merry, Tuesday Rivera (Ryan-Hart) (who now offer an online course on their version of the model) and Phil Cass, all of whom were deeply involved with the Berkana Institute and the Exchange. So this was in our conversations then. We started sharing the model in Art of Hosting workshops and in some client work. I think the first time I was involved in teaching it “on the floor” was at an Art of Hosting in Springfield, Illinois, in March 2009.
That particular way of working with the two loops has become my preferred way of teaching when we are in person. In 2009, Teresa, Tenneson and I were in a convent in Springfield when we had the idea of making a map on the floor and asking people to position themselves on it according to where they were in the systems in which they were working (which in this case was the Illinois education system). We asked people to quietly walk around the map until they “felt” the right place to be. Once there, we asked them to talk about what it was like in that spot with others and then offer insights to the whole. I remember the poignant moment a teacher who stood on the legacy side of Transition broke down into tears, saying that she could see the education system dying around her, and all she was trying to do was throw children across the gap and into the new system. She had no idea if anyone was there to catch them. And in that moment, a tall man who worked for a Foundation pointed to a woman who was on the other end of the Transition bridge and said, “We’ve got you. We fund those programs. Keep throwing those children our way.” It was a powerful lesson about what happens when folks can see others in the wider world to whom they are connected.
Around that time, work carried me into a few other places where this model just made sense. Tenneson and I started working with Canadian Labour unions back then, especially the Canadian Union of Public Employees and in October 2010, we used this model on the floor of the Canadian Labour Congress Training Centre in Port Elgin, Ontario, to talk about how the labour movement was changing. That was the first time I saw people position themselves entirely outside the map. In this case, the two that stood outside were Executives of the CLC, both vice presidents of their provincial labour federations. They both agreed that their job was to care for the whole system, see everybody in it, and try to meet everybody’s needs.
Perhaps the most influential moment in my own development of the model came when I was working with churches in 2012. I had been working with the United Church of Canada at that time working with congregations and presbyteries to look at the changes that were accelerating across the church at that time. As a mainline Protestant denomination, the United Church, like all the others, is going through a massive generational shift in the structure and future of the denomination. After its founding in 1925, the Church grew rapidly and became an influential progressive social and spiritual force in Canada. Membership in the church peaked in the 1960s and since then has been declining. In the last 15 years, many congregations have closed their doors, and very few churches are growing or evolving within the denomination anymore. The two loops model captured this moment incredibly well and asks the question of what is already amongst us that gives us a clue about how progressive Christianity will take form in its next iteration.
Using this framework and infusing it with the theology of progressive Christianity made for a deeply meaningful experience in the dozens of congregations I worked with during those years. It gave everyone a place in the system and opened up conversations about tradition, innovation, and what is required for the church to change. Some churches were just not up to the task, falling to strong traditional voices that squashed the new sprouts of innovation because they couldn’t reconcile them with the church they knew and loved. And I’ve seen some congregations embrace the emerging alongside the traditional and do well meeting the spiritual needs of their congregation members.
One lovely story I remember from this time that I want to record here happened when my friend Tom Brackett – at the time a bishop in the Episcopal Church in the USA – invited me to create a retreat with him for folks we loving referred to as “heretics” within the Church. The retreat was called “Can these bones live?” and the organizing scripture was Ezekial 37:1-14, the vision known as The Valley of Dry Bones. In this vision, Ezekial is taken to a box canyon that is full of the skeletons of slain soldiers, and God asks him, “Mortal, can these bones live?” Ezekial sensibly replies “Oh God, you know.” And from that moment of paying attention to spirit and letting go of certainty, Ezekial and God wake up the bones and send the people home.
My notes from the day. I love the quote i jotted down that someone must have said “Heck: where the bad kids go.”
As we dove into this story and the framework, I invited people to walk contemplatively on the map and explore the Valley of Bones. It was indeed a deepening experience, and the rest of the retreat was full of stories, hopes, and real reckoning with what needs to die if the Episcopal Church is to live. Or even whether the Episcopal Church needed to die for progressive Christianity to live. Heretics indeed.
This particular gathering led to further engagements in the Episcopal Church in the USA and with ecumenical organizations like the Foundation for Theological Education (now known as the Foundation for Theological Exploration). That group sent a number of participants to a workshop that we did in Salt Lake City called “The Art of Convening in Faith-Based Communities,” and I worked closely with the FTE participants to think through this framework and its relationship to issues of justice, marginalization and equity. That single conversation would lead to many years long relationship and a pivotal event in the life of the two loops model in the United Church of Canada.
In 2013, as a part of a massive Comprehensive Review process, the United Church hosted a conversation about the future of theological education in Canada, with everything from academic seminaries to workshops on the spirituality of maple syrup on the table. I was invited to join a team hosting a huge gathering in Toronto to bring the whole system into the room for that conversation. To my delight, four of my friends from FTE were invited to attend as witnesses. The first two days were really hard, and there was a lot of conflict and rancour in the room. We had several conversations which served to surface the tensions and the conflicts. On the second evening, my friends from FTE took me aside and said that the group needed to take the gathering in a whole different direction. The host team from the General Council office didn’t know what else we should do, but my FTE friends and I sat in a hotel suite, watched by others and started to sketch out a plan to take the group through the two loops.
This would require changing the meeting room to accommodate a movement-based workshop for 175 people, so once we had settled on the design, we asked the hotel if they would change the room for the morning. They refused and wouldn’t let us change the room set up ourselves.
And so, at 11:00 at night, we snuck down to the conference room and persuaded a security guard to unlock the doors for us, saying we had a little prep to do for the morning. We locked ourselves in and took about an hour and a half to reset the room ourselves, taping a HUGE version of this model on one half of the floor and rearranging the tables and chairs to set up a World Cafe space.
We started the next day in a circle around the map, and I taught the model. Next, we had everyone place themselves on the map and go through the exercises of talking about what it was like where they were in the system. We followed that with a conversation about what gifts are offered from each place in the system, and the rest of the day was spent hearing about and discussing those together. It was a healthy, powerful conversation, and the moderator, Gary Paterson, absolutely fell in love with the model. Over the next two years, as he led the conversation on the Church’s future, he ran over 50 workshops using the model to talk to people across the country about the future of their Church. Here I am in 2014, teaching the model to the United Chruch’s EDGE Network as a part of the leadership development work at that time.
Of all the frameworks I have worked with over the years, this one has been as important as Cynefin. Both help us understand complexity, make sense of current conditions and both help people find affordances to action. I am immensely grateful for everyone I have ever worked with on this model, from my friends in Berkana to the Art of Hosting community to folks in the churches, transition movements, education systems, and elsewhere.
My Epiphone Emperor Joe Pass guitar upon which I am learning…leadership? Read on!
It’s a cliche as old as time, one I have been guilty of using occasionally too. Leadership is like jazz, where the members of an ensemble support each other in improvisation. We listen carefully, respond to what each other is doing, offer creative responses and make something amazing together.
Yes. Leadership is way more about improvisation than, say, following a step to step guide to assembling IKEA furniture.
But there is another set of metaphors from jazz that I have never seen talked about, perhaps because it needs you to understand a little about music theory, but that is leadership as jazz harmony.
My pandemic project was, after forty years, marrying my love of jazz with my love of guitar playing. My musical life hasn’t been the same. It has felt like starting over again. I have been learning jazz guitar with a teacher and with online tools now since late 2020. I’m focusing on learning how to play jazz standards, mostly solo, which means learning how to make chord melodies while also trying to do interesting things with improvised lines, over chords. I had to learn the fretboard in new ways, had to learn new techniques for voicing chords and playing lines from scales to which I had never given much thought: the harmonic minor, the altered scale, the Lydian dominant. I am getting to the point where I am learning to say things with jazz, but I feel like a baby. One reason for that is that there is SO MUCH TO LEARN from technique to theory to language to repertoire.
Of course with all new endeavours you have to learn a bit of theory to understand how it all works. While I know basic music theory, I have also had to take a deep dive into jazz theory because at its core, jazz is a structured, logical music that provides a harmonic and rhythmic container for improvisation and all the tools one needs comes from the specific ways jazz theory works. When you are playing on guitar, especially comping the lush and colourful jazz chords that accompany other players, your goal is to be as sparse as possible while still implying the harmony so that the melodic lines that the soloists are producing make sense. To the untrained and cynical ear, jazz sounds like “the wrong notes” but in the hands of skilled guitarists, jazz harmony has a number of different characteristics that are interesting.
First of all, in good jazz guitar playing, we try to make arrangements where the chords change only one or two notes at a time, and most often to notes that are just nearby. This is called “voice leading” and has been a feature of Western music since harmony was invented. In fact it probably was the origin of harmony, as two independent voices singing together will produce different notes. Sometimes these notes will sound pleasing and consonant and sometimes they will clash and sound dissonant. However, the point of voice leading is to guide the ear gently from one chord to another through the changes. As long as I have have loved music I have loved voice leading. I spent hours just voicing chords on piano as a kid without knowing what I was doing. But when you play a chord and change one note you discover that you are somewhere else entirely. Your next move from there is constrained by where you are now, and there are patterns of logic and harmonic tradition that are yours to follow or break as you wish.
Because guitar is a weird instrument – six strings played with four or five fingers with the same note appearing in different places all over the neck – jazz guitarists are very fond of stripping chords down to only two notes, to play their essence. In jazz we call these “guide tones” and they are the 3rd and the 7th notes of the chord scale. For example if I’m playing in the key of C and I need a C major 7 chord, I need only to play an E and a B (C-D-E-F-G-A-B) to imply the chord. Guide tones, along with the context of the chord – what comes before and after it – gives you enough information to work with to create a solo that sounds good. Guide tones are connected to voice leading. Playing a standard jazz chord progression like a Dm7 – G7 – Cmaj7 (the well-known “ii-V-I”) with guide tones produces smooth voice leading: Notes go like this: F-C, B-F, E-B. You can see that in each chord change, only one note changes, but when it does it produces a very different sound. We get led by one notes that wants to stay stable (the third) and one that wants to go somewhere else (the seventh). Together these two notes contains the essence of tension and release.
Jazz harmony is all about tension and release. In most of the music I have ever played on guitar, chords are just blocks of information. I might have a chord progression that goes C-Am-F-G (I-vi-IV-V) which is very common in pop and folk music and while certain chords want to go to other certain chords, the most tension is with the G chord, the five chord, which wants to go back to a C. End a song on a five chord, and your audience will be left in suspension. Go listen to the end of The Beatles “For No One” and you’ll see what I mean. You get left there. What happens next? This is the most basic tension and release. When most of us are learning guitar, we learn 7th chords and understand that these always lead us back to the tonic. D7 goes to G. A7 goes to D. C7 goes to F.
In jazz working with tension and release is a high art and there are many, MANY, more things you can do with chords to make jazz lines flow from one chord to the other, but the essence is that a little bit of suspense makes for a satisfying resolution. So we take those guide tones and start adding notes to them, and this is where jazz theory gets really arcane. You can add a sharp 11 or a flat 13 or a sharp or flat 9 to give you some tension and dissonance. Or you can add a 9, 6 (or 13) to give some lush colour to a more stable chord. You can play different scales over different chords. You can keep suspense and tension alive for a long time, or just imply it and bring it home. In Western music tension and release is such an important aspect of the musical experience that it is essential to understand for both composition and improvisation. Music with no tension of release is just a drone. Everything else in music is textured around moments of discomfort and anticipation and moments of relief and stability.
So if you want to see all this in its glory have a watch of this old Ed Bickert recording with his trio. Ultimately all of these tools are helpful in aid of creating a container inside which you make coherent choices for expressing yourself. And THAT is why jazz harmony is like leadership.
Extending the metaphor
I’m writing a lot on containers right now, so my attention is guided toward how containers – contexts for meaningful action – are structured and how we create them. In complex situations, leadership is about creating these contexts for action and interaction, and there are many lessons from the world of jazz harmony that apply here. Here are a few, in case you haven’talrady sussed them.
Theory matters. It really does. In jazz, there are reasons why something sounds “jazzy” and reasons why it doesn’t, and the same is true in working with containers and people. There are things you can do as a leader that will have better chances of certain outcomes than other things. Learning theory, especially working in complexity – like why managing to targets is less effective than managing to a direction of travel – will help you create experiences for people that get better results over time. If you want your tem to be more creative, there are things you can do that will help. If you all want to learn some new things together, knowing what they are and how learning works makes a big difference to how effective you will all be.
Small changes make a big difference. Voice leading in jazz has taught me that changing one small thing can have a powerful effect of taking you somewhere else. We think of “change” in organizations as a big planned thing, but in reality the constant change that arises from interactions between people creates all kinds of new situations. Leadership is about working with existing stability – for better or worse – and making small adjustments to see what can be done to take you closer to your preferred direction of travel. And making small changes means that, as you are improvising, you don’t over commit to an idea that has no future. Instead you are trying to open up new pathways to explore – called affordances in complexity – that are coherent with what is already happening, but might offer a better way to be.
Start with where you are. In jazz if you are playing in the key of B flat major, you should not play a line from the D major scale unless you really really really know what you are doing. One of the biggest lessons I have learned from complexity theory over the years is that the current state matters so much that any attempt to just show up and create something new in a workshop or a retreat with no regard to context is almost guaranteed to be a failure. In complexity, change happens along affordances in the current context, and fruitful change-making and leadership understands that. That is not to say that you cannot create completely new things out of the blue, but there are all kinds of reasons why this entails a massive energy cost to individuals, not the least of which relates to just how much tension and release people can take.
Tension and release helps us move from one place to another. Our work lives are full of moments of tension snd suspense followed by moments of release and stability. Cognitively, we can only stay in this so long and we all have different tolerances. Just like your endurance for listening to a free jazz piece that seems to have no release of stability at all – I love Cecil Taylor but your mileage may vary – folks at work will have a hard time staying in a state of constant tension, or indeed, constant stability. And even though good leaders give their teams and organizations a sense of stability over time, ignoring the changing context of one’s work can render a team irrelevant or ineffective, and in some cases, an entire company can find itself no longer in business. So as a leader, it’s a developed practice to dance with the paradoxes of challenge and rest, creativity and stability, outside thinking and standardization. Human beings live this journey and it is what helps us grow and evolve and form and break our identities and try new things and generally give meaning to our lives. That is a high art of leadership: to create what I’ve heard Jennifer Garvey Berger call “life-giving contexts.”
So there you go. The next time you meet someone who just cavalierly throws around the “leadership = jazz” metaphor, go a bit deeper. And I encourage you to really listen to great music to hear all these things at play. Knowing a bit about how music works helps us to understand why it matters to you, why you like what you like and why and how you are moved by it. Just like everything.
A piece of public art in Berne, Switzerland. Two chairs facing each other in dialogue, but chained to the walls behind them so they can never meet.
At the conclusion of Alicia Juarrero’s new book “Context Changes Everything” she writes:
“Neither puppets nor absolute sovereigns, human beings and the material and social forms of life they induce are true co-creators of their natural and social worlds. We serve as stewards of the metastability, coherence, and evolvability of both of these worlds. Matter matters. History matters. Social and economic policy matters. Most critically, however, because top- down causality as constraint makes room for meaning and value-informed activities, our choices and actions matter tremendously. In acting, we reveal the variables and the values that really matter to us, individually and to the culture in which we are embedded. We must pay attention to what we pay attention to; to which options we facilitate and promote and which we impede and discard. We must pay particular attention to what we do.
The influence of constraints has been dismissed because they do not bring about change energetically. Because they can be tacit and entrenched, their Escher-like characteristics also make them difficult to track. As background constants that go without saying, they have also been taken for granted. Foregrounding these enabling and governing conditions, so different from but as effective as forceful impacts, has been a central goal of this work.
Facilitating the emergence and persistence of validated coherence, of adaptable and evolvable interdependencies that can continue to form and persist in nature, among human beings and between nature and human- kind, is among our most compelling responsibilities. Facilitating the emergence and preservation of a thoroughgoing resilience that affords to both the natural and the human worlds the conditions not only to persist but especially to evolve and thrive is the most pressing moral imperative facing humankind today.
Facilitating the emergence and persistence of validated coherence, of adaptable and evolvable interdependencies that can continue to form and persist in nature, among human beings and between nature and human-kind, is among our most compelling responsibilities. Facilitating the emergence and preservation of a thoroughgoing resilience that affords to both the natural and the human worlds the conditions not only to persist but especially to evolve and thrive is the most pressing moral imperative facing humankind today.”
Alicia Juarrero, Context Changes Everything, p. 237
I think this is a really important point because it brings a moral imperative to understanding and working with complexity, something I have long felt is important for law makers, policy makers and citizens to understand. Without understanding the nature of complex systems, one is at a loss to effectively lead, craft policy or other solutions to emergent problems that plague our world. From planetary climate change to individual mental health, working with complexity dynamics – constraints, and, in my work, containers – is critical to approaching complex problems. It should go without saying I suppose, but it needs saying anyway. And it’s the reason I want these tools and perspectives out in the world in the hands of as many people as possible.
An interesting rabbit hole was opened for me thanks to Tim O’Reilly’s cheeky claim that the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt created the “unconference” in 1828.
Through a link on the OSLIST provided by Rolf Schneidereit I’ve just read Humboldt’s opening address at the “Meeting of German Naturalists and Physicians” held over several days and several locations in Berlin during September of 1878.
The invitation was to break down barriers between scientists from multiple disciplines to explore diverging opinions and ideas. As Harrison Owen did a century later when reflecting on his development of Open Space Technology, Humboldt drew his inspiration from the natural world for a conference that was primarily based on the exchange of oral ideas in small groups, across disciplines, in dialogue. Here are some remarks from his opening address:
The terms naturalist and doctor are therefore almost synonymous here. Chained by earthly ties to the type of lower structures, man completes the series of higher organizations. In its physiological and pathological condition, it hardly presents a class of its own. Anything that relates to this high purpose of medical studies and rises to general scientific views belongs primarily to this association. As important as it is not to loosen the bond, which embraces the equal exploration of organic and inorganic nature; yet the increasing size and gradual development of this institute will make it necessary to give section-by-section more detailed lectures on individual disciplines, in addition to the communal public meetings to which this hall is dedicated. Oral discussions are possible only in such narrower circles, only among men, who are attracted by equality of study. Without this kind of discussion, without a view of the collected, often difficult to define, and therefore contentious bodies of nature, the frank intercourse of truth-seeking men would be deprived of an invigorating principle. also to give more detailed lectures about individual disciplines in sections. Oral discussions are possible only in such narrower circles, only among men, who are attracted by equality of study. Without this kind of discussion, without a view of the collected, often difficult to define, and therefore contentious bodies of nature, the frank intercourse of truth-seeking men would be deprived of an invigorating principle. also to give more detailed lectures about individual disciplines in sections. Oral discussions are possible only in such narrower circles, only among men, who are attracted by equality of study. Without this kind of discussion, without a view of the collected, often difficult to define, and therefore contentious bodies of nature, the frank intercourse of truth-seeking men would be deprived of an invigorating principle.
Humboldt, Alexander von: Speech delivered at the opening of the meeting of German naturalists and physicians in Berlin, September 18, 1828. Berlin, 1828. p. 7-8.
So I don’t know that Humboldt invented the “unconference” as O’Reilly claims, but it is certainly an interesting early record of break-out groups being used to discuss findings and ideas in the spirit of Open Space and current good dialogue practice.
I love Phil Cass. He’s one of my closest friends in the world of the Art of Hosting and is a long-time collaborator. I’ve been lucky to work with him on some BIG work over the years, including a national Food and Society Conference for the Kellogg Foundation and a two-year scenario planning process for a national effort to change the conversation on palliative care in the United States. These days I am on faculty with his Physicians’ Leadership Academy in Columbus, Ohio, where I get to teach complexity to a couple of dozen incredible physicians every year. Plus, he has great taste in bourbon and music!
This is a really nice reflection on his years as CEO of the Columbus Medical Association, where he spent 16 years implementing participatory practices within the organization and in the community as the CMA spearheaded a massive effort to create affordable health care across Franklin County. He has led major state mental health organizations and is one of those guys that is built for senior leadership. OPur colleague Mary Alice Arthur sat him down to chat about what this form of leadership is like from the CEO’s office
implementing participatory practices has its challenges, and Phil’s story will cover ground that many leaders will find familiar around letting go of control, being afraid of vulnerability, delivering on mandates and worrying about seeming flakey. But he has lived the path, and it comes down to a few simple things to do regularly. Have a listen to the whole thing.