These sea lions are afraid to be in the ocean, because a small family of orcas are nearby, and they hunt sea-lions for food. Years ago I was facilitating an Open Space meeting for people working in philanthropy, several of which were self-identified libertarians. They were unfamiliar with the process, and had the common misgivings about it seeming “unstructured.” People often confuse an empty container with a lack of structure, but in truth, Open Space meetings are highly structured. They offer a form and a process to help a group self-organize around issues of importance to the participants themselves. The …
I adore Alicia Juarerro’s work. So much so that I just watched a short video and spent the last hour writing about it. Here’s what I’m learning Alicia Juarrero is a philosopher whose thinking about causality, complexity, action, and emergence has been critical to some of the ways in which folks like Dave Snowden have thought about this field. Her book Dynamics in Action is a really important read, packed full of thinking about complex systems and constraints. It’s a hard book to get into – indeed advice I have had from others is “start in the middle” (a helpful …
Sunday was one of these magnificent days we get on the south coast of British Columbia at this time of year, where the deep summer makes a preview appearance with warm temperatures, bright sunshine, and the scent of berry blossoms and new grass wafting on the air. It’s just humid enough that it is warm in the shade, and there is no bite in the breeze by the water. So it was a perfect day to launch the kayaks. Our first paddle of the year took us out of Galbraith Bay on the northwest side of Bowen Island and had …
I love working with frameworks, of all kinds. Templates, canvases, questions, story spines…all the different kinds of ways of bringing a little form to confusion. As a person who specializes in complex facilitation, using a good framework is the wise application of constraints to a participatory process. It’s hard to get it right – sometimes I offer frameworks that are too tight and don’t allow for any creativity, and sometimes they are too open and don’t help us to focus. But when you are able to offer a group just the right degree of constraint balanced by just the right …
I want to draw your attention to this incredible post by Zhen Goh, a fellow Cognitive Edge practitioner, exploring what is happening to the formerly-named “Disorder” domain in Cynefin, now called “Confusion.” In renaming the domain Confusion, Dave has also divided it into two types of confusion: Aproretic and Confused. I have taken to describing these, respectively, this way: Aporetic means “at a loss” and indicates an unresolved confusion, or a paradox, which is just fine. Sometimes things need to remain a little murky for a while. “Confused” refers to the state of mind where you just aren’t getting it, …