George Zawadzki, photo from Bowen Island Undercurrent
Every community has larger than life characters and it seems like the smaller the community the larger these characters loom. I live on a small island of just under 5000 people and last week, on November 16, we lost a lion-hearted beauty.
George Zawadzki was probably the biggest man on Bowen Island. He stood at least 6’5″ and was a BIG man. He used to drive a small car around that had a permanent lean to the left. The first time my kids met him, he was coming up the driveway with a friend to do some window cleaning for us, and they came running into the house at the appearance of this veritable bear of a man.
But if George had the biggest body on Bowen Island, he may well have also had the biggest heart. He cared so deeply for this place and he fell in love with all the characters here and he poured himself into creating relationships. He drove a taxi, and was an enduring member of a poker game (and he took a crack at a professional career at the game too), twice ran for Council, and made a famous local film of Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang which included a huge cast of local characters, almost all the children on the Island, everyone with a long beard and with George himself playing the Hooded Fang.
In 2014 when he ran for office, he set up a unique, rolling, all-Candidates meeting on Facebook, and asked me to moderate it. My job was to elicit complex open ended questions from the community and posed them to candidates on Facebook so we could see folks working together in real time. I like to think that initiative helped change the character of Council after a couple of really divisive and toxic terms. We learned a lot and I documented it here.
His insatiable curiosity about the people and place here caused him to start a local TV channel on YouTube in 2008, back in the day when you could only upload 10 minute segments. As a Toronto boy of a similar vintage to me, it was instantly recognizable that he was inspired by the 1980s and early 1990s videographers of CityTV – a crew of journalists who carried cameras around the city interviewing regular folks and covering interesting neighbourhood happenings from BEHIND the camera rather than in front of it.
So while the island was going through a very interesting set of changes, George started uploading video to the Bowen TV channel on YouTube where it lives to this day.
Bowen TV captures a moment in time when things were changing in all kinds of ways. Artisan Square and Village Square were well established, giving a new shape to our village. Bowen traditions like the polar bear swim, Light up the Cove and Hallowe’en were still solid community fixtures, political debates raged around development, environmental preservation and planning, and affordable housing. There had been a period from the 1960-1990s which was post-Union Steamship company-town era and the island was still a small and quiet place. Starting about the early 2000s that changed, and lots of new folks (me included) arrived bringing all kinds of changes with us. Some good, some bad, as usual.
Bowen TV captured that era when that general shift was in full swing and his videos span that time, introducing newcomers and featuring old timers. It is a rich historical legacy of a moment in our history lovingly curated by a man that adored this place and was curious about where it was going. He considered it the most important work of his life.
We are going to miss George around here. A larger than life hole has been left in our collective community heart.
It’s been a fair few interesting weeks. A heavy work schedule with some important in person facilitations, combined with steady online work and teaching and an extended family health emergency is stretching our resources around here. So here’s a little news.
Social media rethink
On the social media front I’m still active on Twitter, and just waiting to see what happens there. But I have also opened a Mastodon account and I like it better. Twitter was created in an era where the speed and interaction and brevity of text messaging met blogging. Mastodon feels much more like blogging in that we all have accounts that hosted in different places and you can follow each other. it’s like Twitter meets blogging plus an RSS feed. Consider your friends’ Mastodon accounts as mini blogs rather than twitter accounts. At its best, Twitter is great for banter and conversation and has a feel of a transparent text conversation. But it’s under the control of a single unstable genius at the moment and demonstrating why we should not trust critical infrastructure to single individuals or companies. Musk is messing with Twitter as if someone got hold of the power grid and decided to create a whole new type of power generation by firing all the hydro dam technicians and trying to find nuclear scientists to keep the old system going and also get a new one up and running right away.
Twitter was robust. Robust things fail catastrophically. Musk is in danger of taking the compancecy dive into chaos from which return is neight guaranteed nor cheap.
So just stay here by subscribing to this blog’s RSS feed or subscribing by email over there on the right sidebar, or add me at Mastodon @chriscorrigan@mastdn.ca. I’m still on Facebook and LinkedIn but I don’t interact much in those places.
What I’m doing besides work
I might start sharing some different content here, and probably will do so as well at Mastodon too, so in addition to posts here on complexity and facilitation and working with groups, you might start seeing some stuff relating to other passions I am interested in. That includes building Canada’s first ever supporter owned semi-pro soccer team, TSS Rovers, who won a men’s championship in our fourth season and are on our way to play pro-teams in Canada’s national championship for the Voyageur’s Cup. If you are in Canada you can buy a share here and be a part of history. Our teams play in the third level of men’s soccer in Canada and the highest level of women’s soccer.
You may know I am a long time amateur musician and I sing and play liturgical music, folks songs, Irish music and popular music and I have started expanding my guitar chops by studying and learning jazz guitar over the past few years. That has married two passions – jazz and guitar – that I have kept separate for most of my life because the thought of getting them together was overwhelming. But I’m having the time of my life playing this music. Enjoy what I am enjoying. Here’s a Canadian guitarist I am studying, Reg Schwager and legendary bassist Don Thompson playing Everything Happens To Me.
So those are a couple of things that might seem to pop up here out of the blue.
Some cool stuff to share
Finally, I continue to read and earn about my professional craft and lately I have come across some hight quality recourses that I HAVE to share with you all:
- A snapshot of REOS’s scenario planning methodology recently used in Australia and Aotearoa to address future wildfire issues. With thanks to my mate Geoff Brown, a member of that team. It’s so good I’ve added it to the Facilitation Resources page.
- A toolkit for starting up communities of practice from my friend Nancy White, who is just the best there is at this stuff.
- A reader-focussed report assessment tool from Fresh Spectrum that will help you keep your audience in mind so that the reports you are writing get used. This is a great harvesting tool.
- A nice six step process for strategic planning from my Aussie Art of Hosting mates at the Jeder Institute.
- A for you theory-heads, a paper by Albert Linderman on Sense-making Methodologies and Ethnography published at the Spryng.io website. I’ve started in on some of Dervin’s work on this. It’s heavy going in a good way.
So there you go. What have you been up to?
My shoes are covered in dust. The entire island is dry and crackly underfoot. We have had no significant rainfall since July 8 here ibn Atl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound which is highly unusual for us. After a very wet fall and spring last year, we had a lovely summer but it is as if someone left hom without unplugging it and a persistent ridge of high pressure offshore has ensured that any low pressure systems trundling across the North Pacific have been diverted north.
This is our rainy season here on the west coast. By now we typically would have a fairly consistent set of front and lows that would have passed over us dropping rain and more importantly filling the creeks and capping the mountains with the first brushes of snow. A steady flow of rain in the creeks and rivers gives the returning slamin something to hone in on as they find their way back to their creeks to spawn and die. We have had nothing. The land is dry. The lakes are shrinking. The rivers are a mere trickle.
in the last few days our inlet has been filled with smoke from wildfires burning to the south and east of us. The GOOD news with that is that the wind is changing and a shift in the weather patterns is in the offing; by Friday we should have our first 100mm rainstorm of the year. The fires will not survive that rainfall, but I’m curious to see how the land does. The soil is loose and dusty. Trees are drought weakened and the wash of the soil into the rivers will make it hard for the fish. Silty stream beds are not good for salmon spawn.
In the seas around us the waters are full of humpbacks and orcas. We have seen a gradual resurgence of marine mammal life in our inlet over the past 40 years, a phenomenon that has been enabled by good marine stewardship and documented by my friend Pauline Le Bel in her book Whale In The Door.
On Sunday, taking a deep day of rest, Caitlin and I chased some humpback whale sightings along the shoreline. A friend was out in his boat sending me texts about a pair if humbacks that were moving fast along N’chay’ch Nexwlelexwm, the south shore of our island that represents the boundary between the Squamish Nation territory and the rest of the world. The whales were travelling around that edge and rounded the corner of Cowan Point heading into Seymour Bay where they stopped and rested and fed for a while. We watched them for about an hour. The bay had a few boats who were being respectful and compliant with the marine mammal regulations. there was a sea lion spyhopping along, a pair of marbled murrelets, migrating geese and mergansers and both short bill and glaucous winged gulls. It was divine. Quiet, calm, full of life.
At one point the whale came up next to my friend’s boat and he snapped this photo above. That’s me on the shoreline in front of the leftmost garage door, watching through my binoculars with awe and reverence and respect. My buddy was in tears as this whale blessed him with its presence.
These times we are living in.
Dave Snowden has a new post up this week in which he gives us a situational snapshot about a big chunk of his body of work he has been developing for a number of years now. I love these posts because every so often Dave publishes them to consolidate teaching he has done and methods he has been working on in practice. They have the energy of “okay…I think I’ve got something here. Check it out.”
I alos love these posts becasue they always offer me something to dive further into and ways to improve my own practice.
So first go and read his post, “Estuarine mapping first edition.“
The metaphor of an estuary is powerful in many ways and round where I live, I get to hang out in estuaries. These are geographic features which are critical habitats and essential incubators for life in near-shore marine coastal ecosystems. The Estuary pictured above is at the end of Mannion Bay below where I live. At one end Killarney Creek flows through a lagoon and over a weir into a tidal estuary that experience 4.5 meter tidal ranges. Sometimes the water flows upstream into the lagoon, making the water there brackish and changing the kinds of life that lives and thrives there. At other times of the water rushing down the river pushes fresh water far out into the bay, delivering debris and food to the marine creatures that only live in the salt water of the bay. As Dave points out in his post “In an estuary (but not a delta) the water flows in and flows out. There are things you can do only at the turn of the tide. There may be granite cliffs which you only have to check every decade or so, sandbanks that are checked daily and so on.” And so the context determines what is possible, and the context changes, so cadence and rhythm and timing are important.
A couple of things stand out for me in Dave’s post, and I want to explore these in my practice in the next ittle while. First Dave has been talking about his typology of constraints for quite a while now, and that’s been massively influential in my own work. Dave’s typology currently is:
- Rigid or fixed, like a sea wall or dyke
- Elastic or Flexible
- Tethers – like a climbing rope they snap into place when you need them
- Permeable – some things can get through
- Phase shift – like Roe v Wade, there is a process in the system which can produce a sudden significant change
- Dark constraints – a reference to dark matter, we can see an effect but not what is creating the said effect
These are helpful and they help me think HOW to change the constraints in a system. When I introduce people to constraints I talk about first of all connecting and containing constraints (a distinction I also learned from Dave). I then break these down a bit further using material I learned from Dave and Glenda Eoyang in their works on containers, work I developed into a book chapter and a paper (original in English, updated in Japanese ) a number years ago. Connecting constraints influence the actions of agents as they relate to each other. and then we explore different kinds of constraints. Connecting constraints are connections and exchanges between agents in a system. Containing constraints are the attractors and boundaries in a system. And human systems have a special kind of constraint called identity that other complex system don’t have and that makes the field of anthro-complexity a distinct branch.
I teach these in a kind of scaffolded way (thanks Ann Pendelton and Dave for yet ANOTHER useful metaphor) by first having people look for patterns and then ask what constraints are keeping those patterns in place. Helpful patterns can be stabilized by tightening constraints, and unhelpful patterns can be broken by loosening constraints. We then start to find connections, exchanges, attractors, boundaries and identities and look for ways to shift them.
The problem with a simple scheme like that is that makes it seem like constraints are obvious and easy to spot and work with. So the scaffolding I use invites people to look for them specifically, but as Dave points out in the post, “The purpose of a typology is to see things from different perspectives not to allocate things to types – always a difficult thing to get across.” So what I’m taking from Dave’s work here is to move people quickly from the idea that “there are five kids of constraints” into a much more subtle and less easily defined and delineated set of constraints, because sometimes a connection is an attractor and a boundary is indistinguishable from an exchange and is also an identity, etc. You see the problem. We use a form to help people find these five, but in strategic work, we abandon that form after the first iteration of working with constraints. Complexity workers need to be good at finding subtle, context-specific constraints and TYPES of constraints. Dave’s post opens up possibilities for finding lots of different ways to name, think about and work with these things.
So I’m excited by the post and the links and thinking and it’s timely as we have a third iteration of the Complexity from the Inside Out course starting this week (do register if interested) and so I’ll have a chance to drop some of this thinking into my own practice imminently.
This weekend is Thanksgiving in Canada, and with that in mind, I want to once again lift my hands and gratitude to Dave for being so generous and uncompromising in his thinking and mentorship. I’ve learned an immense amount from him and continue to do so.
In our Complexity from the Inside Out program, we do a session on evaluation, looking at some of the implications that complexity has for traditional models of monitoring and evaluation. This is especially an issue in the non-profit world where organizations find themselves managing complexity while being subject to requirements from funders that treat their operations as if they were ordered and predictable.
It is common for participants in these sessions to ask the question “Complexity is all good, but how do we actually deal with the funding bodies that want us to measure everything and create targets?”
Well, this report from a series of conversation convened by the UN Development Program offers a helpful starting point for having these conversations with funders. Here are some of their framing questions:
- How can we measure in ways that enable and incentivize learning and adaptation?
- For whom and why do we measure (recognizing that measurement is often an extractive activity done to satisfy a donor rather than something with the primary objective of learning and empowering local change agents)?
- What should we measure when we are just starting out (e.g. at the intervention design stage) given we may not know what solutions or success will look like? What is the role of baselines and how do we change measures as we learn and adapt?
In my experience, having these conversations early on is critical so that a grantee working on a complex project and their funders can create an evaluation approach that is coherent with the work they are doing. In this article you will find many good conversations starters and framing ideas to help start this co-creation without alienating anyone in the conversation. It pays to meet people where they are at, and that includes funders and folks that are wedded to ordered approaches to evaluating change work despite the reality that those approaches might not work, or even be harmful, to a complex project.