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.
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.
We all won.
It was amazing to watch the Vancouver Rise win the NSL Playoff Championship last night and be crowned the first ever champions of professional women’s soccer in Canada. The Cup Final was an incredible occasion. AFC Toronto, the league champions, came into the match as favourites, having relatively cruised their way through the semi final against Montreal and with a winning record over Vancouver. The Rise have had an up and down season, but finished third in a tight field and made the semi finals with a couple of weeks to spare. They worked hard to beat Ottawa, winning 2-1 in the first leg of the semi final before going to Ottawa and needing penalties to settle the match. Yesterday’s match in Toronto was an occasion in so many ways. A lightning delay around 38th minute stopped play for a half an hour. Toronto dominated the first half and a goal from their 17 year old talisman Kaylee Hunter set them up with a 1-0 scoreline that looked like it would hold. But Vancouver found another gear, tightened up their defence and got a flukey goal to level the match before their own talisman, Holly Ward scored a beauty to take the lead 2-1. Vancouver needed to hold on for another 25 minutes though, which they did and toppled Toronto for the win.
There is so much that is amazing about this event, not the least of which is that there were 4 former TSS Rovers players involved in the match. For Toronto, Emma Regan and Ashley Cathro started and Kae Hansen was an unused sub. These players appeared for our club in 2018 when we had a team in the Women’s Premier Soccer League. For the Rise our former supporters’ player of the year Kirstin Tynan, who was our keeper and captain in 2023 and 2024, was the back up keeper behind goaltender of the year and Finals MVP Morgan McAslan. That’s Kirstin pictured above, losing her mind after the match!
Having watched these players develop, especially in the nearly invisible world of lower level women’s football, it was incredibly moving to see them on this stage, afforded this opportunity and doing it brilliantly. This whole season has been deeply meaningful for thousands of people and especially the women who played the game for so long at the highest levels without ever getting a chance to play professionally at home. You saw it in Amy Walsh’s sign off from the broadcast yesterday. She was one of Canada’s bad asses in her day, and has been a tireless champion of this league. You see what it means to her.
And on the other side of the country, our 2025 player of the year, Sofia Faremo (and 2025 TSS Rovers player Elyse Beaudry) won their Conference title for Simon Fraser University, so it was a day of championships for women’s soccer involving Rovers.
Support people to dream, learn, grow and build something and they will exceed expectations.
It’s November now, the snow is finally calling the mountains. The salmon are back on Bowen. And the Northern Super League is drawing its inaugural year of professional Canadian women’s soccer to a close. Our local team, the Vancouver Rise today secured a spot in the playoff final with a penalty shootout win after the two leg semi-final against Ottawa Rapid went to extra time. Holly Ward, a bright young forward who has seemed snakebitten for much of the season scored the equalizer in the 84th minute and penalities decided it.
I’m pleased for our former Rovers supporters’ player of the year, Kirstin Tynen, who is the backup keeper for the Rise. She’s only played once this year, but got a point in a wild 3-3 draw. On the losing side, Desiree Scott, a Canadian national team LEGEND played her last game today and former Rover Stella Downing sees her scintillating rookie season come to an end.
Toronto and Montreal are battling it out tomorrow for the second spot in the final. Whatever happens, a former TSS Rover will lift the cup next weekend. Watching these women finally get their chance to play pro at home is what this league is all about.
Soon we will know if we are alone. A beautiful “Occasional Paper” from Doug Muir published at Crooked Timber about where we are in relation to the search for life on other planets. I love this description of the current moment:
What that means is that now, right now, we’re in a very special time. It’s a time when we’re actively looking for life out there — The Search is underway — but the question is still open.
For all of human history until the 1990s we couldn’t do anything but speculate. And at some point in the future — I suspect around 2100, but it could be 2150 or 2200 or 1500, whatever — we’ll know, or anyway we’ll be pretty sure we know. Right now is the only time in history when we’re able to actually Look, but we haven’t yet Found. This brief period is epistemologically unique. We are living through the short-lived Age Of The Search. And when it’s over, one way or another, it will be over forever.
I’ve been reading through Jen Briselli’s work both as an inspiration and a fresh take on much that I already know about what we both seem to love about complexity. One of the pieces that I’d recommend to others is this one on Stases Theory, a classical rhetorical technique for working with difference. Jen explores how difference works in complexity and offers these thoughts before moving in to a method and then a grounding in many streams of thinking from communication theory to complexity.
…disagreements are less like rungs on a ladder to be climbed stasis by stasis, and more like landscapes of unresolved questions and conflicting perspectives, overlapping and interconnected.
Crucially, when people are operating at different stases it isn’t always marked by overt disagreement or interpersonal conflict. Often, we don’t even realize we’re making sense of an issue differently, working at different stases, until we’re prompted to consider it. So, the question really isn’t “Where are we in the sequence?” as much as “Where is the crux of meaning making for each of us right now?”
Sometimes we don’t need to agree on the facts first, as long as we can still coordinate action around shared policies. Other times, coherence and collaboration absolutely depend on established facts and shared definitions before implications can be explored or decisions can be made. Knowing the difference isn’t just a matter for rhetoricians and laywers, but also one of collective diagnosis for teams trying to make complex decisions and take action together. It helps groups locate the friction so they can orient toward and navigate through it. In some ways, a stasis is less a blockage than a beacon — a signal where attention and understanding are most needed, and will provide the most leverage.
Oh the sports. I’ve been so busy lately, and travelling and working odd hours, that I haven’t had time to watch too many games. Nevertheless, I’ve jumped on the Blue Jays bandwagon for this World Series and, like much of Canada, become entranced with these loveable underdogs who continue their quest to become the absolute archetype of what can be accomplished with friendship, commitment to one another, and support. If they win the World Series tonight, you will never shut me up about how the intangibles are as crucial to quality work as the tangibles are. You can’t shut me up about that anyway.
It seems like the opposite also proves the case with the other two teams I devote much of my winter’s attention too. Both Tottenham Hotspur and the Toronto Maple Leafs are mailing it in at the moment, suffering periods of perplexing performance. Spurs are at least inconsistent, with wins like last weekend’s 3-0 v Everton coming at the same time as they get bundled from the League Cup or drop points in an anemic game against Monaco in the Champions League. They are also suffering an injury crisis again. The fact that the Premier League is so weird this season means that we currently sit third on 17 points, but if we lose to Chelsea tomorrow and Brentford beat Palace, the 11th place team can overtake us in one afternoon.
As for the Leafs, “discombobulated” is the word of the moment. They must be happy that the Jays are doing so well, because the Toronto fan base is ruthless when their team is underperforming. Heads will not yet roll at the Scotiabank Arena, but they are being feverishly scratched.