Dave Snowden has been hard at work diving into the complex domain (just one of the domains in Cyenefin, remember) as he unpacks how to work with anthro-complexity around strategy, risk, and change. Yesterday he published an important blog post on a new framework called WRASSE Have a read of it.
Tottenham faced Doncaster Rovers in the third round of the EFL Cup today, and it was a decently entertaining match. Spurs had some squad rotation at play, resting our centre-halves and replacing them with Danso and Palinha. Tel, Johnson, Simon, and Gray started in the midfield, around Bentancur and Odobart on the wing. Doncaster played well, especially in the opening of both halves, but Palinha’s bicycle kick and an own goal generated by our trademark wing play set the visitors on the back foot. Johnson was great, Gray was his usual reliable self and Tel had two glorious chances but got his feet tied up. It was a set piece clinic with Danso’s long throws steaming into the box and Simon’s corners causing havoc. Johnson made a solid claim to be a regular starter in a crowded field with terrific outside play and a late goal. Late in the match Luca Williams-Barnet made his first team debut, at 16 years old. He’s a bright young talent and received a very warm ovation when he came on at 86′. He scores at a rate of a goal a game in the U21 side. 3-0 in the end.
A day of football yesterday. It started early watching Tottenham play Brighton. Spurs were looking to continue their form but despite having the lions share of possession and the best set of chances, they conceded thwice in the first half, digging themselves into a hole. Exciting battles on the wings saw both Kudus and Odobaert stymied by their full back counterpoints, and Lukas Bergval in the middle was creative but loose. His mistake resulted in the second Brighton goal. Still, Richarlison managed to nick one back before the half. We came out of the dressing room with more of the same. It was fun watching Kudus and Bergval experiment, resulting in many failures, but there was patience there. Xavi Simon joined them as a creative later in the half and we secured a second goal. Not a scintillating performance, but better than the disjointed show against Bournemouth earlier in the season. The draw was enough to keep us in second place overnight behind undefeated Liverpool. We play winless Wolves next.
Yesterday was also the last Vancouver Rise home game of the season and we went along to that one in person. Ottawa Rapids were in town, featuring former TSS Rover and TSS academy player Stella Downing who is having a great rookie professional season. A very similar pattern of play to the Spurs match, with the Rise dominating possession and pressure in the opening 15 minutes, but conceding a goal after a clearance was flicked on and Stella got loose behind the high Rise back line. She doesn’t miss when you give her time and space like that. 1-0. Latifah Abdu, Vancouver’s new striker, had a couple of good chances early, but was taken out of the game in the second half by a smothering and pressing Ottawa defence. Jasmyn Spencer and Lisa Pechersky, two of the best and most consistent Rise players couldn’t get anything going either. After DB Pridham’s goal and a third from Jazmine Wilkinson, who also played in League 1 BC for Harbourside, the Rise missed their chance to secure the fourth and final playoff spot. 3-0 flattered the visitors, by Vancouver’s defence is a shambles, and their attack looks unconnected with players like Abdu and Pechersky taking it all on by themselves. They have conceded 10 unanswered goals in the past two games, after a good four-game winning streak took them into playoff contention. They have work to do.
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.
You know you’re getting older when you strain a tendon in your little finger whilst holding a bowl. Ouch. My guitar practice will be about more compact chord voicings for the next few days I think.
Sometimes (all the time?) music needs you to be the channel for it, not the filter or the gatekeeper. Cal explors their growth as a musician in a beautiful post this morning. And my friend Luke Concannon, who is as pure a channel for music as I have ever met, has news about a new album, which I can’t WAIT to hear. I just my copy.
Making meetings a channel for good work requires asking the right questions and designing from deeper intent. Mana Shah shares her go to questions, framed through an appreciative inquiry design cycle. Helpful stuff.
A conversation in verse between Dave Pollard and PS Pirro, has me reflecting on Dave’s lines:
The problem — where it all begins, it seems —
is in the desperate need of our sad species
to find patterns, to make everything ‘fit’
into this flimsy model we mistake for reality.
I’m partial to Brian Cox’s idea that Earth could be the only place in the galaxy where meaning is made. I don’t know why, I don’t know what for, and I don’t think we are really equipped to do it well on our own. But it is something that we do, and it enlivens my animal life.
The Canadian National Men’s team set a new standard for themselves, claiming to 26th best in the world after their performances in friendlies last week. That’s the right direction.
While I was away I didn’t get a chance to see Tottenham’s 3-0 victory over West Ham, but I was glad to hear of it. After the hiccup against Bournemouth I was worried that we might head back to our trend of diabolical losses bucking a trend of otherwise credible performances. I had one eye on today’s Champions League match against Villareal. It wasn’t a scintillating piece of art or high drama, but a reasonably comfortable 1-0 win based on an own goal from Luiz Junior who bundled a cross into his own net from the in-form Bergvald while Ricarlison was steaming in behind him. The lack of offensive was a little concerning but with Simons now taking his place in the side and a more or less settled starting XI, I hope that the chemistry keeps building.
In other English football news, these plucky boys from Grimsby keep doing the business and snuck out of South Yorkshire with a 1-0 win against Sheffield Wednesday in the League Cup. They are fast becoming the story of the tournament as if knocking off Manchester United wasn’t already enough.
Last week was the international break and by all accounts Canada had a good set of games against European competition. I caught some of the first match against Romania, a solid 3-0 win in Bucharest, which was powered by Ali Ahmed who had an assist and a goal. Later they played Wales, and as good as the Romania game was, this was even better. A 1-0 win off a sublime free kick from Derek Cornelius doesn’t tell the whole story. Canada missed a swath of chances and could have had two or three more goals. The movement and chemistry up top with Ahmend, Oluwasayei, Buchanan and David was beautiful. With no competitive matches until they open the World Cup in June in Vancouver, these kinds of games are just the right kind of warm up for the MNT.
Closer to home, the Vancouver Rise got pummelled 7-0 by AFC Toronto putting an end to a good run of form that saw them climb up the table. They meet Ottawa Rapid on Saturday back at Swangard Stadium and I’m hoping to see our former TSS Rovers Stella Downing (Ottawa) and Kirsten Tynan (Vancouver) get starts. Vancouver needs to win to stay above Ottawa. The Rise are currently tied with Montreal for second place. No one is catching Toronto at this point, I don;t think . With five games left, Toronto have a 10 point lead over their chasers.