Carmina Bowena warming up before our concert on Monday
I sing in a choir here on Bowen Island called Carmina Bowena. We focus our attention on Rennaisence European music, singing sacred music, madrigals and modern inspirations of the same. We also sing folk music and more traditional music from Italy, France, Spain and the British Isles. We are an impressively eclectic group of people, under under the leadership and joy of our director, Nicole Thomas Zyczynsky.
We like to craft an atmosphere with the music we sing. It’s already transcendent music to begin with but when we perform we want to make it less about a concert and more of an immersive experience. We usually perform in small theatres or churches with good acoustics, from a stage, to an audience.
Monday night though was the first of what I hope will be a series of contemplative experiences that we co-created with the congregation of Cates Hill Chapel here on Bowen Island. We sat in a circle in the centre of the room, which has phenomenal reverb, and around us were a couple of circles of chairs. Candles lit the room and the participants were invited to be in silence for an hour as we sang four sets of music interspersed with poems about light and dark. It was not explicitly a religious experience, but for a contemplative person like me, it was a very good way to be in Lent.
The program began with a couple of Gregorian chants and went through songs by Byrd, Palestrina, Duruffle, Rossi, Lauridsen and Gjello. There was no applause between pieces, just a transition from one to the next, as we stood and sang in candlelit darkness. My friend Kathy played a beautiful clarinet solo a set of variations on a theme by Kodlay. I played a slow air one my flute from the Irish tradition called “The Fire in the Hearth” from an album by John Skelton.
The experience was co-created. Asking the audience to hold silence throughout the hour or so, in a resonant room light by candles, created an atmosphere of deep compilation. More importantly it was an atmosphere that was held by all of us, the choir, the readers, the hosts and the “audience.” It doesn’t;t even feel right to call them an audience.
To me this is the high art of participatory container work: when people all have a role in creating something together. To paraphrase Christina Baldwin, it is not one person’s job to create a container, but a group creates a dialogic container together. And when there is some coherence in that group – perhaps some shared experience, or a shared aspiration or even a shared curiosity – the container can be one in which transcendent experiences happen, where beauty emerges, or novelty, or flow. When we get out of our own way, feeling that it is our job solely to host and create, something else becomes possible. These are communal experiences can be full of beauty, like our concert, or of intense emotional joy like I have experienced when my teams have won important matches. They can be collectively healing, as my friend Linda Tran has begun to discover in her sound bath practice. Today we were talking about the way in which a sound bath session – where she plays crystal bowls and offers gentle meditative and awareness guidance – becomes a powerful collective experience when the participants have all done it before and have set aside their anxieties and worries and deeply rest in the experience. Something else is possible.
We live in a world of performance and consumption. Being an audience member in most places assumes a detachment from the experience. The fourth wall is intact. We passively consume what is put in front of us. We forget that we are also participants. It is becoming more and more clear to me that we NEED to find places of the participatory and collective practice of beauty, even in what is traditionally thought of as as an audience-performer context. May we never lose that ability.
My friend seanna davidson sent through an invitation today to a one-day event she is holding on Toronto Island in October called Systems Leadership: seeing the forest for the trees. The one-day retreat will be held on October 19 and is associated with the incredible RSD 14 Symposium which is being held virtually and physically in Toronto this year. Go if you can.
Navigating the currents of dynamic systems at speed seems impossible now. The “flood the zone” strategy of disruption turns everything into a crisis, meaning that it is seemingly impossible to find the time to slow down and see where you are at, and who is there with you. I think the strategy of flood the zone is superficial in that those who promote it are not interested in deep seated change. They continually move the chairs around so you can find no where to sit, while meanwhile they use the pretext of chaos to impose high level constraints. But if we take a view out at different scales, we can see that fundamental patterns of power haven’t changed, and the chaos being wrought upon the world isn’t rooted. If we play at the level at which the perpetrators of this strategy are working, it feels too fast. If we get above it and watch, we see repeating patterns of power and influence at play, and the strategies we have learned as humans to deal with these may yet be useful to us who are committed to life-giving contexts. That is a propos of my post from the other day. I think the fundamental capacities of participatory leadership and dialogue are as necessary as ever. We can, and we need to, connect and exchange at speed. I think this is what seanna’s work is about, where she sees that systems leadership is an outcome of working with systems. Or, as she quotes Nora Bateson:
‘leadership does not reside in a person but in an arena that can be occupied by offerings of specific wisdom to the needs of the community. so leadership is produced collectively in the community, not the individual… leadership for this era is not a role, or set of traits; it’s a zone of inter-relational process.’
seanna and her colleague Fiona McKenzie in the post linked above, are trying to see leadership as a forest metaphor, which, like all metaphors, is both limited and useful. Specifically, they see systems leadership this way:
Our metaphor won’t hold for theoretical purists, but bear with us — it has helped us to frame the ‘when, where, who and how’ of a type of systems leadership that is dynamic, fluid, and moves far beyond the role of an individual as a systems leader. Our thinking goes that ‘systems leadership as a forest’ is:
Seasonal—leadership that is taken up at the right time, not all the time, with different approaches, roles and behaviours needed in different contexts
Self-selecting—leadership taken up and held by many, not by just one ‘leader’ (or a single tree?) — across position, authority, roles
Biodiverse—thrives in a context of a diversity of people and worldviews, ways of knowing, being and doing
Layered—taking place at multiple scales, levels, sub-systems, cultures, capacities, ways of knowing
Sometimes invisible—Often happening in-between places and below the radar without formal recognition.
Self-organising—Organised patterns of behaviour arise without ‘control’ over decisions on what gets grown where.
Inter-dependent and adaptive—Where actions influence each other through interactions, are reliant on many to sustain change, and are recalibrated from feedback.
Emergent—always transitioning from one pattern/season/state to another, which can only be seen by looking at the whole forest, not just a single tree. Transitions can include phases of breakdown and renewal.
Generative—Healthy system parts enable improved health and capacity amongst other system parts. Their interconnected nature is an amplifying feature of health and resilience in the system.
Existing—this forest has inherent value not defined by others and does not need permission to exist
I strongly resonate with that. I would even say that this has been a cornerstone of my practice over the past 25 years as well, underpinning the ways I have thought about and worked with communities and organizations as complex living systems. What I notice here is that at every level of “systems” (I think I prefer “contexts”) there is both dynamic change and longer term stability. The stability is brought by the constraint regime (as Alicia Juarerro would say). In a forest, at the level that seanna and Fiona are talking about there is enduring stability of structure and predictable dynamic processes: cadences and rhythms that, while they are dynamic, are nevertheless stable in their pattern. And there is also the work at the micro level in a forest where there is constant movement and change. Pull apart a rotting log and you see very little stability as creatures of all shapes and sizes are at work transforming the system without a larger view of what they are doing, or what they are even a part of.
I’m thinking a lot about this stuff at the moment. Today I was set to meet with a young person whose heart lies in social change, personal healing and systems transformation, and I wanted to give her a sense of possibility in her work. She wasn’t feeling well, so I’ve put this blog post together partly as a gift to her and to let the world know about seanna’s work and some of the ways people are trying to think about this moment in time in the context of history.
This is a blog post, so it’s not 100% coherent, but if you have made it this far, I’d love to hear your thoughts, and I’d like to leave you with a stunning visualization of action at the dynamic level. Last night The Montreal Roses defeated the Halifax Tides 2-0 in the Northern Super League to claim a playoff spot. Montreal’s second goal was a sublime team effort from a counter attack, ultimately scored by Noémi Paquin who steamed her way through the entire Halifax midfield, received the ball at speed from a PICTURE perfect pass from Mégane Sauvé, dribbled around one more defender and calmly passed the ball into the net while still two more Tides defenders and the keeper watched it happen. I can only imagine what Paquin felt in that moment. Time slowing down, every opportunity and affordance open to her, a simple action, a touch to the outside and suddenly the goal looming so large that she couldn’t miss. Even the commentator Signe Butler, said the goal was easy, and it clearly wasn’t. It was magical. For the defenders, the opposite. They couldn’t see the affordances Paquin was seeing. They were flummoxed by how she found the seams in their defence that appeared larger than life to her.
Acting within incredibly dynamic systems sometimes has this flow to it. That is something of the emergent outcome that seanna is talking about – a way of seeing, a way finding the underlying stability of the constraint regime that allows you to move at another scale. I think what we know about flow states is that they reveal a kind of stability, sometimes known as “slowing down time” that allows for action on a different level than what other agents see around you.
It’s a tricky time. We need more Noémi Paquin-style action, and perhaps we always did.
Not every facilitation gig goes great. The kind of work I do – and this is probably true of many of you – is usually novel. It is new to the organization I’m working with and often times new to me too, because every organization’s context is different and we design to what is needed.
This means that I often find myself involved in processes that folks have never done before. Moreoften than not, if we’ve done our preparation work well and folks are well invited to the gathering, the process is fun, engaging, powerful and results in good outcomes.
And sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we get lost, don’t know where to start, flounder and find ourselves surprised. And at times like that I think about Tommy Flanagan.
Tommy Flanagan was one of the best jazz pianists who ever lived. His discography includes 40 solo recordings and some of the seminal jazz recordings of the 20th century: Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus, Kenny Burrell’s Swingin’, and numerous albums with Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, Milt Jackson, and JJ Johnson among others. Famously he appeared on John Coltrane’s 1959 album Giant Steps.
Now Giant Steps featured as its title track a now-classic tune of the same name which is diabolical in nature. Coltrane plays it very fast, and the chord progression is something that no one had ever seen before – embodying Coltrane’s radical approach to jazz harmony – with hardly any time to think between changes.
When Coltrane introduced the song to Flanagan a couple weeks before the recording session, he played it slowly so Tommy could get a sense of how the changes worked, and this left Flanagan with the impression that the tune was a ballad. Ballads are played at 60 beats per minute. When the band stepped into the studio to make the recording, Coltrane played it at nearly 300 beats per minute. Flanagan wasn’t prepared.
On the recording, you can hear Coltrane’s soaring solo of 11 choruses, before he drops and lets Flanagan comes in. Tommy Flanagan has five choruses to solo on and he starts scared and gets progressively more and more lost until by the fifth chorus he is just comping out some chords and probably thanking his stars he survived it.
His solo is perhaps the most famous example of a top jazz musician who tried something and failed. Lost, bewildered, out of ideas, but gamely getting through it.
Some days are like that. Folks loving using jazz as an example of what happens when teams of people really cook together, but they never seem to bring up Tommy Flanagan’s solo. Facilitation is like that sometimes too. You know you’re stuff, you are good at it, and then you find yourself in a context where things are not what you expected and you dry. It doesn’t mean you’re not good at your job. But, Coltrane’s recording of Giant Steps is perhaps the most relatable moment I can describe listening to jazz masters play.
Flanagan, by the way, had more than the last word on this piece of music. After Coltrane died he recorded a lovely version of it on a tribute album that has a solo that rivals Coltrane’s and is maybe even better for its lucidity and cohesiveness and swing.
Detail from a quilt designed and made by the St. Andrews Anglican Church Women Quilter’s Guild. The quilt was made in 1967 in honour of Canada’s centennial year. Keen eyed observers will notice patterns in here that relate to that celebration. The quilt was on display at the Bowen Island Public Library earlier this year, on loan from Joyce Ganong whose mother, Isabel Faulks, was one of the quilters.
Another reflection from the Complexity Inside and Out course we taught yesterday…
Caitlin led us in a check in process that was about slowing down out seeing. Here’s a variation. Try it!
- Pick a view where there is some distance – looking out a window is best. If this is a familiar view, all the better.
- Notice the scene out there. Notice the colours, the landscape, the patterns. Notice movement and stillness. If the scene is familiar, look at what you know.
- You can close your eyes and remember what you see. How does that scene conjure itself up in your mind’s eye?
- Now open your eyes and look again at the scene. Try to notice something you’ve never noticed before or something that you’ve forgotten, or a change to the scene that you hadn’t noticed until now.
- Describe the scene now. Write down obersvations about what you see. What is the overall colour palette? What are the lines you see, of trees or buildings, horizon and sky. If you saw this scene in a flash, how would you recognize it?
You can add different variations to this exercise, but the point is to notice how we see things as patterns. Our mind conjures up a scene of large blocks in it and details aren’t always apparent. Sometimes we have to see things with new eyes, or a naive perspective.
I reflected yesterday that I was once walking through the forest here on my home island, following a path to the village with my brother who was visiting from Toronto. Bowen Island is very different from Toronto. He stopped us next to a very large Douglas-fir tree and said “Look at that! It’s huge!”
All the trees around here are huge, especially if you aren’t familiar with the forest. But I looked again at this tree – one I passed hundreds of times to and from the village – and noticed that it was actually an old growth tree. How could I tell? The pattern of bark is different, the branches are thicker and more gnarly and look like the trunks of younger trees. My brother’s eyes found anomalies in the pattern I had formed of my home forest, and I used my own pattern recognition skills to identify why the tree he spotted was an anomaly.
This, it turns out is an excellent thing to do when you are looking for other patterns in familiar contexts, like your business market or your team culture or the school system you work in or the services you offer to community. Be careful not to assume that the patterns you can see is the sum total of the reality available to you.
This isn’t new. But you can never over-practice awareness.
There is a neat game called Geoguesser that is based on the Google Street View database. You download the app and get started and it throws up an image from somewhere in the world and you have two minutes to guess where it is. The closer you get to the actual spot, the more points you get.
You’re not supposed to cheat by using Google maps to look up land marks. It entirely depends on the pattern recognition that you bring to the game. What language is that on the side of a truck? What does that street sign say? What kind of palm trees are these? Is that dirt road red or dark brown? Is that a white ring around the power pole?
Really good players of this game have thousands of details stored meaning that they can discern the location using macro clues first, and then narrow things down with decision trees, like how the shadows are cast, entire websites have sprung up devoted to these pattern markers that help people quickly identify the location. There are competitions culminating in the GeoGuesser World Championship. You can watch these competitions live. They are amazing.
And the kind if undisputed champion of this game is rainbolt, a man full of so many patterns, that his guesses are almost always pinpoint accurate.
Watch him host five great players finding obscure locations. They are engaged in constant pattern finding. It’s kind of amazing and it’s very cool to have them articulate the way they are seeing these landscapes. Specific knowledge helps them make generalizations and they connect what they know and use abductive reasoning to guess the location.
Back when I first experienced Open Space Technology, at a conference in 1995, the thing that immediately caught my attention about the process was how it was a perfect, simple set of constraints to enable self-organization. It sent me down a rabbit hole of learning about self-organization and complexity and I became captivated with the patterns I saw around me, and specifically with dissipative structures.
Ilya Prigogine coined the term dissipative structure. In layperson’s terms it refers to a structure that persists in time despite its components constantly changing. The classic example is a whirlpool. When you pull the plug on a bathtub full of water, the water forms a whirlpool as it head down the drain. The whirlpool is an emergent structure and a pattern that persists over time, held in place by constraints such as gravity, the size of the drain hole, and way bigger forces like air pressure and where you are on the planet.
If you just look at molecules of water, you would have no idea that they could form a whirlpool. The water molecules that drain out of your bathtub all participate temporarily in forming the whirlpool but none of them initiate it. When they leave, they have no memory that they were in it. You cannot take a random water molecule and discover whether it has ever gone down a drain. And yet, the pattern persists and is real. What gets dissipated is the energy and matter that travels through the structure.
In human systems, we see related kinds of structures everywhere too. Learning about these kinds of patterns, which I did initially through Fritjof Capra’s book The Web of Life, made me seek out analogues around me. The pattern of “dissipating structure” was interesting, and because I had focussed extensively on culture in my undergraduate studies, I finally had a useful way of looking at cultures and how they seemed to exhibit both stability and constant change. People, energy and material flow through the culture but they are entrained to behave in a larger scale structure that has some persistence, but which is also sensitive to changing. This was how I ended up coming to complexity theory, through my exploration of these ideas.
Cultures are not dissipative structures in the technical sense that Prigogine describes, and there seems to have been quite a bit of controversy over the years about whether social structures qualify as thermodynamic structures. Because I’m not a physicist I will say they are not, but this idea makes a good metaphor and helps me to explain how we work with emergent structures and persistent patterns in organizational and community life.
Seeing this pattern led me into the margins of participatory leadership work, facilitation, and ultimately dialogical organizational development. These ways of working were all concerned with creating the kinds of containers that enable emergent meaning. Sometimes these containers are temporary, like meetings, and sometimes they are persistent, like organizations, teams and communities. If you’ve ever tried to change an organizations culture you’ll recognize that it is very much like sticking your hand in a whirlpool. You’ll get some temporary disruption, but unless you change the enabling constraints, the whirlpool will reestablish itself the moment you stop interfering.
A few months ago, I was immersed in teaching complexity within the framework of the Art of Participatory Leadership program (AoPL). Essentially, AoPL is the application of the Art of Hosting within leadership contexts, extending beyond traditional facilitation and hosting scenarios. With a strong emphasis on personal practice and the use of complexity tools, AoPL encourages a deeper exploration of the connections between the Four Fold Practice, complexity, and dialogic containers – topics I’d previously addressed in my chapter for the book ‘Dialogic Organizational Development‘. My recent revisit to these subjects has sparked fresh insights.
In one of these sessions, a spontaneous thought emerged: “Leadership is all about managing interactions to get results.” This notion, inspired by Dave Snowden’s idea that culture is the product of interactions within a system, made me reflect upon the history of my own fascination with containers.
Throughout my life, I’ve found myself drawn to the concept of containers, primarily, I believe, due to an aversion to controlling interactions between people. This leaning was what initially attracted me to open space technology as an empowering meeting process. It didn’t dictate how people were going to interact, but instead provided conditions conducive to fruitful and creative connections. It left agency with the participants rather than centralizing control with the facilitator – something I’ve always preferred to avoid. Open Space is built on the ideas of self-organization and is therefore a natural method to use in complex environments, to invite groups to organize around important conversations and ideas for which they have the energy and agency to host.
This interest in open space led me to the realm of complexity science and various writings on self-organization, including work on networks, emergence, and community organizing. These concepts strive to vest power in the hands of those actively involved in the work, a principle that resonated deeply with me and steered me towards anthro-complexity and the application of complexity science to human systems.
It was in this field that I discovered William Isaacs’s seminal book on dialogue. Isaacs was among the first to describe the dialogic container in the context of organizational life. This deepened my interest in the topic, leading to my connection with Gervase Bushe in the early 2010s. Our collaboration eventually resulted in an invitation to contribute a chapter to the book he was editing with Bob Marshak, a key text in introducing dialogic organizational development to the world.
Interactions, containers, patterns, and emergent outcomes are all characteristics of complex systems. Both Snowden and Glenda Eoyang offer valuable, and different, insights into how constraints create conditions for emergence. However, the lesson that resonates most with me is the idea that, in complex situations, we can only work with the constraints to increase our chances of creating beneficial patterns.
This approach to working with containers and constraints can be challenging and risks verging into manipulation, especially when massive amounts of power and data are involved, such as in large social media companies. There is an ethical imperative to maintain transparency when working with constraints, a principle fundamental to this work.
In my chapter for Bob and Gervase’s book, I discussed the Four Fold Practice as a guiding framework. It helps leaders focus on four key patterns that make conversations meaningful, while also nurturing an environment that fosters the emergence of these patterns.
This practice grew from the observation that presence, participation, hosting, and co-creation are essential elements of meaningful, productive conversations. Importantly, these patterns should not be imposed but rather fostered through well-crafted containers.
Rather than dictating “be present now!”, we can shape spaces where presence naturally occurs and feels appreciated. Instead of compelling participation, we aim to cultivate processes that promote deep engagement through authentic and impactful invitations.
The same principles apply to hosting and co-creation. We shouldn’t impose facilitation roles onto individuals; instead, we should craft environments in which people comfortably host each other on various scales – from open-space, world café, circle to intimate one-on-one interactions.
Similarly, forcing people into co-creation isn’t the right approach. Instead, we must provide them with the necessary tools, conditions, constraints, and challenges to stimulate collaborative creation and achieve desired outcomes.
I strive to uphold these principles from the Four Fold Practice in every facilitation – to create conditions where the patterns of presence, participation, hosting, and co-creation naturally emerge.
This exploration into the realm of leadership, complexity, and dialogic containers has been a journey of discovery, reflection, and evolution. My fascination with containers and how they impact interactions, outcomes, and ultimately culture within a system continues to grow.
The intersection of complexity and leadership in the context of dialogic containers is a rich tapestry of insights and practices that can greatly enhance our effectiveness as leaders, facilitators, and change-makers. The journey is ongoing, and the learning never stops.
How do these reflections resonate with you? I’m thinking of writing more on the idea of containers, and would welcome your thoughts and questions about the topic.