It is “Juneuary” on the west coast of British Columbia, a time of year when low-pressure systems of cold air break off the jet stream and drift down the coast providing unstable weather, rain, and cloudy days. It’s like a return to winter.
It reminds me that walking in the mountains in the winter, or indeed during these wet and unpredictable weeks, can result in getting lost in fog. When that happens, your response to the situation becomes very important if you are to make choices that don’t endanger lives.
My colleague Ciaran Camman was presenting on a webinar with a client today and used a lovely metaphor to describe developmental evaluation relating to being lost in a fog. I’m always looking at ways of describing this approach to evaluation with people because it is so different from the kinds of evaluation we are used to, where someone external to a process judges you on how well you did what you said you were going to do. Having said that, I like to introduce people to “developmental evaluation” by telling them it is actually just a fancy way of talking about what people do to make everyday decisions in changing and unfamiliar contexts. In some ways, you could call it “natural evaluation.”
Ciaran used the example of navigating in a fog. When the cloud descends on you, you best slow down for a minute and think about your next step. You have a sense of your destination – a nice warm house and a cup of tea – but suddenly what you thought you knew about the world has disappeared.
You can manage for a short time based on the last picture you had of your surroundings, but after a few meters of walking, you will be in a very different place, and you need to carefully probe your way forward. As you find the path again, you can move with a bit more confidence, as as the trail fades, you will adjust and slow down to sense more carefully.
Developmental evaluation is indistinguishable from adaptive action. The two sets of processes form an interdependent pair: you simply can’t do one without the other. How you choose to developmentally evaluate – including what you consider to be important, your axiology – is critical to how you will gather information and what decision you will take to adjust your action. Walking in fog towards a warm cup of tea is fairly straightforward. Creating new forms of community safety in a world dominated by racism and social and economic injustice is rather more difficult.
How do you explain this to folks?
When you are lost
It’s my birthday on Saturday. Join me in donating to:
- Ta7talíya Michelle Nahanee’s work on Decolonizing Practices
- Teara Fraser’s work to fly essential services and goods to indigenous communities during the pandemic
On Saturday it is my 52nd birthday. It seems to be a feature of getting older that birthdays and other gift-giving holidays become less about the stuff and more about the relationships.
For this birthday, I’d like to invite any of my readers, friends, and colleagues to join me in donating funds to two local indigenous women who are doing powerful work for others. We can gift to them and through them to support a better world. For my birthday this year, I’m donating $200 to each of their initiatives and I invite you to join me and give what you can. In these times, and perhaps always, the work of indigenous women is critical to support.
One of the gifts I receive all the time is the gift of living in Squamish territory on a little island called Nexwlélexwem (Bowen Island) in the Squamish language. I am grateful to live here and grateful to have so many friends and colleagues from the Squamish Nation who have schooled me on the cultural landscape that surrounds me.
The word “Chenchénstway” is a Squamish word meaning “to lift each other up” and it’s a key value in Squamish life. It is one of the values that permeate the landscape where I live and it’s the core of the work of one of my friends, Ta7talíya (Michelle Nahanee), who has assembled a powerful collection of teaching and practices in the service of decolonization. Her work is opening eyes and building capacity and she holds it with the energy of a matriarch. Donating to Michelle’s work helps her to develop new resources and grow the impact of her work. You can learn more about her work and offer a donation at the Decolonizing Practices website. You can also sign up for a 4-week online program there, so consider that too.
The other woman I’m donating to this year is Teara Fraser. Teara is a pilot and an entrepreneur who is single-mindedly focused on indigenous women’s leadership development, including her own. She created the first indigenous-women owned airline, Iskwew Air, which flies out of Vancouver. During the pandemic, along with the Indigenous LIFT Collective, she has been raising funds to fly essential goods and services to remote indigenous communities along our coast.
I’ll be donating to that initiative this year too and hope you will join me in supporting this work.
I’m grateful to be living and working on Squamish land, and deeply grateful for the work these two women do in the world.
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 process invites a radical blending of passion for a subject and responsibility for doing something about it.
Witnessing the empty agenda wall and the circle of chairs, one of the libertarian participants complained that the lack of structure was making him nervous and he needed to be told what we were going to talk about, what the outcomes were going to be and what would be done on the day. I teased him a little about being uncomfortable with freedom, to which he responded “well yes, THIS kind of freedom.”
That was interesting.
Harrison Owen has called this common experience “freedom shock” and it is what happens when people who are used to be told what to do suddenly get the freedom to take responsibility for their own actions. The way to deal with it is to keep asking people what they care about and what they would like to do about it. Fortunately, Open Space provides a mechanism for others who feel the same way to find each other, so that you are not alone, and can connect your ideas to other people’s.
As the restrictions on our societies are lifted gradually, I am seeing examples of “freedom shock.” Although many of us bristle at being contained and constrained, for many of us, the orderliness of structure and rules he’s us to cope with uncertainty and fear. When those rules are loosened, the become principles, and it is up to each person to interpret those principles according to context and need. We go from being confined in our homes with only sanctioned reasons and times for leaving, to being allowed to get out into public while “maintaining social distance and being aware of others.”
Everyone will interpret these new principles differently, and there is conflict and anxiety around whether one is interpreting the order more broadly that another person.
My friend Ciaran Camman observed this morning that we are comfortable when we can feel the boundary. That seems true for me too. When I know what is allowed and what isn’t, I can relax into being in a small space. When the boundary is more permeable and less clear I can get anxious about what is allowed, what I am supposed to be doing and whether others are doing right. And in these times, the consequences of doing it wrong can be devastating, so there is no amount of risk and pressure in doing this.
Whether it’s COVID or working with containers in facilitated sessions or workplaces, the halting anxiety of freedom shock is a natural reaction to loosening constraints. As you become a skillful complexity practitioner and realize that loosening constraints is one way to influence a system, be aware of this emotional rebound.
And on a personal level, remember that you can always shrink your own constraints inside a larger system if you need more comfort and security. The way we handle too much freedom is by choosing limitations that help us make order of all the possibilities. I wear a mask in public, and although I am allowed to be out and about more, I’m choosing to stay home as much as possible, still treating myself as an asymptomatic carrier of COVID, despite not knowing if I have had it. These personal heuristics allow me to be comfortable, confident and live by my principles. I’m glad things are opening up, but aware too that I have come to be comfortable functioning in a small bubble and a part of me is nervous at this moment.
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 enabling constraint) – but worth the read.
But if reading philosophy is not your idea of a fun pandemic activity and you’d like a tiny primer into her work, I strongly encourage you to watch this 27-minute video of her presenting on emergence, constraints, and closure. Watch it first and then come back to these notes, for I am going to summarize her ideas and bring them into more common applications. I’ll probably end up carving massive holes in her thinking – so feel free to correct my takes here – but here’s what got me thinking.
Juarrero presents on three main topics, emergence and constraints, context-free and context-sensitive constraints, and closure.
Emergence
Here are her main points:
- Nature uses constraints to generate emergence and sustain it. Constraints both limit and enable.
- Evolution selects for resilience, adaptability, and evolvability.
- Resilience is sustained by micro-diversity.
- Ecosystems are sustained by distributed control rather than governing control. The key is in the links.
- The emergence of novel practices – innovation – cannot be caused, but novelty can be enabled. You do this by catalyzing conditions that allow innovation to occur.
- Think of constraints as phenomena that change the likelihood of things, and the probabilities of what is going on.
SO the conclusion from this section is pretty straightforward. One cannot simply say to people “INNOVATE!” and expect emergence to happen. In order to create the conditions for novelty, one must change the interaction between the people in the system. You can do that in any number of ways, by changing a constraint. Everyone will be familiar with what happens when you are given a task with a constrained amount of time in which to complete it. The pressure of a deadline sometimes creates the conditions for novel practice. By cutting your available time in half, you will discover that a solution that requires an hour will not work, and you may discover that you can find a way to do the task in 30 minutes.
Folks are. discovering this all the time right now. Being forced to work from home is suddenly creating all kinds of novelty and innovation. Many people are discovering that the commute is simply not worth it. Some are finding that they cannot do their work from home and so must find new jobs or new ways to do what they did before. Being forced to isolate has created the conditions for emergence and innovation, and not all of it is successful. Complexity-informed governments have created temporary universal incomes to enable people to be safe to fail. This is not the time to force people to “stand on their own two feet.” If you want people to stay at home, you have to enable them to do that in order to disrupt the pandemic, otherwise, they will have no choice but to head out looking for jobs, thereby increasing the spread of COVID-19.
Context-free and context-specific constraints
This is important and dense stuff, and Juarerro gets this from Lil Gatlin who wrote about it as far back as 1971, but here are the main points:
- In a system, the probability that something will happen vs. something else happening is due to constraints.
- A system with no constraints is “smooth,” in other words there is an equal probability of anything happening.
For example, if I give you a random number sequence like 761893826544528… what do you think the next number will be? In a random system, there is an equal probability that the next number will be between 0-9.
Now If I give you this number sequence: 123456… there is a much higher probability that the next number will be a 7. Why? Because the way to make some things more likely than others is to provide constraints. In this case, the constraint is your bias that the number sequence is not random and you are entrained to expect a 7.
So then what of constraints. Juarerro says:
- All systems come with built-in probability: it’s more likely to be one thing or another. Probability is determined by two types of constraints: context-free and context-sensitive.
- A context free-constraint is like a bias, or an assumption, or a preference.
- A context-sensitive constraint is something that is conditional on a state in the context.
For example, you might say “I like walking on the beach” and that is a context-free constraint that might help you get a date. But a context-sensitive constraint like “If it is raining, I hate walking on beaches” is helpful for your date to know so they don’t invite you out for a beach walk on a rainy day, thereby ruining the chances of romance.
(“But you said you liked to walk on beaches!” is not an endearing thing to say to a waterlogged and miserable partner)
This is useful for innovation because a context-free constraint – like a shared purpose – can help give a sense of direction to work. Developing a new shared purpose will cause some things to be more likely than others. If you decide to stop farming and start building cars, you will be unlikely to be found buying seeds, discussing the weather, or thinking about crop yields. You will be more likely to be focused on supply chains, manufacturing efficiency, engineering, and roads. But in both cases, the higher level context-free constraint is the need to make money.
Context-sensitive constraints begin to give a system coherence. A context-sensitive constraint creates an interdependence or an interrelationship between to parts of a system. Hating rain makes one’s mood dependant on rain, and that can govern or enable a whole set of behaviors. If you end up with a friend who loves rain and one that hates rain, the probability of enjoying each other outdoors on a rainy day decreases radically. But it also means that two people may find that they both love being indoors playing board games while it is raining outside. Sustainable long term relationships are dependant on people finding novel ways of being together as their context-specific constraints change. This is called resilience: the ability to maintain coherence while changing.
Juarrero then talks about some useful kinds of constraints:
- Linkages and relationships: innovation requires interaction and collaboration and interdependence among what will become the components of a larger system.
- Catalysts: things which, given their presence, make other things possible. Catalysts act to break patterns or to create new ones and can sometimes become attractors in their own right.
- Feedback, especially positive (reinforcing) feedback between parts in a system which increases the likelihood of emergence.
- Rhythm, gait, cadence, sequence, order, and timing – temporal constraints – which are very helpful context-sensitive constraints that make things interconnected and interdependent in time as well as space.
In my work as a facilitator and a consultant that helps people innovate, I catalog these attractors with the ABCEI acronym, standing for Attractors, Boundaries, Connections, Exchanges, and Identities. These constraints can all be found active in systems and sets of problems. When people tell me that they are “stuck” we can usually find some of the constraints at play that are causing that state of affairs. Once we have put our finger on something, it’s a good idea to try catalyzing that constraint to see if we can break it or tighten it as need be, to create the conditions in which another course of action is more probable.
For example, today I was coaching someone to use Zoom. She had read the documentation and watched videos, but she had context-specific questions about the application. Clearly she needed more connection with someone who had more experience than she did. So I tightened that connection with her and focused the exchange of information. I started by giving her a tour and I showed her things, but when when I was going too fast she slowed me down, and ask me how she could do those things. Responding to this new constraint on our session – her desire to learn hands-on – I shifted her identity and handed her the power to host our meeting and she took a turn making breakout groups. The whole session took a funny turn when we ended up chasing each other through ten breakout rooms we had created.
By the end of the session, she had enough information to be able to schedule and host a Zoom meeting. She took on the mantle of “Zoom host” an identity that an hour previously, we didn’t even know existed.
Learning like this is emergent and one can work with constraints to discover new ways to teach, new ways to learn and play, and new things to do to address old problems. Constraints-led learning is major field of pedagogy and my friend Mark O Sullivan, a football coach with AIK in Stockholm, is one of the leading proponents of this way of learning skills and teaching the complex sport of football.
Closure
The last part of Juarrero’s talk is about closure, the essential dynamic that makes emergence possible. She says:
- Loops create novelty and innovation. When a loop closes, what emerges is cohesion and cohesiveness.
- Autocatalytic, circular causality and closed positive feedback loops generate novelty.
- Parts interact and when the loop closes, an emergent whole is created, and when that loops back it influences the parts: cultures, systems, organizations, communities, identities,. These are all cohesive and influence parts that come into the system.
Stuart Kauffman’s work on evolutionary biology and autocatalytic systems describes this process beautifully. Essentially the ancestors of all living things are small contained systems of molecules that act on one another. A interacts with B to create C and C interact with A to create B, and suddenly you have a coherent system that “creates itself.”
At the cultural level, look at the way that feedback loops and closure create communities online, for better or worse. In highly partisan contexts, “echo-chambers” are simply autocatalyzing social systems, where biases are reinforced, shared purposes are strengthened and new identities are formed and stabilized. This can create such deep attractor wells into which people fall, almost like cults. Family members can no longer relate to them, they become unable to work with people who are different than they are, especially those who are considered “the enemy.”
Closure creates identity and landscapes of mountains and valleys that Juarrero talks about toward the end of her talk. A mountain might represent an idea that is unthinkable – having dinner with your racist uncle – and a valley might be a much easier, more preferable, and more possible outcome, such as going to a rally for racial justice with your friends. The way in which constraints have closed and looped and fed back information to you in your life will determine which of these two scenarios is most probable. When you choose dinner with your uncle. everyone will express surprise. They never saw that coming. You must have climbed a mountain to make that possible.
Juarrero ends with a really important point about what happens with context-specific constraints operate in a closed system: you get identities, cultures and mindsets, which themselves become context-free constraints for new things entering the system. If you have ever had the experience of moving to a new place you know this well. On our island where I live we have a “Newcomers Guide” that talks about practical realities of becoming a Bowen Islander. It contains a helpful mix of tangible facts – like where the school is, and how to check the ferry schedule. But it also contains insider information about the emergent characteristics of Bowen Island life that have grown out of our interactions with each other and our environment over many decades. These include things such as “Someone flashing their hazard lights in the rearview mirror is not being a jerk. They are a firefighter on their way to a call” or “Don’t ask online for whom an ambulance siren was sounding…” The original guide was written in 2016, and I can already see where things need changing, although the heuristics by which one shod live here, seem robust enough for now.
Like everything associated with complexity these three simple concepts – emergence, constraints, and closure – are easy to see, difficult to unpack, and powerful in practice. Go read and listen to Alica Juarrero though, and be grateful, as I am, that someone as brilliant as her has done the heavy lifting for us.
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 us exploring the shoreline around to Grafton Bay and back. The tide was low and there was lots to see, but most remarkable of all was the number of sea stars
Back in 2013, seas stars began dying by the millions. Over 40 species on our coast fell victim to what became known as Sea Star Wasting Disease which causes them to dissolve and die. Our once abundant sea star populations crashed. Our coast was once covered in deep purple ochre sea stars and the bottoms were patrolled by magnificent huge twenty-legged sunflower stars, with another few dozen species thrown in the mix. Overnight, these iconic creatures disappeared and some years it was nearly impossible to find even one.
The cause of the collapse of sea stars was attributed to warmer seawater – an effect of climate change – and the spread of a virus against which the sea stars were helpless. They had their pandemic, and it looked like entire local populations would be completely wiped out.
Last year, whilst paddling in the Gulf Islands, we saw some ochre sea stars in small patches on some of the more isolated islands, like the Secretary Islands in the Trincomali Channel. This was encouraging.
But yesterday, paddling at low low tide, we rounded a point and saw entire shorelines covered with young ochre sea stars. There were hundreds of them crammed into cracks and nooks and crannies. The vast majority of them were young, and clumping together protected them from hungry gulls that like to wolf them down whole. In a year these stars will be big enough to feast on the sea urchins that have cleaned out our local kelp beds, and thereby restore the balance of plants and animals in that little cycle. More kelp means more small fish, and that is good for the seals and sea lions and the salmon and the orcas. And so goes the chain of interrelationships and interdependencies that make up the marine ecosystem of my local fjord.
Seeing these huge groups of sea star survivors was moving, because I’ve missed them for these past seven years. And in a time of the global pandemic, where we are helpless against our own viral threat, it was good to be reminded of cycles, and resilience.
I hope our sea stars make it, and that they adapt to the ocean conditions and that they have somehow developed an immunity to their virus. I’m hoping they are different and no longer as vulnerable to climate change or disease. The threat of a second spike is always just around the corner, as it is with our virus at the moment. Witnessing a mass local extinction of an iconic species is sobering, and the reminder that survival is possible under changed conditions is encouraging.
I have no idea how OUR pandemic will play itself out: I imagine we will survive. But I’m interested in how we will be different too. This virus detests the things that will defeat it: collaboration, sharing of information, care and protection of the vulnerable, gentleness, compassion. Absent these things, the novel coronavirus COVID-19 will thrive and continue to run through us all, taking the vulnerable and randomly selecting from the rest. If we beat it, it will only be with the capacities and capabilities that make us the best of who we can be.