It’s nice to see a systemic look at what’s plaguing the healthcare system in BC. Today, The Tyee publishes an article on emergency room capacity, and the strain on the acute care system brought about by several decades of decisions, the consequences of which are coming home to roost. This piece is part of a longer series The Tyee is publishing on the hospital overcrowding in British Columbia.
It’s been a wild weather week here on the south coast of BC. The rains and southeasterly winds have subsided, which always means a backing northwesterly and last night while it was calm here on the east side of our little Island, a few kilometres away the west side was being battered by 100km/h wind gusts and several trees came down over power lines, making today a hunker down at home day for most of the island. The cold front came through around 1:00am last night, when the wind direction swung almost 180 degrees and went from 10km/h to 70km/h+ gusts. The library is closed as the staff were trapped on the other side of the island, so I’m just quietly enjoying the sunshine and calm ocean here on the east side and listening to the water drain off the mountains and into the sea.
It was a torrid weekend for sports in our house. Tottenham had a terrible performance in Nottingham losing 3-0 to Forest. It’s hard to know what is plaguing Spurs, but the joy seems gone from the game for many of them. And it’s diabolical that we have perhaps the best centre back pairing in the league (if not one of the best in the world) and yet, we’re conceding silly goals. Things were looking good after the midweek Champions League win against Prague and the 2-0 Premier league win against Brentford. We sit in 11th place. On the ice, the Toronto Maple Leafs, who have been on a decent run of form lately, choked against the Edmonton Oilers and lost 6-2. Edmonton is my daughter’s team and she and I watched the game together. It was a lopsided energetic in the TV room on Saturday night. Much was redeemed though yesterday. The Leafs had a fantastic come from behind win against Chicago with a couple of very late goals to erase a TERRIBLE first period and a 2-0 deficit. And The Vancouver Goldeneyes returned to the city after an extended road trip and stopped a three game losing streak to take a 2-1 win and slot themselves in at second place in the standings.
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The rains came yesterday and last night with a persistent atmospheric river delivering over 100mm of rain to the communities like Agassiz and Chilliwack in the east end of the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver, All of the eastbound highways out of the region are closed right now due to flooding and landslides, and while not as catastrophic as the 2021 floods that cut off this part of the country from the rest of Canada for weeks, it nevertheless shows how easy it is for us to be isolated here. The highway down the coast to Washington State is still open, but they too are dealing with flooding.
This was the first time that our region has had an orange level weather warning, and I would say that the system did well in predicting and warning residents of the eastern Fraser Valley about the impending danger. It validates the heuristics I attached to the colours when the system was launched a couple of weeks ago.
Coincidently, we woke up early this morning to the sound of water dripping inside the house. It had nothing to do with the rain, but rather a broken pipe in our ceiling. So my day began a bit early today. We filled the kettle and turned the main water off and now I’m just surfing and waiting for the plumber to come. He’s currently dealing with a flooded basement elsewhere on the island.
For the rest of the day I have enough water stored in my emergency containers to easily get us through a few days without running water. It’s nice to have emergency preparations validated by non-catastrophic events. The rain has stopped outside but it’s code orange inside our house today.
Anyway, here are a few links that caught my eye this morning.
An interesting read on Liberalism and its intersection with African political thought and economics The comments contains a good discussion as well.
Sports gives you a really tangible view of how the intangibles affect performance, which is one of the things that fascinates me about games like football and ice hockey. These rely on very subtle intangible connections between players to enable rapid adjustment in a dynamic environment. At the highest levels, skills aren’t all that different, but what often makes the difference in play and performance is culture. Manchester United went through a massive culture change after Sir Alex Ferguson left, from which they haven;’t recovered. It was wholesale changes that made a difference. It was the way new leadership handled the legacy of culture that was handed to them. The guys at Anecdote explore this more.
A project after my own heart, weaving music and ocean conservation together. Explore The Oceansong Project.
Every Thursday Patti Digh shares a few links she found during the week. This week there is a lovely collection of before and after photographs showing Czech people as both young adults and centenarians.
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So many of the principles for work and community I use in my life have come through the people I met and who supported me back in the early 2000s when I started consulting (it’s the only job I’ve had this century!). One of those networks and collections of people were the folks associated with the Berkana Institute with whomI worked for many years. My buddy Tennesson, one of the OG Berkana guys and still one of my best friends, pulled up a set of principles that Berkana used back in the early days, and I’m grateful to notice how they continue to inform my practice today:
- We relay on human goodness.
- We depend on diversity.
- We treasure the power of community.
- We trust life’s capacity to create order without control.
- We nourish our relationships and ourselves.
A few others I gained from Berkana include, “no matter the question, the answer is community” and “proceed until apprehended.”
Your algorithm may be giving you a false sense of confidence about what you know. I find this anecdotally true. Stuff I learn about through facebook or LinkedIn seems to make me feel knowledgeable especially on quicker moving issues, like the North Coast tanker ban. But stuff that comes through Bluesky, Mastodon or my RSS feeds are much more nuanced because of who I choose to follow.
Football is a game played with principles, becasue it’s a complex game and requires players to react and respond to a constantly changing environment. It was a joy watching Tottenham today cover some sense of purpose after a series of poor results, especially at home. Visiting Brentfod was no match for Spurs, and we dominated possession and played incredible defence off the ball. Van der Ven and Romero are probably amongst the best centre back pairs in the world when they are on their game, which they were today. Xavi Simons finally got the start at the number 10 position and generated the first goal and scored the second. Spurs were positive and exciting to watch and won 2-0. More of that would be much welcomed.
Elsewhere in the football world, today the Vancouver Whitecaps will play Inter Miami for their first MLS trophy in the MLS Cup Final. I used to be a huge supporter of the Whitecaps and for all kinds of reasons I stepped back from supporting that organization. But many of my friends are core parts of the Whitecaps supporters movements and they are having the time of their lives. Vancouver has played their best season of football in their 41 year history and have made every final they have competed in, winning the Canadian Championship and losing in the CONCACAF Champions Cup down in Mexico. But today they have a chance to make it two from three. They beat Miami on the way to that continental cup final, and the likes of Messi and Suarez will be side-eyeing the ‘Caps today who are on a wonderful run of form. We will see what happens.
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I’ve had many conversations lately with friends and colleagues about the long term cost of isolation that is exacerbated by the ease of online connection. But, as folks who know my complexity work will know, connections and exchanges are two different things. I can engage in all kinds of people and bits and digital entities now. But why then are we more lonely than ever before? And why are we losing the ability to be in real life conversations? Harrison Moony. catches the moment in this article from The Tyee.
But how do you commit to a discourse when you can’t be sure that the person you’re talking to even exists? The tech libertarians don’t even want us. We’re too hard to manage, too human, and that’s why they’ve flooded their sites with fake people, more likely to say what they want, and much easier to reconfigure, like Grok, if they don’t.
Seeking human connection online today feels like being the last one who hasn’t been body-snatched.
That’s a good analogy.
Paul McCartney is also addressing this head on and trying to show that it’s not just an analogy. Actual bodies of work are being snatched up by AI and he has spearheaded an initiative to protest this with an album of the sounds of creativity when the artists have disappeared. The project is called “Is This What We Want?” and it’s a question worth asking. As usual, Ted Gioia, whose blog pointed me to the work, does a masterful job of unpacking the cultural implications of this moment. It’s one of the things I love about live sports to be honest. You need actual people to play it, it’s a form of creativity that is very somatic and body based and the outcomes are always unknown. That’s perhaps a post for a different day, but it’s certainly an overriding concern for me these days.
For what it’s worth, This blog is always hand written. If I ever use AI here I’ll let you know.
A different disappearance in the Canadian cultural milieu happened this week in the world of sport. Valour FC, the Canadian Premier League team in Winnipeg announced that it is wrapping up operations. They were part of probably the biggest sporting moment of my life in 2023, when our TSS Rovers became the first semi-pro team to eliminate a professional team from the Canadian Championship.. We’ve been rivals since then, playing them again in May in Winnipeg where they nicked a 1-0 win against us in the preliminary round. Nevertheless, it absolutely sucks for supporters to lose their club. It sucks for players and other workers to lose their jobs. Like the rest of the global economy, soccer is a billion dollar thing only at the very highest levels in the 0.01%. Everywhere else it’s about community and connection and hopes and dreams. People make it possible. Intangibles are essential. When it dies, a little bit more community dies with it. Support for your local clubs matters because it will keep it viable AND because you will experience connection and belonging and friendship and purpose. The billionaires want to sell those to you on their own terms. Resist and make community in spite of them.
Friday night professional women’s hockey arrived in Vancouver. The Vancouver Goldeneyes kicked off their history starting with a puck drop by Christine Sinclair and then a 4-3 come from behind overtime win. It was the third game in a row that a professional Vancouver women’s sports team has won from behind if you go back to the second leg of the NSL semi final and the final of the NSL. This win happened in front of a packed house at Pacific Colosseum and. Vancouver became the first PWHL team to have its own logo permanently marked at centre ice. It’s a very special time in women’s sports in this city. Both the Northern Super League and the PWHL strive to be top tier leagues in the world of professional women’s sport. The PWHL already is. NSL has made a strong start, based on the “state of the league” address that founder Diana Matheson gave prior to the Cup Final last week. It remains to be seen how profitable and sustainable the league can be over the long term, but it is walking and talking like a top five global league after just one season, and that’s probably well ahead of schedule.
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No, not a a post about facilitation tactics, just some notes on questions in different contexts: business, football and life hacks. Like these job interview questions from readers of The Economist. Some of these are truly anodyne, but some are interesting. And it gives you some insight into what an elite level job interview looks like (washing dishes at the CEO’s cabin?). I’m slightly disappointed there weren’t 42 questions. I’ve gifted you the link. Read it to find out why.
World Cup qualification all but wrapped up yesterday for most of the remaining spots in the 2026 Men’s World Cup. There was drama all around but perhaps the most incredible match of the night happened in Edinburgh where Scotland qualified for the first time since 1974 in a match for the ages. In our region, North and Central America and the Caribbean, there was late drama as Curaçao qualified for their first World Cup after Jamaica hit the woodwork 3 times and was denied a 95th minute from a VAR review. With 155,000 people, If Curacao was a city in Metropolitan Vancouver, it would be the fifth or sixth biggest municipality in our region. They are the smallest country ever to qualify for a World Cup, in a year in which 47 other countries will also take part. I hope they get to play Cabo Verde for some kind of small island trophy.
Canada, for the record, played their last game of 2025 and broke a three game goalless streak with a sometimes-feisty, sometimes-anemic performance agains Venezuela. Becasue we qualify by being co-hosts, we have had a dearth of competitive fixtures since a disappointing quarter final loss in the Gold Cup in the summer, where we also drew with Curaçao. Impressive friendlies against Wales and Romania in September failed to build momentum. Last night’s win was good, but with only two windows in March and June, we have only 4 warm up matches to prepare for the World Cup.
I like soulcruzer. I found him on Mastodon, and his approach to life is to use his brain and his sense of ritual and magic to hack reality. Here are a few of his Chaos Magik practices. Have a read. Some of these are really fun little games and rituals you can play using the tools of obliquity and complex cognition.
Yesterday Rowen Simonsen and I filmed a little conversation about AI in facilitation practice and perhaps inspired a bit by soulcruzer’s reality hacking, I suggested that AI, specifically LLMs can be a fabulous obliquity engine to help individuals and groups crack their pattern entrainment, much the way we can use art, poetry and music to create surprising associations in our mind. Use LLMs to stimulate your brain’s own meaning-making capabilities. Perhaps we can use LLMs as a way to introduce obliquity into deliberations (give me ten questions about this subject that might be asked by a river watching us work). This is the kind of thing that LLM AI might be best for in the world of sense-making and dialogue: generating nonsense that stimulates human brains to make unlikely connections. We could also use card decks, I Ching divination, coin flips and the like to introduce randomness that forces brains to get to work. Like all “oracles” though, if you believe that the tool has an answer informed by some kind of intelligence, you are more culpable for hallucinations that your LLM partner. Oracles are best used to force your own eyes to see what is really going on with you. The interview is part of a series that are being used for Beehive Productions’ current course on Hosting at the Edge of our Humanity.