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.
In Those Years
In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I -- Adrienne Rich, 1992, hat tip to Jim
My favourite scene from the Life of Brian starts with Brian appearing at a window, trying to get his crowd of misinformed followers to leave him alone. He is, in fact, not the Messiah, and exasperated, he tries to tell them that they have it all wrong.
“You’re all individuals!” he cries, to which the crowd responds, in unison, “Yes! We’re all individuals!”
“You’re all different!” cries Brian. “Yes! We are all different!” the crowd replies again.
And then a single voice, with a slightly melancholy edge, quietly says, “I’m not.”
He is shushed.
This diabolical twisting of the Individual — Collective polarity has been on my mind over the past few years. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had the briefest moment of hope that the world would suddenly wake up to pulling together and looking after our public good. We created universal basic incomes, which made the most significant difference in poverty alleviation in my lifetime. We undertook mass public health campaigns to keep vulnerable people safe and not allow our medical and health systems to get too overwhelmed. We even briefly saw our planet’s health rebound as cars and airplanes, and industry generally slowed down or stopped, and the skies cleared.
But it wasn’t sustainable. It was a temporary fix to a global problem and didn’t address the underlying causes of poverty, public health crises and climate change. Within a year, we had splintered and fractured. “We lost track of the meaning of we,” as Adrienne Rich wrote in 1992, “we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible.”
I have been on holiday these past two weeks, on Maui, and I’ve had time to read and think and rest. One of the books I took with me is Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, a recent book that traces how our attention has been stolen by social media, schooling and the workplace. Deirdre, who recommended it to me at Jessica’s Book Store in Thornbury, Ontario, last month, said it made her quit social media.
The book isn’t entirely about social media – it’s much more extensive than that – but the history of social media’s colonization of our attention forms a big part of the book. Hari traces the rise of surveillance capitalism, delivered through the toxic and amoral algorithms that drive us into deeper and deeper echo chambers at a pace and a way that steals our attention before we are aware of it. The need to keep eyeballs on the app instead of the world around us drives us apart. At one point, he asks the provocative question about why Facebook can’t help us connect physically with friends and like-minded folks nearby so that we can make something together or enjoy an evening together. Why does it not recommend amazing projects and activities we could do with friends? It could easily do all of this. It could quickly help us build community, have a good time together, and make a lasting impact. But it doesn’t, and it won’t because the idea is to keep eyes on the app and keep people out of the physical world, which requires them to put down their phones and play.
Hari traces the origins of the psychology of social media back to the behaviouralist researchers and teachers who taught the cabal of engineer-capitalists that built this world in Silicon Valley. Nothing new there, perhaps, but what is different is that one can see how it works on one’s own mind. It is a chilling read because it lays bare capitalism’s unapologetic agenda that uses everything it can to generate wealth regardless of the impact.
Our attention is a battleground and a landscape that surveillance capitalists will exploit as readily as an oil company will exploit a shale play. The difference is that oil companies are subject to government regulation about what they can and cannot do, and surveillance capitalists are not. There is no environmental protection for the pristine nature of our creative minds. The predators have been given free rein to exploit it all.
The result is that we have become radically disconnected from each other. And the pandemic made it much worse as we retreated into our bubbles and became more reliant on social media for connection while at the same time being fed a steady stream of the stuff that is guaranteed to keep us engaged with apps and not each other. I think I first heard the term “doom scroll” in 2020. I recognize it in myself as the embarrassing desire to read one more stupid thread of misinformed comments. It makes me feel self-righteous. I can take on a few transphobes or racists from the safety of my own house. But that doesn’t make a change in the world. Half the time, I might even be arguing with robots.
But of course, this is precisely the cognitive-chemical loop that creates deep attractor basins that keeps us at home, on our devices, facing a massive barrier of inertia to get up and do something. Hari points out that this is not simply a problem that can be addressed by individual actions and habits, like putting away the phone at night in another room. While those are essential strategies for reclaiming attention, Hari clearly points out how attention-stealing is systemically enabled.
I can feel it in my work with TSS Rovers FC as we build this football club and enlist volunteers, spectators, and fans. To try to make a culture around something positive that requires people to come out and participate is to buck the forces of the entire world of surveillance capitalism that wants us on our phones and not in the stands singing and supporting young men and women, co-creating community, having fun together.
A couple of weeks ago, I was having dinner with a friend, and we discussed the crisis of belonging in our world. This has been an important concern in her research and advocacy work over several decades, which has led to all manner of crises, including mental health, development for young people, and our general tenor of social relations at the moment. I think it even contributes to the most significant issues like climate change, which arise from disconnection from each other, our natural world and the community of living things threatened by the actions of our species.
This affects all of us. Our phones and laptops have handy apps that can tell us how much time we spend on our screens, particularly on our social media apps. It is way more than you think. Thinking about places where you spend MORE time than on your social media apps is helpful. To which community do you really belong? WHOSE community do you really belong to? And, do you REALLY belong?
At the moment, I have a few activities outside of work that activates flow in my life: playing music, cooking, volunteering with both TSS Rovers FC and the Rivendell Retreat Centre, writing, gardening, and hanging out with my beloved and my kids. And altogether, I wonder if I STILL spend more time on my phone than doing these things, WHICH GIVE ME JOY. Even as I am typing this, my little tracker tells me that, on holiday, I averaged almost 4 hours of screen time daily.
These past two weeks, combined with Lent, have given me a welcome respite to reconsider my relationship with the thieves of attention who rule my life. Social media is an important part of my life and is probably how you and I are connected.
But Hari points out that the stealing of attention has existential impacts. It might be what prevents us from concentrating enough and spending the time we need together to address and move past existential crises like climate change, populism, and the threat of nuclear war. Suppose we cannot give more time to the collective problems of now because we are instead tilting at the AI-generated windmills of Facebook and Twitter. In that case, we will not be able to find one another, collaborate and perform out of our skins in the service of a viable future for this planet, its creatures, and its people.