Xwexwesélken is the Squamish name for the mountain goat, a creature that lives on the high rocky cliffs of the coast mountains, picking its way across perilous and sheer vertical surfaces in search of food and protection. Mountain goat wool is a prized material in Squamish culture, used to weave blankets with immense spiritual and social significance.
In the last session of the Mi Tel’nexw leadership course, Chepxímiya Siyám (Chief Janice George) used the mountain goat as her metaphor for teaching about Squamish ways of doing. As a master weaver who has brought the weaving practice back to life in many Coast Salish communities, she wove her personal story with the deeper cultural story of Squamish ways of life, as goat wool is woven through weft and warp into a beautiful, powerful blanket. I heard two critical teachings in her presentation: doing things well comes down to being anchored in story and treating all work as ceremony.
Chepxímiya started her teaching with her own personal history of how she grew in the cultural knowledge, raised by her grandmother after her family died in a car accident, and working as an archeology researcher. Several times she talked about how “the culture saved my life.”
Chepxímiya was raised in the Squamish tradition of women’s leadership, leadership that is characterized by gentleness and deep knowledge of the rhythms and seasons of land, family, medicines, and food, so that the people may be cared for. In a culture where men were often sent to war, the women are knowledge keepers. A man might be killed in battle and all his knowledge dies with him. Women hold the deep knowledge of ceremony while men lead the work.
“To lead,” she said, “we have to believe in our ancestors, their teachings, and ourselves.” Who I am and what I am doing is deeply connected to my family, to our stories, and to my aspirations for my children and their children. This is the bigger context for any action, but it is so easy to make things short-term and succumb to immediate needs that don’t take the bigger picture into account. If one is disconnected from family, community, land, and history, then one is lacking the perspective needed to lead well.
One of Chepxímiya’s profound early learnings about this came in her research work when she discovered that the National Museum in Ottawa had two skeletons in its possession that were taken from Xway Xway, the village site in Stanley Park in Vancouver that is located near to where the totem poles stand today. In the early part of the 20th century, it was cleared and the residents relocated across the water to Xwmeltch’stn. In 1879 and again in 1928, two skeletons were disinterred and taken to the museum. Chepxímiya was a key part of the effort to bring these ancestors home in 2006. When the skeletons arrived in Vancouver, they were driven to the Park and brought to Xway Xway for one more visit before being taken away and buried in the cemetery. It was a profound moment, connecting ancestors, land, history, and ceremony.
This moment led Chepxímiya to learn more about her leadership and to accept her responsibility as a Siyám. She was invited to take a name and refused to do so until everyone in her family agreed that it was a good action, and there was no jealousy or conflict. The name she was given is from Senákw, the village on the south shore of False Creek that was the subject of nearly a century of litigation with the federal government and decades of discussions between Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh. Chepxím was one of the last people to live at Senákw before the villagers were moved against their will. In taking her name, Chepxímiya consulted Elders and leaders from Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh, and all were invited to witness in her naming ceremony. As Cheif Leonard George told her at the time “that’s a gutsy move you’re making” but when the final litigation was all settled and the Squamish regained the village site, the final court decision was released on her birthday.
As Chepxímiya says, when you walk softly and receive signs, you become susceptible to spirit. This is why ceremony as a model of “doing” is so profound.
Lessons from Squamish ceremony
The way in which Squamish ceremonies are conducted contains many lessons for leadership. Chepxímiya shared these lessons generously, and these are my reflections on her teachings.
Family, land, and teachings are all connected to action. Squamish ceremonies are conducted under strict protocols. These protocols include an intense period of preparation where one personally invites people to come, prepares to seat, feed, and gift every person who comes. There are people in the community who manage the feasts and conduct the ceremony with detailed knowledge of every person’s name, who their family is, which community they come from, how they are related to the family hosting the feast and where they are in their spiritual development. For a feast with hundreds of attendees, this is an immense amount of knowledge to carry, and making a mistake – such as pronouncing a name wrong, running out of food or seating a person in the wrong place – can be costly to the standing and status of the host family. Knowing the context is critical, to the finest detail, and finding the people who can lead in a respectful and generous way is essential to keeping the work relational.
(It is one of my great failings that I have a hard time remembering people’s names and faces, and I personally understand how hurtful it is to get this wrong. I spend a lot of time trying to remember and also humbly apologizing for my inability to connect faces and names.)
“The more you give away the richer you are.” Squamish culture is a reciprocal gift giving culture, and in giving away possessions, names, and power, one humbles oneself and open oneself to be able to receive from others. Those who hold on to their possessions and hoard them are unable to receive gifts from others. In my own spiritual practice, emptying is a key practice, to become open to receiving. To receive, first, you must give and that is a powerful leadership lesson.
Prepare seriously for important work. When leaders are appointed to lead in ceremony, they are blanketed with a mountain goat wool blanket to protect their heart and given a headband made of cedar to focus their mind so they can act purely, kindly, and with the purpose of the work in mind. Witnesses are appointed for any kind of important work and are given the job of reporting the story of what happened in as much detail as possible. In my own facilitation practice, these are the practices of hosting and harvesting. Preparation for hard work is essential, and perhaps this is an obvious teaching, but in a rushed world, when we can zoom from one meeting to another, it is critical to create time to prepare ourselves well to host and harvest important moments.
“The weaver’s job is to create a pure space for your people to stand on.” I have left the most profound teaching for last, as this speaks so powerfully to the work I have done for years trying to understand the role of space and containers in my facilitation and strategic leadership practice. The blankets that Chepxímiya weaves are both for the protection of the heart, but also to lay down on the floor of the longhouse so that people may stand on them as they are appointed to their witnessing roles or given their new names. The blanket creates a pure space, a container that is open to potential and clear of anything that holds back the person in fulfilling their duties, It is both a physical purity and a spiritual purity that is represented. The image of the leader as a facilitator and as a weaver is powerful; creating a lifegiving context for action; providing the conditions of material and relational capacity for a person to live out their purpose for their family and community and territory; to trust a person to act while keeping them connected to all that is important. This is really the gift of these teachings.
Mi tel’nexw is a powerful leadership journey. As a person who lives within Skwxwu7mesh Temix, this journey has given me some deep insight into what is HERE, into the traditions that are soaked into the land in which I live. It helps me better understand Squamish practice and tradition and gives me lenses for reflection on my own leadership the concepts that I teach others. You too can go on this journey, and the next course starts on November 3.
I lift my hands up to Skwetsímeltxw, Lloyd, Ta7táliya, Chepxímiya and Ta7táliya-men for this offering, for their generosity and their beautiful work. Chen kw’enmantumi!
Sts’úkwi7 is the generic name for salmon in Skwxwú7mesh, and in our second module in the Mi tel’nexw leadership program, Lloyd Attig offered practical grounding in his teachings on the medicine wheel as a way of exploring balance.
My home island is a rock rising out of the fjord that makes up the southern half of Skwxwú7mesh Temíxw. We have a few lakes here and creeks that swell in the fall when the rains return and fill the sea with fresh water infused with the taste of our island. Salmon, who have been living their lives in the Pacific ocean for 2, 3, or 4 years since they hatched in these creeks are able to discern the taste of their home stream in the great mix of waters that fills the Salish Sea. They use all of their senses to find their way home at all costs where they spawn and then die, for their life cycle begins and ends in the same stream, and a powerful drive returns them to their source.
Because of this symmetry in their life cycles, the faithfulness of their return to their places of origin, and their crucial role in the ecology of the Pacific coast, salmon are deeply important animals in both traditional and settler cultures here. They are powerful symbols of active balance and they are essential to the health of coastal forests. Up to 30% of the nitrogen used by the giant trees of our temperate rainforests originates in the ocean and is carried to every part of the land through the capillary network of salmon coming home to spawn and die. In this sense they literally connect land and sea, trees and ocean, erasing the boundaries, mixing nutrients and diversifying the health and wellbeing of the entire ecosystem.
Lloyd Attig, used the salmon as his inspiration to lead us through a series of exercises based on the medicine wheel, to examine interconnection and balance in our own lives. Leadership of all kinds demands that we place ourselves in challenging positions where we are likely to be knocked around, knocked off balance and create damaging dynamics for ourselves and others. I know Lloyd is an accomplished boxer, and so his sense of balance and grounding is born of years of experience in the ring. Tip off balance and the moment you are pushed, you collapse and fall.
For Plains Cree people, and many other indigenous cultures the medicine wheel is a powerful symbol of balance and renewal, just as the salmon is here. Breaking the wholeness of the world into four quadrants, it gives meaning and coherence to the stages of life, the seasons of the year, and the interdependence of the human faculties of spiritual, mental, emotional and physical well being. In our course last week Lloyd led us through an exercise to look at how balanced our every day lives are. Working with the mundane – fine granularity and plenty of examples – helps to reveal patterns of behaviour that indicate where to place our attention to address a current imbalance. This kind of inventory is helpful not as a one time thing, but in an ongoing way, reflection within a framework to see where the attention needs to be.
But the medicine wheel is not simply a tool for personal self-development. Individuals are not solo practitioners in a world without influence. We are embedded in high and higher levels of organization, teams, families, circles of friends, organizations, communities, nations. And we are also embedded in time too, as products of everything we have inherited and living ancestors to the thousands of generations yet to come. For me, practicing the balance and interconnection of salmon is to place oneself in relation to everything upon which I am dependant and which, even in some small way, is dependant on me.
Pacific salmon really are amazing creatures because they embody this teaching so perfectly. All five species that make our coast home exhibit the same circular life cycle of hatching in freshwater, growing and travelling over thousands of kilometres during their short span and then fiercely making their way back to the very gravel bed where they were hatched. Their entire life cycle is in service of the next generation, and becasue they die right after spawning, they never meet their young and never pass on knowledge or guidance. As we say, salmon are born orphans and die childless and yet the cycle of life continues over generations.
As individuals, salmon do everything in their power to grow strong and healthy while they are at sea. Some species, like sockeye, stop eating once they return to freshwater, meaning that they face an upstream journey of sometimes hundreds of kilometres against an autumn freshet with only the fat and muscle in their bodies to power them. Their singular drive and commitment to return assures the survival of their line. When they die, their bodies decay in the river and become food for the tiny creatures upon which their offspring will feast, or are carried away by animals into the forest to feed to soil and provide fresh sources of nitrogen and minerals to the hungry trees of the temperate rainforest.
In terms of a model for living balance and interconnection, there is no better standard than the pacific salmon. Tools like Lloyd’s medicine wheel give us gateways through which we can explore this deep relationship our own self has to all the systems in which we are embedded. Leadership which is in the service of life, at a minimum, requires this perspective and practice.
I live in Squamish traditional territory, Skwxwú7mesh Temíxw, and I have spent the last 19 years of my residency here as an uninvited guest trying to learn a little about the land and sea, and the traditional teachings that have found a home here for tens of thousands of years.
This month I have joined dozens of others in taking a course from my friend Ta7táliya and her family and friends called Mi tel’nexw which in Squamish means “figure it out.” It’s a leadership course that is rooted in Squamish ways of knowing and being (you can join anytime at that link.)
Our first class was last week, listening to the teachings of Skwetsimeltxw, who spoke about Squamish history and teaching from the perspective of sp’ákw’us, the eagle. As part of the course, we are invited to articulate takeaways and giveaways, naming the gifts received and how we will offer gifts as a result. This cycle of reciprocity is essential.
So here are a couple of takeaways and giveaways that are sitting with me.
Everything starts with the land. As obvious as this one seems, it’s important to remember. I take away from this insight the idea that when doesn’t know what to do, stop and see where you are, what is the land or sea saying about this. It is the ultimate source of everything. The other day I was up at Rivendell Retreat Centre, where I am a Board member, and we were talking about the gardens and outdoor space there. People come to Rivendell from all over the world to experience contemplative practice through silence, hospitality, simplicity and prayer. The practice of simplicity invites us into a powerful, open and basic relationship with the natural world, and my friend and I were discussing how we could make the gardens of Rivendell embody the hosting that the land does so that visitors to our centre could practice outside of our beautiful rooms and sanctuary, attuned to the blessing of the natural world. This territory begs to be loved through every expression of the land and the sea and so my giveaway is to put that lens back on the land at Rivendell and to work with folks to help us help spiritual seekers find the simplicity in that teaching.
Ceremony strengthens you so you can stay positive. My takeaway here is how important practice is. Ceremony that ties me to the land and to the community, brings me into a relationship with the natural world, the supernatural world and community in a way that makes me accountable for the way I spend my time in this life. Skwetsimeltxw shared a teaching of revered Squamish Elder Louis Miranda: “Don’t be afraid of death – we are only here camping for a short time. Don’t waste a day while you are here.” Ceremony gives us names, helps us over the transition of life’s markers, through grieving and loss, through celebration and abundance. Daily practices helps us to live well so that we can take care of what we have. My giveaway is to a practice that shares the beauty and goodness of my life and to this end I have deleted my social media apps from my phone to manage my energy and attention.
Take care of the things in your temporary possession. Squamish culture, like most west coast traditional cultures, is heavily based on property and ownership. The myth that indigenous people don’t have concepts of land ownership is patently false everywhere. Here on the west coast where potlatching is the governance system, all of the property of the nation – including land and places, stories, names, responsibilities, and resources – are placed in the care of someone. The laws and the rules are very strict because care for these fundamental things is essential to the survival of a people. (and yes removing these systems is a form of genocide, set on destroying a people through banning potlatching and ceremony, and stealing these possessions). Skwetsimeltxw said that when a person is given a name, it is not theirs to own but theirs to carry for a while and “polish during your life.” The takeaway for me is a teaching about stewardship and how we are to care for the things that come into our possession. For me this means that names I have like “Art of Hosting steward” confer responsibility to ensure that when I no longer carry that title, it has been made better for those who pick it up. My giveaway is to examine the various names and identities I carry – Board member, Bowen Islander (Nexwlélexwm uxwimíuxw), settler, Canadian, father, husband, facilitator, – and to live them in a way that people encountering these identities in others – especially in those I teach, train and raise – will recognize them as honourable. It is my work to transform an identity like “Canadian” conferred by my birth into this colonial land, or to try to live up to the high standards of a word like “father” that has been given to me by my dad and children.
“Prayers and love, once they are put down, stay where they are put.” This is a direct quote from Skwetsimeltxw and it refers to how Squamish people, living in this territory for tens of thousands of years, have prayed and loved every inch of it from time immemorial. The love and prayers of every ancestor lie upon the rocks and mountains and waterways here and my takeaway is that this land is soaked in blessings. Everywhere you walk or sit is a place that has been stewarded since the beginning of time with care and affection and deep spiritual connection. My giveaway is gratitude and an attuned sense of this sacredness. When Skwetsimeltxw uttered this sentence, I felt a complete and overwhelming sense of gratitude for the fact that I live in a place that is literally covered in love and prayer. Open to the sacred appreciatiation of the stewards and owners of this territory, inspired to attune myself ever deeper to what is really here.
I want to draw your attention to this incredible post by Zhen Goh, a fellow Cognitive Edge practitioner, exploring what is happening to the formerly-named “Disorder” domain in Cynefin, now called “Confusion.” In renaming the domain Confusion, Dave has also divided it into two types of confusion: Aproretic and Confused. I have taken to describing these, respectively, this way:
Aporetic means “at a loss” and indicates an unresolved confusion, or a paradox, which is just fine. Sometimes things need to remain a little murky for a while. “Confused” refers to the state of mind where you just aren’t getting it, and you don’t understand the problem. It’s often the result of a failure to see past one’s own biases, habits, and entrained patterns of solving things.
I have started thinking of this domain as the most important Cynefin domain because really, everything starts there. When you are confused, you can go to Cynefin to help you make sense of the routes available to you for action. This is the subject of some of Dave’s recent thinking, and also the meaning of the above graphic that he has produced. There is probably a lot more coming on this.
At any rate, that brings me to Zhen’s great post, which has been rattling around in my consciousness the last couple of weeks, largely because of this line, which is Jacques Derrida ultimately quoting Søren Kirkegaard:
“The moment of decision as such… must always remain a finite moment of urgency and precipitation; it must not be the consequence or the effect of theoretical or historical knowledge, reflection or deliberation, since the decision always marks the interruption of the juridico-, ethico-, or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it. The instant of a decision is a madness.” (‘Dialanguages’ in Points: Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995), 147–8.)
Isn’t that the truth? We only ever need to make a decision in the absence of actually knowing what is the right thing to do.
Speaking personally, it is one of my personal leadership challenges, making a decision in the absence of certainty. I find myself paralyzed at times, unable to make a choice. As Dave Snowden said on a webinar last week “there is really no right decision, but there ARE wrong ones.” Making a tough decision often feels like a kind of madness, dangling above an abyss full of projected and imagined monsters and very real pitfalls.
But making decisions in radical uncertainty is what is happening to all of us right now. We are all in radical Aporia, confronting paradoxes and situations that have no resolution, no precedent and no right way forward. We have to rely on human instincts now, ethics, values, morality. Moments like this reveal true character, and we are seeing the leaders who are truly built for these times, like Leo Varadhkar who has taken up his doctor’s license again. Also, our own Dr. Bonnie Henry in BC, who I can’t stop writing about. These are people who recognize, as Zhen puts it, that “Aporia allows for humanity:”
Aporia is part of ontological reality when facing crisis – but the burden of leadership is to communicate with clarity and authenticity. At once providing direction, demonstrating action, but acknowledging where there is uncertainty. Acknowledgment of this uncertainty is where the invitation for collective action can take place.
These folks are merely the most visible archetypes of human leadership in times of unresolvable confusion. In every home and every family, there are many millions more who are discovering what high-risk decision making is all about. May you all persevere in this time in being a leader who confronts the reality of Aporia and works diligently against mere confusion.
I live on an island, literally. It is a small community located near Vancouver, home to 3750 people in the winter and perhaps 5000 or so in the summer. Living on an island attunes one to the realities of working with bounded spaces. There is really only one way in our out of here, through the ferry, so it is a good chance to explore and learn about self-organizing systems. And as anyone who has visited an island knows, every one has its own unique culture and character, developed through decades of living in tightly connected, tightly bounded community.
During the pandemic, all I can see are islands within islands within islands, as each of us retreats into heavily bounded spaces, contained within other heavily bounded spaces and so on. Holonic containers repeating at fractal scales. Our word is organizing itself to defeat a virus that can permeate all but the most impermeable boundaries, and for a complexity worker, it is fascinating.
Complex adaptive systems consist of agents operating within bounded spaces. The five main factors that influence self-organization in complex systems are:
- Connections between agents in the system and the Exchange between those agents.
- The Identities that those agents have, in any given context.
- The Attractors and Boundaries that form the spaces in which agents interact. These contain and constrain the behaviour of the agents in the system.
The world is fractal at the moment meaning that these systems are nested within one another; the whole of one system becomes a part of a higher level space. Levels look like this:
- As a person, I try to keep the virus from entering my body
- I am in a relationship with two other people in my home and we are trying to keep the virus from entering our home. Our Chief Public Health Officer calls these “bubbles,” defined right now by people you can touch.
- Our bubble lives in a community and we must be very careful to keep at least two meters away from other bubbles so that we can keep the virus from entering our bubble. “Don’t connect the bubbles” is the heuristic here.
- Our community is very highly contained, being an island, and we have to do everything we can to limit the connections and exchanges we have to other communities.
- All of us together are living in a province that is itself contained and has limited connection with other provinces in our country. As a result, differences are appearing in how each province is handling the crises. and so far ours is doing fairly well.
- Our country is also bounded and contained, with very little international travel, and so we are also starting to see differences in how different countries are handling the pandemic, even close neighbours like Canada and the US. Anyone arriving in our country to stay must self-quarantine for 14 days and that is an order that is enforceable.
- And then of course, here we are on earth, perhaps yearning for an escape to a cleaner place, but no such place exists.
So it is clear that the two main factors influencing the pandemic are boundaries and connections at this point. Managing these is what we are doing now. Public health is about influencing behaviour, and as behaviour is an emergent property of people interacting within systems, it can only be influenced by changing the conditions for self-organization. Health authorities are applying tight constraints on Boundaries and Connections in order to influence behaviour and within each of the various levels, in the hopes that behaviours will change and we will ‘flatten the curve.” The challenge, as always, is that you cannot predict what will work and what won’t, so you need to try things and see what happens and adjust. Lots of adjustment has been going on and we can see a gradual tightening of Boundaries and narrowing of connections. Just as you are supposed to wash your hands and not touch your face, people in communities are expected to keep physically distant from one another and stay at home as much as possible.
Application in practice
By all accounts, this is working in British Columbia, where I live. All of our nested holons are engaged in the same project so that even with outliers who are disobeying the public health orders and recommendations, we are generally operating at the moment within the capacity of our health care system. Of course, things can change very quickly and so our daily reports have contained a mix of the carrot and the stick: praise at the efforts that are paying off, and a dire warning that we have not yet reached our peak and that the choices we make now will determine how many people literally live or die in the next few weeks and months.
Our only metric that matters is the curve. Exceeding the capacity of our health care system to provide care will trigger a massive escalation in this crisis meaning even tighter constraints. Currently, we are managing well, and we haven’t had any major tightening of constraints since March 18 for the general population.
As a case study, the way the British Columbia government has handled the pandemic is an excellent example of managing in complexity. I put this down to our Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry. Dr. Henry is trained in public health and preventative medicine, which is itself a complexity field. She was the operational lead in Toronto during the SARS epidemic in 2003 and she subsequently worked on the ebola and H1N1 outbreaks. She knows her stuff.
Her advice to British Columbians has been a mixture of heuristics – wash your hands, don’t touch your face, practice physical distancing – and orders that make it illegal to gather in groups larger than 50, and by law officers have been empowered locally to enforce physical distancing orders around much smaller groups in public places. This shows excellent use of what we try to teach with Cynefin: the proper application of the right use of constraints and practices for the type of situation at hand, with sophisticated monitoring, openness to change, and decisive action. My confidence in her is unparalleled. This is what a top rate complexity-informed leader looks like. Her actions and her influence have been widely praised and as a result of her leadership at this moment, people in our province generally feel safe.
What I worry about now
From a complexity perspective, the worry is what might happen to the connections and boundaries that are currently the most important constraints at play. In general, the tighter you make a constraint, the more catastrophically it fails and so there is a fine art to finding just the right balance to manage the disease and not provoke widespread social unrest. Even though we would all be 100% safe if we were locked in our houses and forced at gunpoint to stay there, this would probably provoke a massive social reaction that would defy that order en masse, creating the perfect conditions for 100% of the population to contract the virus. Likewise, a too lackadaisical attitude will not be effective in keeping people separate. There are already concerns that the March 18th order needs to be tightened to groups of less than 50. At this point, I think everyone would agree with that. The major boundary violations have been happening in house parties which is very dangerous as one infected person at a party will almost certainly infect everyone else who will take the virus home to their own generally tightly constrained bubble. Within bubbles, we don;t have boundaries, so the virus spreads by jumping across a boundary at one scale and finding it’s way into a bubble at a lower scale.
This has massive implications especially for people whose ability to adhere to orders and practice good heuristics is compromised by poverty, disability, or disempowerment. A general population health approach allows for flexibility in the system so that in principles, those who cannot adhere to the highest standard can nevertheless do their best. Our federal government emergency benefit, which looked initially like a $2000 a month income supplement for any who need it, now appears to be excluding up to a third of workers in our country. This is NOT the time to exclude people who would otherwise need to go out into the community to find work. The simplest solution would be to make that benefit available to all, to protect renters and homeowners from losing their homes during this period and housing homeless people properly in empty hotels instead of on uncomfortable cots in conventions centres and hockey rinks. Our society’s unequal in-bred distrust of the poor and disabled will have massive consequences if we don’t get this right.
At the best of times our system lets hundreds of thousands of people fall through the cracks. These days what will also certainly fall through the cracks is the virus we are trying to contain, simply because we don’t trust poor people.
On our island, we have asked that no one come and visit us, as we try to limit the connections with the outside world. This is because within the bubble of our island we have self-organized practices and systems that are working to care for our community. We are a small island, tightly connected, and our community crisis infrastructure is very small. People coming to live in the summer homes, or coming to visit for the day don’t know the protocols that have developed here and many small communities are reporting that visitors are more cavalier than residents are. Indeed this article names the problem of uncontrolled connections between bubbles as a major issue for small towns. (The lede phrase “wealth is the vector” is a powerful statement of the truth). Small communities are fragile social ecosystems. An outbreak of COVID-19 on our island, for example resulting from a visiting infected boater who doesn’t understand or follow our social practices, could ravage our General Store staff and would have a catastrophic consequence. We would quickly run out of food options and have no choice but to make more frequent trips to the mainland, thus increasing the exposure and overall exchange bandwidth for the virus to move.
Other constraints are also playing into this. Our island is an interesting Attractor for people who have been cooped up in their homes for months and the weather is changing. It will be very hard to stop people visiting on the ferry or on boats and so our ferry company has begun making serious discouraging announcements about visitors to small islands and our tourism association has been ramping up the message. With a sunny long weekend coming up, I believe that we need to make ourselves less interesting as a catalyst. I imagine the provincial government will be driving home that message too. Already ferry runs between the mainland and Vancouver Island have been massively reduced, with several reserved only for cargo. Entire routes have been shuttered.
Identities too become an important aspect to play with. We see our provincial government and health officer praising British Columbians and reminding us that we are all in this together. they are trying hard to get everyone to belong to the same team, and showing the results is a good way to reinforce that identity. Using wartime metaphors, while not especially helpful, nevertheless have the effect of getting folks into a serious mode of action. Our health officer sprinkles her messages with calls to be diligent over one’s own role, and have kindness and compassion for others. She refuses to condemn people for momentary or temporary violations of physical distancing practices (she says “you don’t have the full picture of what your neighbour is up to, so don’t be quick to judge”) but has no qualms using her authority to enforce orders against house parties and large outdoor gatherings.
It’s interesting times to be sure, but it has been a living and breathing example of how complexity thinking is providing the best way through the pandemic. I hope you are currently living in a jurisdiction where your decision-makers understand this, and I know many people are not. To you, my friends, all I can say is make sure YOU take a complexity-informed view of the situation and keep your bubble as tight as a little rocky island.