I’ve been going down a bit of a rabbit hole these past few mornings, looking at some commentary and writing about Kurt Lewin. Lewin, who died in 1947 was a psychologist whose theory and research had a tremendous influence on the modern movements or organizational development, action research, Gestalt theory, change management and group dynamics. To read his writings now is to read a person deeply interested in the complexity of human systems long before there was much language at all available to even discuss complexity.
His ideas – or more precisely other people’s ideas about his ideas – have been largely responsible for the way mainstream organizational change is conceived and thought about.
One example is the theory of change attributed to Lewin that is known as “Change As Three Steps” or CATS. This theory is reduced to an incredibly simplistic set of moves called “Unfreeze –> Move –> Refreeze”. Looks simple enough to use right away and authentic enough because it can be attributed to Lewin. Lots of consultancies uncritically use this model, and even a cursory glance at Lewin’s work would make it clear that he would never make change that simple or linear.
The fact is that Lewin never proposed this set of moves, and it’s not even clear if he ever used the terms “freezing and unfreezing.” The rabbit holes I’ve been down started with a paper from 2015 that showed up in my feed by Stephen Cummings, Todd Bridgman, and Kenneth G Brown called “Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management.” This is SUCH a great critique of how Lewin’s ideas have been misattributed and misused. Lewing is the victim of a classic strawman argument, where something simplistic is attributed to him, and then folks pile on saying that his work is simplistic. Meanwhile. the work he did do is ignored or lies unread.
And that is a tremendous shame, because that paper led me to look at some of Lewin’s writings again and some of the papers about him. I got especially interested in his work on Field Theory, which is a term used in the world I travel in quite a bit. The Presencing world is predicated on working with “social fields” and lots of facilitators talk about “sensing the field” and so on. In my experience the uses of the terms “field” feels like a softer, more approachable, but more mystical way of describing complexity in human systems. Some might call it a “fluffy bunny” approach to complexity, but anything applied without much rigour can be that.
Lewin’s work is really worth a long look. His work is important because it embeds human behaviour in a set of contexts that influence change and stability. This was pretty groundbreaking in Western thought especially thinking that was rooted in Cartesian theories of mind and behavioural psychology. Lewin called that context in which we are all embedded “the life-space” which represents a field of influences that creates what we might now call “affordances” for behaviour. Lewin’s work anticipates ecological psychology, the effects of trauma, anthro-complexity, systems theory and other approaches to organization, culture, and human behaviour.
The implications for this idea are pretty clear, and a 1991 paper by Malcolm Parlett called “Reflections on Field Theory” in the British Gestalt Journal articulates five principles of Field Theory that are quite useful for thinking about change. In that paper, Parlett reflects on five principles of Field Theory that are rooted in Lewin’s work and influenced by subsequent thinkers like Gregory Bateson, Gary Yontef and Carl Hodges. The principles are:
- The Principle of Organization which states that field are organized by what I would now call “constraints” and that changes to these organizing forces will result in changes to what happens within the field.
- The Principle of Contemporaneity says that what matters in the field is the present. While history helps to explain how the field is currently organized, there is no special causal weight given to actual events that have happened in the past. However, it is important to understand how a person in the present has made sense of those events because that is what guides behaviour. To me, this is an acknowledgement of the limitations of retrospective coherence for making sense of the present and also an important insight for trauma-informed practice.
- The Principle of Singularity which states that each situation is unique and therefore requires a unique response. This clearly acknowledges the limitations of best practices on dynamic fields. Generalizations are of limited use and every moment needs to be approached afresh to find the affordances of timing and opportunity that allow for some actions to be easier to accomplish than others.
- The Principle of Changing Process which acknowledges that the field is in constant change. This is why the metaphor of unfreezing – moving – refreezing is of such little utlilty. It is predicated on a knowable stability in a system that simply isnt’ present. If one’s change management strategy is predicated on that, one is walking into a dark alley of surprise with a dangerous and blissful assumption of certainty.
- The Principle of Possible Relevance which points to the fact that in an interconnected field of actors and effects, anything can be a locus for change. And because we just don;t know which points in a field will be the most relevant in any given time, Snowden’s approach of multiple, parallel safe-to-fail probes can teach us a lot about the potential for change that takes us in the desired direction of travel.
In 1991, I finished an honours thesis that tried to use several theories and approaches to traditional knowledge, postmodern ethnography, critical theory, sociology and organizational development theory to create a new way of looking at organizational culture in Indigenous organizations. It was admittedly a little pompous for an honours thesis. Still, it led me in the direction of curiosity toward complexity and epistemologies that were rooted in more holistic ways of knowing. It would have been great to have Parlett’s paper back then and a better understanding of Gestalt approaches, to make the case in the academy that such ideas were not ONLY rooted in the marginalized worlds of “traditional knowledge” at that time but were in fact a long-standing part of the western intellectual traditional of behaviour, culture, and action in organizations.
Ove the years I have been aware of Lewin’s influence in the fields in which I work, especially organizational development. But I have to confess that I didn’t take an active interest in his work because I saw how it was used, especially CATS. It turns out that Lewin never developed CATS as a theory, and his actual work is much more interesting, especially as a source of some of the vestigial ideas and language that is present in the “field” in which I work. His work deserves a broader reading for those of us wanting to ground our practices in the history of thinkers like him and Mary Parker Follett and others who dreamed us into being 100 years ago.
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Have you been bitten by the complexity bug yet?
I think after several years of facilitating, leading or organizing, most folks get curious about how things work. Why did that meeting go that way? How did our organizational culture become so bad despite so many good people here? Why can’t we seem to make a dent in this substance misuse issue in our town?
In the arts of working with groups of humans, very few of us have any kind of formal training in how to do it. What formal training exists in credentialed institutions tends to avoid a deep focus on complexity and emergence in favour of teaching the skills and tools that can bring various degrees of order to a situation.
These will serve you well for sure. But there comes a time when you are expected to run something, solve something or lead something when you just can’t put your finger on it, and all your best efforts stall. That’s when the curiosity gets triggered, and “Why?” becomes an active part of your vocabulary.
I have often said that Caitlin and I offer our company’s services in very specific circumstances: to do highly participatory work in highly complex environments. While those are specific contexts for our work, they are not uncommon contexts for our work. For both of us it would be impossible to do this work without a good grounding in theory that underlies our practice. I credit people like Harrison Owen, Toke Moeller, Dee Hock, Dave Snowden, Glenda Eoyang, and many other thinkers and practitioners for grounding my work in complexity and co-creative participation. Caitlin’s work is grounded in Byron Katie, Pema Chödron, and new thinking in cognitive and neuroscience research. Together, we have built a body of work that helps us to work with complex situations to support leadership, nudge cultures towards more life-giving contexts, and strengthen people and communities to live with and thrive in uncertainty.
We call the work Complexity Inside and Out because it acknowledges that every diabolical situation we find ourselves in has a tangle of dynamics that include what’s happening inside of ourselves and what is happening around us. The bad news is that there are no clear root causes for these situations and no way to predict what will happen next with a high degree of certainty. Still, the good news is that there are many places where people can make a difference to move situations in a preferred direction of travel, which to me is typically towards life-giving, affirming, meaningful activities and results. That’s what we aim to do with this program: increase your resourcefulness to support your work with humans in complex environments.
We’ve offered this program three times now to an incredibly diverse group of people working in many different fields, from health care, education, business, sport, philanthropy, Indigenous communities, faith communities, justice, social and environmental action and many other sectors. We’ve dived together into issues of power and equity as complex phenomena, looked at how cultures form and, stabilize and change, thought about evaluation and knowledge, explored leadership, worked on ways to address our own thinking and behaviours that compromise our abilities to design lead and co-create in uncertain situations.
We’d love for you to join us in this extended discovery. We’re proud of our program, which delivers a lot of content, practice, and a chance to learn it individually and with a cohort of buddies with whom you can explore these ideas in more detail.
Have a look at our website to learn more. Drop me an email or a comment here if you have questions. Come on the journey.
One of the hundreds of Open Space Technology Principles posters I have used in my time, this one from an Art of Hosting training in Minnesota in 2012, and designed by a team member.
NOTE: I edited the title of this to make it clear that I’m not calling Harrison a “shaman,” but rather trying to correct a meme that has been going around which has appropriated his work.
There is a post going around on the internet called “The Four Laws of the Shaman” or the “Four Laws of Spirituality.” The four laws are ascribed to some unknown shaman or some exotic culture like “Indian spirituality” or “Native American wisdom.” You can visit the links I’ve provided here to get a sense of the text. And, of course, this stuff is all over Facebook, where it gets shared endlessly. The earliest reference to these “Four Laws of a Shaman” I could find is from a Facebook page in 2011.
This kind of thing always gets my hackles up because it is possible that these sorts of sayings are attributable to a person who may be a specific teacher in a specific spiritual lineage or tribal community. Erasing their voice is a kind of colonization, so please don’t share these kinds of unattributed nuggets of wisdom unless you can quote a source.
In this case, however, the source is not a tribal elder from an exotic locale, but is Harrison Owen from Maryland, USA and the “Four Laws” are actually the original four principles of Open Space Technology. Here is one version of these “four laws of a shaman” from the posts:
- “The person who comes into your life is the right person”
- “What happens is the only thing that could have happened”
- “Anytime it starts is the right time.”
- “When something ends, it ends”
Anyone familiar with this blog or Open Space Technology will recognize right away that these are the original four principles of Open Space Technology, to whit:
- Whoever comes is the right people.
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
- Whenever it starts is the right time.
- When it’s over, it’s over.
(And there is a fifth principle that was added within the last decade or so which says “Where ever it happens is the right place” but I’m old skool and the truth is I forget that one all the time)
The original reference for these principles is Harrison’s “Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, first edition” originally published in 1992. The principles and the law of two feet are outlined in Chapter Five, pp 68-74. Before that, these principles were articulated in the late 1980s and published in the original set of notes Harrison wrote about the process sometime in 1987 or 1988. You can find that document at the worldwide archive of the Open Space Technology community of practice.
Harrison is incredibly generous with his work, and you can find much of his out-of-print work available at the Harrison Owen Library at openspaceworld.org. There is a library of his papers there too.
Sometimes, it is asserted that Harrison got these principles from a Liberian village. This isn’t true. Harrison did a stint in the US Peace Corps in the 1960s and documented village life in Liberia while working on community projects. You can read a beautiful photo essay of his observations in “When the Devil Dances” at the Internet Archive. He never claimed to see Open Space in action there. Rather, he was taken with how the community addressed a complex agricultural issue, and he cut his teeth on designing participatory processes in that work, which is documented in some detail in The Practice of Peace.
The Organizational Transformation conferences he helped run in the early 1980s (documented here) were the first use of the method, specifically at OT3 in 1985. His story of how he came to develop and use the method with many others is documented in his many papers and books, especially Expanding Our Now. He has been interviewed countless times, done TEDx talks and is always up for a chat, so if you want to hear the story from the horse’s mouth, you have abundant opportunity to do so.
Harrison is an incredible guy, a deep river of experience and knowledge. His folksy manner and his constant exhortations to simplify one’s facilitation practice don’t come close to giving the full breadth of his life’s work its due. He is a priest, a theologian, a scholar of Near East religion, myth and culture, a former bureaucrat, community organizer, consultant, teacher, and author, and his whole life has only partially been about Open Space. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t describe himself as a shaman but he was an important mentor in my life. He was the first person to introduce me to complexity theory, to spirit in organizations and to the dynamics of self-organization which transformed my facilitation practice.
So. The next time you see these “shaman’s laws” shared in your circles, feel free to bring these receipts and give Harrison his due.
In this video, Harrison Owen discusses the chaos that is disrupting the order we take for granted and begins to create a new order and a different world. Harrison has been saying much the same thing for his entire career, starting with his dissertation on Aramaic and associated mythologies and cosmologies. He has been a long-time student of the dance of chaos and order, and his development of Open Space Technology came from this lifelong inquiry.
i encountered Open Space first through an event that was hosted by Anne Stadler and Angeles Arien in 1995, and I met Harrison for the first time in 1998 at a one-day session at Simon Fraser University where he sat and taught about chaos and order, self-organization, organizational transformation and Open Space just through telling stories and sending us into a little bit of Open Space. Harrison’s work ignited two major threads in my life’s work: the facilitation of self-organizing dialogue processes, and a fiery curiosity about how complex systems work.
This talk opened a recent gathering of Open Space facilitators on the Power of Love, Not Knowing and Open Space. These are the stories and insights Harrison has been sharing for his whole career. What I love about him is his embrace of the fundamental simplicity of working with complexity and facilitating Open Space. It’s mind-boggling to me (and him) why people seem so predisposed to make Open Space far more complicated than it needs to be. We understand why: it’s about losing control and being unable to deal with the discomfort of uncertainty. Fear, power and ego come into play, and people lose the ability to act resourcefully.
It’s lovely to watch him teaching and encouraging people to do the simple things well and get out of the way of the work that groups of people can do.
Enjoy this video. He’s been a mentor and an inspiration for me for 25+ years. We do indeed love you, Harrison.
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.