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.
It’s not at all clear where the social media drip feed is at these days.
Here’s where you can find me on the web these days:
- Parking Lot (this weblog published since 2002)
- You can subscribe to this blog by entering your email in the window on the right hand sidebar.
- The RSS feed for Parking Lot.
- Linked In
- Mastodon
- Bluesky.
It’s all coming apart isn’t it? The social media landscape has become fragmented and disjointed. The main sites that still dominate the global system are starting to lose functionality. I have a love/hate relationship with social media, but these days the love is waning quickly. And so, I’m wondering where everyone is and what you’re using these days. Here’s my setup.
I have been on Facebook for a long time. In 2010 I worried that Facebook was becoming my blog as it was easy to cross post there and the discussion was much more engaging and robust. My primary concern was all of the great discussion happening there was happening inside a walled garden and that these great conversations were REALLY hard to find again as Facebook’s search and non-existent archiving systems meant that I could probably never find what I was looking for. I go to comment threads on my blog all the time, even some that are decades old. In 2019, I saw the fruition of Facebook’s ever more tightening of its control on content and the disastrous results of the algorithms that have guided fascism and hate into the mainstream all around the world. I can no longer automatically cross-post to Facebook, but I still have a presence there and you will find a link to this post there, with a general plea that you come back to the blog to discuss it.
The only real reason I still use Facebook is to keep up to date on my community’s Facebook group. But that is becoming a tiring litany of a few shrill voices complaining constantly about things with hardly any community building going on. A much better use of my time would be to show up at the pub once a week and catch up with friends. So I’m thinking of purging Facebook completely from my diet and just posting blog links there.
Twitter was tailor made for me. It was started by the guy that started Blogger and it took me a while to understand it as a micro-blogging platform and a marvellous source of real time news and experience. My use of twitter has changed through the years and I acquired about 4500 followers without really trying. It was a marvellous place to follow marginalized voices and for the past five or so years I only added feeds from BIPOC folks, queer folks, or women and that has radically shifted the view of the world I get. Sadly most of those voices have fallen silent in the past year as Elon Musk’s destruction of the app has resulted in the amplification of the voices I was trying to hear from less. Hate is now ubiquitous and reporting and blocking is a futile waste of time. Alos, many news organizations pulled away from twitter in the past year and the algorithms have destroyed it. My main twitter account is @chriscorrigan and there I post links to the blog and still amplify some interesting things, but since twitter disallowed the automatic positing of content from WordPress, my interest there is also waning. I have other accounts I run for a local soccer team that I am a part of and those accounts have been important ways we market the team and support our players. Increasingly our players have moved away from twitter and so this app is becoming less and less relevant. Still, it anchors a misfit community of people who love and are interested in lower level Canadian women’s and men’s soccer, and without it at this point there is really no other way to stay engaged.
I never really got into Linked It and it’s yet another algorithm driven networking site. Of late it has been a more interesting place to drop in on because there are some professional communities of practice that exist there. But it’s like going to a job fair to look for new ideas. It is so transactional and I can’t really get the din of hustle out of my ears when I’m scrolling there, so it doesn’t hold my interest. However, I still post links to blog posts there on my page.
Mastodon
I joined Mastodon during last year’s great twitter exodus. I like it a lot. It is now the place that I use as a micro blog, and on and off I will compile links from my Mastodon page and publish them here. It is the closest thing to a 2002 blog I have found and it doesn’t have an important role in my sharing ecosystem. However, not a lot of folks are there, and it tends to be hard to figure out how to use at first. Nevertheless, it is not a corporate-owned site, there are no ads and as a part of the Fediverse (a self-organized network of web sites and applications) it tends to be a much nicer experience than being subjected to content an algorithm wants to feed me.
Bluesky
I just joined Bluesky and this will be my first post there. Because it looks and feels so much like twitter, it may well fill the niche, but I suspect that it is going to be a while until we see something with widespread use acting as a public commons. Apps and sites that run in the Fediverse SHOULD be that commons but I suspect that it will take private capital to scale something that everyone uses so ubiquitously, and that’s not really a commons at all. Private capital eventually wants an ROI so it remains to be seen what that it will be. I do think also, that folks have moved on from twitter like apps and that the way we are all using social media is changing.
Net News Wire
That brings me to old faithful: the RSS feed reader. Since it was invented, RSS has been the bext standard out there for creating one’s own feeds and channels of content. All WordPress and Blogger sites and Substacks and Medium pages are RSS enabled. Using a tool like NetNewsWire to aggregate these sites and create a scroll gives me the best content. If I have time to spend reading online content, I will read my NNW feeds. I have feeds for blogs related to my professional work, to music, jazz guitar lessons, soccer, and critically important, news. With Facebook and Twitter going silent with respect to Canadian news, I get my fix through the RSS feeds that news organizations publish, along with a daily listening to the CBC. I hope that mainstream news organizations will reincarnate their RSS feeds again. It may be a geeky cul-de-sace for us pre-Facebook web users, but nothing has beaten RSS for delivering great content. All that remains is for people to create it outside of the walled gardens. You can subscribe to this site’s RSS feed here.
Everything else
I use Instagram a little to stay in touch with our TSS Rovers soccer players, because that’s what they use. I was too old to get on Snapchat, and I’m not down with any other social media apps. It’s getting to be too much as it is, and I find myself increasingly only publishing to these places and not engaging. THIS is the place to engage.
So if you are out there on any of these sites, or you know some great sites, feeds, pages or accounts that we should all be following, drop them in the comments. I’m curious what you are using these days.
Back in the late 1990s, when Toke Møller and Monica Nissen were mentoring a group of Kaos Pilot students, they went to visit Dee Hock in California to learn about his ideas of the chaordic organization and the chaordic lenses that help organizations stay focused on a minimal necessary structure that allows for coherence and emergence. It was a useful contribution to the budding set of participatory leadership practices that were emerging amongst the early Art of Hosting developers.
After that, Dee Hock’s chaordic lenses got expanded a little and became the “Chaordic Stepping Stones” which we have developed further in the Art of Hosting community, so-called because they slow down the planning conversation and allow one to find secure places to stand in the flow and swirl of planning in complexity. The stepping stones give you places to rest and look around with a little bit of intention and provide you and the people you are working with with a set of conversations that help to make some decisions/ I’ve often described it as a project management tool for the times when “you don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t know where you’re going.”
One of the things that distinguishes it from other planning processes is that we don’t start from vision or purpose; instead, we start from a sense of the current moment, what was called the need, and what I now call “the necessity.” Naming this is critical because current conditions limit what is possible. Too often, strategic planning starts with aspirations, which can either be so abstract that they are useless for guiding concrete action and decisions, or they are aspirations without paying attention to whether it is even possible to move from here to there.
Necessity is embedded in the present moment. When someone feels like “we have to do something,” they are responding to something in the present moment. It is always the first conversation I have with a client: what is happening right now that compels us to do something? In this sense, necessity is truly the mother of intention – a phrase that came to me this morning and is too good not to comment on. Intention – what we mean to do, what we think should happen, and what we want to commit to, provides the affordances that make a purpose concrete and avoids the aspirational aspect of purpose statements that avoid the reality of the situation and take us into a process that is too vague and diffuse to be effective.
PS: I have an online course on chaordic design you can take on-demand that goes into this planning tool in more detail.
The chapel at the Statenberg Manor, when we finished cleaning it out in 2013, and after it has been restored.
The global Art of Hosting community is an eclectic group of people from all over the world who share an inquiry about how to bring more participatory processes to a massive variety of challenges they face with their communities and organizations. There is no formal organization, but the community is a network loosely connected through a website, animated through Zoom calls, an active Facebook group and face-to-face gatherings of practitioners who occasionally meet to forge connections and share practices. One such important gathering happens next week.
As an approach to dialogue and leadership, the Art of Hosting itself is very simple: it is a framework that connects the practices of self-hosting and presence, hosting others, fostering participation, and enabling co-creation. This simple framework has formed the basis of an inquiry and practice that has evolved over the past 25 years or so in many places all over the world. To hold together the essence of this approach, a group of experienced practitioners evolved to steward the Art of Hosting and ensure that there was some consistency in how we talk about the practice and how we connect practitioners so that the global community can thrive, share learnings and be a resource to each other. SInce about 2008 I have been one of those stewards, responding to an invitation from my friend Toke Møller to do so after a stewards gathering in Nova Scotia.
As my friends and colleagues begin to gather in Slovenia for a larger global gathering next week, I took a few minutes to write about some key lessons I have taken from my work as a steward of this practice over the past couple of decades. This letter reflects on lessons from a similar gathering ten years ago at the Statenberg Manor, where the present gathering will be held, and I share it here for posterity.
Hello, colleagues, friends and fellow practitioners.
I want to send my greetings from the traditional territory of the Squamish people off the west coast of Canada from the island of Nexwlelexw, also known as Bowen Island, nestled in the waters of Howe Sound. Since 2004 we have hosted dozens of Art of Hosting gatherings on our Island or in the nearby City of Vancouver, or, during the pandemic, online. We have built a deep community of practice in this part of the world and the Art of Hosting has found its way into many aspects of civil society, local government, Indigenous Nations, and community. we have a number of local stewards in this region who offer training and use these practices for good in the world.
I was at Statenberg in 2013 and I fondly remember visiting with friends, connecting with other practitioners and learning a little bit about how the Art of Hosting community was spreading its wings across the world. I co-hosted a smaller steward’s gathering in 2010 here on our Island, where we engaged with the same kinds of questions about stewardship, leadership and essence under the watchful gaze of a thousand-year-old Douglas fir tree and with the visit of a bear who reminded us of the powerful effect that a well-hosted conversation can have in a world full of uncertainty.
I reflected on the biggest lesson I took away ten years ago at the gathering of 2013. When we arrived on the site we saw that the chapel had close to a meter of dust and dirt and rubble covering the stone floor. it seems that for more than 250 years nobody had bothered to sweep it out, and our children, who got very bored at the important conversations their parents were having, began a competition to see who could remove the most wheelbarrows full of debris from that Chapel. Over the course of the week, they set up a scoreboard on a flip chart at the entrance to the chapel and every time somebody shovelled out another wheelbarrow of debris they put a point next to their name. I don’t remember the actual scores but I do remember that hundreds of wheelbarrows of debris got moved from the chapel and dumped elsewhere on the grounds. The chapel was so clean by the end of the week that the priest came up from Makole with a number of villagers and reconsecrated the chapel. In this space of five or six days, many small human beings and a few big ones came together to reclaim and restore a sacred space and leave a legacy in place as a gift of return to the community that had hosted us.
I will always remember that particular act as the defining moment of stewardship. leave what you have found better than when you found it and return it to those who gifted it to you in the first place, your descendants and those who are yet to come. when you visit the chapel in that space make sure that Franc tells you the story and the photos of what it looked like before, and reflect on your role as a steward of a practice that supports life-giving spaces and conversations to make our world a better place.
When people ask me what it is I’m stewarding within the Art of Hosting community, it’s very simple. it’s that I hold the memory that a global community of us discovered value in a framework that connects presence, participation, hosting and co-creation. we all have many different ways of doing that but the idea that these four approaches to life and facilitation and learning and leadership are connected and interdependent is the essence that forms the basis of the art we practice. it’s that simple ground upon which we meet and it’s that simple ground that provides us a context for conversations that will enliven you and challenge you, cause you to find new mates and reignite the love and friendship you share with old ones.
There are two key lessons I have taken from this practice over the past 20 years of stewardship. The first is a quote from my friend Thomas Arthur, who spoke these words at the beginning of a Shambhala Institute faculty retreat years ago. Speaking as an artist, he channelled the urgency of the times and said: “If you have a gift, give it now.” This is not the time for any of us to hoard or hold on to things that can benefit all of us so give your gifts with energy and unconditional love.
The second lesson I’ve learned Is one that served me well in my life at every stage of my work. and that is “Support is Life.” None of us exist without the support of others and we must do everything we can to support the people building the world we want to see.
So in closing, I wish you to have a beautiful gathering in that incredibly powerful place. I hope you will learn, I hope you will make deep, lasting friendships, I hope you will be challenged, and I hope you leave there with a strong sense of what your gifts are to give away and how you can support others to host a better world into being.
Thank you for gathering and being a part of this community of practice and practitioners. Have a great time.
Last night we were treated to an incredible concert here on Bowen Island by Susie Ungerleider and Sarah Jane Scouten, two of Canada’s finest singer-songwriters, lyricists who simply and directly reach for the soul, remind you of things you have loved and lost, of times that have rolled on and of places that hold the heart no matter how they change. Sarah Jane is Bowen Island born and raised, brought up in a family and a community that soaked her in folk music, theatre and language. She lives in Scotland now and this is the first time she has been back to play in her own small town in about seven years. I warned her on Facebook that she would be facing a love bomb of appreciation when she took to the stage at the Tir na nOg Theatre, and she was.
Susie Ungerlieder is a long-time mainstay on the Canadian music scene, and she has come out from under the cover of “Oh Susanna” as if, after 35 years, her alter ego in the song “My Boyfriend” steps into bringing the soul.
These two are accomplished crafters of exquisite song. Simply chords, folk/country/Americana idiom, but distinctly west coast Last night in concert they traded songs back and forth, in a barely amplified setting, both offering only the sparsest of guitar accompaniment to their lyrics. The songs are simple but powerful and evocative. From Sarah Jane’s lament of a World War 1 mother’s labours to Susie’s conjuring of the landmarks and zeitgeist of 1980s Vancouver, back when it used to rain and Teenage Head played in dingy clubs in East Van and the Town Pump turned you away for not having ID. What delivers them are their voices, and for both, the intensity of being back on home soil, singing songs that resonate just that little bit deeper with an audience who knows their place and knows a little of what has formed these songs.
It was a really special evening, and I’m thankful that one of this Island’s prodigal daughters returned to us for a night with stories from her travels, and a curious and incisive eye for what makes us all tick.