HFN guide Qiic Qiica, wearing his Three Stars vest, leads us across the beach at Kiixin, the ancient capital of the Huu-ay-aht Nation, and a site that has been occupied for more than 5000 years.
Two hours to kill in the Departure Bay ferry terminal because I forgot to reserve a ferry. Missed the 4pm sailing by three cars. But it was worth it to stop in and have lunch with my dear friend and colleague Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier in Port Alberni. I’m grateful for my friends. And for the time to reflect on my week.
I drove through Port Alberni on the way back from Bamfield, or more accurately, the Huu-ay-aht territories, where I was invited to lead a little debrief session at the end of a two-day Dark Skies Festival. The festival was inspired by and connected to the Jasper Dark Sky Festival. It was hosted and organized by the Huu-ay-aht First Nation and Foundry Events from Calgary. I was invited by my new friend Niki Wilson who is one of the organizers of the Jasper Festival and a science communicator with a growing interest in how dialogue can help us get past polarization. We both have an interest in that, so I would say we are co-learners because these days, polarization ain’t what it used to be.
There were 30 or so of us at this event, a pilot project designed to explore the feasibility and challenges of doing dark sky events at Huu-ay-aht. Present was a mix of folks, including amateur and professional astronomers, Indigenous cultural workers, leaders and territorial guardians, folks working in Indigenous and local community economic development and Indigenous tourism. The mix and diversity meant that we could absorb presentations and conversations on topics as diverse as exoplanets, Huu-ay-aht history, marine stewardship, economic development, astrophotography, Indigenous sovereignty, and economic development. Hosting becomes very basic when a diverse group of people is collected with a shared curiosity for both offering their expertise and learning from each other. Create containers in which people are connecting and, as councillor n?aasiismis?aksup, Stella Peters remarked to me on our first afternoon, the principle of Hišuk ma c?awak comes into play, and we begin exploring connections and relationships. Everything is connected.
Huu-ay-aht history begins with the descent of the original ancestors from the sky and so the skies are important, just as the land the sea and the mountains are, to the core identity and principles of Huu-ay-aht life. I quickly got enamoured with the idea of ensuring that the sky had a matriarch to govern and guardian that part of creation. With Elon Musk polluting the very skies over our heads with an infrastructure of connectivity and delirium, the sky needs a protector.
Over the days and evenings we spent together we were absorbed by story, guided through ancient Huu-ay-aht history and culture by Qiic Qiica, through the deep passion of Emma Louden for her research on exoplanets, to the astrophotography of Jeanine Holowatuik and her despair at the sky pollution of satellites and ground light. We toured the territory by foot and by boat, and spent the night around the fire talking and drinking tea and hoping for the fog to life so we could catch a glimpse of the starry sky, the partial lunar eclipse or the auroras.
Alas, the starry night evaded us as we were blessed with two foggy days, but for me the Dark Sky experience was only enhanced by being socked in. I am lucky enough to live in a relatively dark place, but darkness is a luxury for many who live in towns and cities. I have seen folks equally awed by the thick, inky darkness of the forest under cloud and fog as they are under a sky full of stars on a clear, dark night. Darkness is another of our diminishing commons in this world, and in this respect, the fog and cloud are a blessing, restoring a healthy circadian rhythm and deepening the rest we need. There is perhaps nothing better for understanding how arbitrary the boundaries between living things, landscapes and the universe are than a dark, foggy night where every edge is slightly ambiguous, and you are unsure if the sounds and sensations you feel are coming from inside or out.
I have long felt that on the west coast of Vancouver Island, in all the Nuu-Cha-Nulth communities in which I have been fortunate enough to travel and work. The west coast is one of those places where experiments like the Three Stars Dark Sky Festival seem more possible. First Nations have important and intact jurisdictions in these territories and are actively engaged in massive cultural resurgence. This means that relationships are constantly being reimagined between colonial governments, settler communities, foundations like the Clayoqout Biosphere Trust and Indigenous governments and communities and people who are governing, directing and stewarding their lands and resources with more and more of the recovered authority that was wrested from them over the past 200 years.
The first place I ever visited in BC was Hot Springs Cove in Hesquiaht territory back in 1989. We flew, drove and boated from Toronto to Hot Springs without stopping in Vancouver or anywhere else along the way. I think from that moment, my view of possibility for what could happen in this part of the world has always been informed by the week I spent, staying with my friend Sennan Charleson’s family, fishing herring, listening every night to Simon and Julia Lucas tell stories of all kinds. Coming out here wakes up those experiences in me, and I always return from the Nuu-Cha-Nulth worlds, which are a little different and a lot better for being there.
I hope this Dark Sky Festival thrives. There were so many ideas generated and so much goodwill created between folks this week. So much good can come from that.
A detail from a surf board on display at the Nazare Surf Museum, Nazare, Portugal.
If you have been working with me over the past five years or so you will have heard me reference and use the work of Cynthia Kurtz in the work we are doing. Among other things Cynthia is the originator of NarraFirma, the software I most often use for narrative work on complex topics. She is the author of one of my favourite papers on Cynefin, The New Dynamics of Strategy which she wrote with Dave Snowden back in 2003. She wrote her own books on Working With Stories and Confluence a brilliant book about her own approach to working with complexity. Last month she posted some news about her current work and life. She is in the process of downloading her work into four different versions of Working with Stories, and thinking deeply about a transition in her life and work. I encourage to read her post.
Cynthia has been a key mentor in my own life and work, especially as the pandemic changed our approach from in person to online. Last year I took her practicum course on PNI which deepened my appreciation for the depth of these tools that she shares. NarraFirma in particular has been a godsend as a tool for me to work with my clients. Because it is open source and Cynthia and her husband Paul have their hands on the code, any updates or bugs I have experienced with the software get corrected right away.
So I thought I would take a moment to offer folks an introduction to her work and point you to the resources that she has shared. Cynthia is an incredibly deep and generous thinker and has made it her life’s work to provide accessible tools to people struggling with complex challenges because at the core of human community should be the delight in the way we work with our stories.
Her work on complexity
Cynthia began her work in the world as a biologist studying social behaviour in animals until an injury in the field prompted a career change. Already pre-disposed to curiosity about complexity and with some skills as a programmer, she teamed up with her husband Paul Fernout to write environmental simulation software to help people learn more about the natural world. Later, seeking more security, Paul took a contract job at IBM and showed Cynthia a job posting relating to organizational storytelling and she applied. Her skills as a researcher, and knowledge of social dynamics through her science background quickly became the foundation of her work.
Cynthia worked at IBM as the company was discovering complexity and the role of storytelling and her ideas found a rich ground alongside many other researchers and thinkers who were helping to explore and develop the field. The paper she wrote with Dave Snowden from this time, The New Dynamics of Strategy, starts with a deep dive into theory and why complexity challenges conventional forms of decision making. It then goes on to describe the Cynefin framework in detail and discusses how to use it with a series of practices and applications. Together this represents a pretty comprehensive foundation for understanding the role of Cynefin and the methods for using it when it comes to strategy and decision making. The paper itself contains Cynthia’s ideas on control and connection which are key aspects of her own sense making framework
Although her work is deeply informed by theory, it wasn’t until 2021 that she finally published a book that describes her approach to understanding complexity, or more precisely, the relations between self-organization and intentional organization. The book is called Confluence and it describes a set of tools and approaches for thinking about the intersection of organizational planning in a self-organizing world. True to form, it is not just a theory book, but a book of well-documented thinking tools illustrated by stories and knowledge gleaned from a wide swath of human experience. It’s a delicious and lingering read. It cuts close to the bone. The last section addressing conspiracy theories might be one of those things that saves democracy. (It also helpfully addresses jargon and complexity theory in an incredibly thought provoking way!)
While it took her a long time write Confluence, she has been a productive and generous blogger for decades and her thoughts, ideas, ramblings and clear gems of wisdom are collected at her blog, Story Colored Glasses.
Working with stories
Cynthia’s focus in the world has been consistently on the role of stories and narrative and so her work has been driven towards the deeply practical. She has created, co-created or piloted dozens of methods for working with stories in groups, many of which are standard practice in our field now. Her magnum opus is Working with Stories in your community or organization and is a comprehensive introduction to her own research method, Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI). Working With Stories (WWS) has a whole website devoted to this book and some of her latest iterations, which include a simplified version and an advanced version, a collection of story forms and will soon also include the fourth edition, which she is currently preparing.
WWS is a constant companion on my desk and there is a lifetime of learning in this book. I’m astounded at Cynthia’s capacity to document her own process and her knowledge and present it in accessible ways. That isn’t to say that the material isn’t dense and rich. This approach is not simple to understand or work with until you have unschooled yourself a bit in research methods, epistemology and facilitation. But as a body of work it is immensely transformative for research, engagement and strategy.
WWS is a worthy investment of time and money and is a useful guide to anybody seriously working with story, social patterns and change making in complex settings.
Software for working with stories
Cynthia’s interest in uncovering patterns and connection in stories along with her training in statistics and her experience in programming led her to create the early programming behind Sensemaker Explorer while she was at Cognitive Edge. Later she and Paul Fernout created their own software for gathering stories and discovering patterns. Eventually their efforts became NarraFirma, an open source software package that is really a project management tool. NarraFirma includes hundreds of screens and tools to plan and carry out a PNI project, including the ability to create story gathering surveys, perform catalysis on the results, prepare materials for sense making sessions, and reflect on and report on projects. One of the best features of NarraFirma is the context specific help screens that enable users to not only navigate the software but learn about the practice as they are doing so. I’ve never seen anything quite like NarraFirma.
Although the software is free to use and requires only a WordPress site to install as a plug in (my preferred option) it takes several days to really learn how to use properly and years of experience to use well. When you use NarraFirma you are not just building a survey tool for story collection, but you are immersing yourself in Participatory Narrative Inquiry. I have done probably thirty or more projects, from one time story collections for strategic planning or engagement around complex issues like opioid use and crisis response to a four year long inquiry into changing workplace culture. Every time I dive in I learn more about how to work with this approach. The software not only helps me run my project, it makes me a better practitioner as I’m doing so.
I’m immensely grateful to Cynthia for putting her work out in the world and I highly recommend anyone interested in this field explore her thinking, offering and tools.
Part 1: Introduction to the model
Part 2: A deeper dive into the model
The two loops model emerged from many years of conversations amongst people working in the Berkana Exchange and their friends and mates in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As my friend Tim Merry pointed out on a comment at LinkedIn, the model itself was an emergent framework of how organizing happens on what we called back then “trans local” communities of practice. The Berkana Exchange was made up of many learning hubs around the world in places like Zimbabwe, South Africa, Senegal, India, Brazil, Mexico and Canada. These learning centres supported all kinds of experiments in living and the Art of Hosting took root and was co-created and developed in many of these places too, notably at Kufunda Village in Zimbabwe and The Shire in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Part of the origin of the two loops model was from the network making sense of itself and trying to understand what was required to create and sustain these kinds of experiments in an increasingly connected way. In the early 2000s there was so much talk about the way in which networks enabled by the open web were bringing people together and making interesting new forms of activism and organizing possible. Berkana was at the forefront of this lived inquiry and at some point prior to 2010, Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley published a pamphlet called Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale, summarizing the Berkana approach to developing leadership in communities, which sought to build on the promise of networks by discussing the role of emergence and how to support communities of practice so that they can grow into systems of influence. Although this diagram above is not in the published document, the “Name-Connect-Nourish-Illuminate” pathway was named.
My earliest photo of a skecth of the model in my handwriting from 2009
I’m trying to remember when I first encountered this model. This is probably the earliest version of it I have in my photos, dated March 9, 2009. At that time, I was working a lot with Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony, Tim Merry, Tuesday Rivera (Ryan-Hart) (who now offer an online course on their version of the model) and Phil Cass, all of whom were deeply involved with the Berkana Institute and the Exchange. So this was in our conversations then. We started sharing the model in Art of Hosting workshops and in some client work. I think the first time I was involved in teaching it “on the floor” was at an Art of Hosting in Springfield, Illinois, in March 2009.
That particular way of working with the two loops has become my preferred way of teaching when we are in person. In 2009, Teresa, Tenneson and I were in a convent in Springfield when we had the idea of making a map on the floor and asking people to position themselves on it according to where they were in the systems in which they were working (which in this case was the Illinois education system). We asked people to quietly walk around the map until they “felt” the right place to be. Once there, we asked them to talk about what it was like in that spot with others and then offer insights to the whole. I remember the poignant moment a teacher who stood on the legacy side of Transition broke down into tears, saying that she could see the education system dying around her, and all she was trying to do was throw children across the gap and into the new system. She had no idea if anyone was there to catch them. And in that moment, a tall man who worked for a Foundation pointed to a woman who was on the other end of the Transition bridge and said, “We’ve got you. We fund those programs. Keep throwing those children our way.” It was a powerful lesson about what happens when folks can see others in the wider world to whom they are connected.
Around that time, work carried me into a few other places where this model just made sense. Tenneson and I started working with Canadian Labour unions back then, especially the Canadian Union of Public Employees and in October 2010, we used this model on the floor of the Canadian Labour Congress Training Centre in Port Elgin, Ontario, to talk about how the labour movement was changing. That was the first time I saw people position themselves entirely outside the map. In this case, the two that stood outside were Executives of the CLC, both vice presidents of their provincial labour federations. They both agreed that their job was to care for the whole system, see everybody in it, and try to meet everybody’s needs.
Perhaps the most influential moment in my own development of the model came when I was working with churches in 2012. I had been working with the United Church of Canada at that time working with congregations and presbyteries to look at the changes that were accelerating across the church at that time. As a mainline Protestant denomination, the United Church, like all the others, is going through a massive generational shift in the structure and future of the denomination. After its founding in 1925, the Church grew rapidly and became an influential progressive social and spiritual force in Canada. Membership in the church peaked in the 1960s and since then has been declining. In the last 15 years, many congregations have closed their doors, and very few churches are growing or evolving within the denomination anymore. The two loops model captured this moment incredibly well and asks the question of what is already amongst us that gives us a clue about how progressive Christianity will take form in its next iteration.
Using this framework and infusing it with the theology of progressive Christianity made for a deeply meaningful experience in the dozens of congregations I worked with during those years. It gave everyone a place in the system and opened up conversations about tradition, innovation, and what is required for the church to change. Some churches were just not up to the task, falling to strong traditional voices that squashed the new sprouts of innovation because they couldn’t reconcile them with the church they knew and loved. And I’ve seen some congregations embrace the emerging alongside the traditional and do well meeting the spiritual needs of their congregation members.
One lovely story I remember from this time that I want to record here happened when my friend Tom Brackett – at the time a bishop in the Episcopal Church in the USA – invited me to create a retreat with him for folks we loving referred to as “heretics” within the Church. The retreat was called “Can these bones live?” and the organizing scripture was Ezekial 37:1-14, the vision known as The Valley of Dry Bones. In this vision, Ezekial is taken to a box canyon that is full of the skeletons of slain soldiers, and God asks him, “Mortal, can these bones live?” Ezekial sensibly replies “Oh God, you know.” And from that moment of paying attention to spirit and letting go of certainty, Ezekial and God wake up the bones and send the people home.
My notes from the day. I love the quote i jotted down that someone must have said “Heck: where the bad kids go.”
As we dove into this story and the framework, I invited people to walk contemplatively on the map and explore the Valley of Bones. It was indeed a deepening experience, and the rest of the retreat was full of stories, hopes, and real reckoning with what needs to die if the Episcopal Church is to live. Or even whether the Episcopal Church needed to die for progressive Christianity to live. Heretics indeed.
This particular gathering led to further engagements in the Episcopal Church in the USA and with ecumenical organizations like the Foundation for Theological Education (now known as the Foundation for Theological Exploration). That group sent a number of participants to a workshop that we did in Salt Lake City called “The Art of Convening in Faith-Based Communities,” and I worked closely with the FTE participants to think through this framework and its relationship to issues of justice, marginalization and equity. That single conversation would lead to many years long relationship and a pivotal event in the life of the two loops model in the United Church of Canada.
In 2013, as a part of a massive Comprehensive Review process, the United Church hosted a conversation about the future of theological education in Canada, with everything from academic seminaries to workshops on the spirituality of maple syrup on the table. I was invited to join a team hosting a huge gathering in Toronto to bring the whole system into the room for that conversation. To my delight, four of my friends from FTE were invited to attend as witnesses. The first two days were really hard, and there was a lot of conflict and rancour in the room. We had several conversations which served to surface the tensions and the conflicts. On the second evening, my friends from FTE took me aside and said that the group needed to take the gathering in a whole different direction. The host team from the General Council office didn’t know what else we should do, but my FTE friends and I sat in a hotel suite, watched by others and started to sketch out a plan to take the group through the two loops.
This would require changing the meeting room to accommodate a movement-based workshop for 175 people, so once we had settled on the design, we asked the hotel if they would change the room for the morning. They refused and wouldn’t let us change the room set up ourselves.
And so, at 11:00 at night, we snuck down to the conference room and persuaded a security guard to unlock the doors for us, saying we had a little prep to do for the morning. We locked ourselves in and took about an hour and a half to reset the room ourselves, taping a HUGE version of this model on one half of the floor and rearranging the tables and chairs to set up a World Cafe space.
We started the next day in a circle around the map, and I taught the model. Next, we had everyone place themselves on the map and go through the exercises of talking about what it was like where they were in the system. We followed that with a conversation about what gifts are offered from each place in the system, and the rest of the day was spent hearing about and discussing those together. It was a healthy, powerful conversation, and the moderator, Gary Paterson, absolutely fell in love with the model. Over the next two years, as he led the conversation on the Church’s future, he ran over 50 workshops using the model to talk to people across the country about the future of their Church. Here I am in 2014, teaching the model to the United Chruch’s EDGE Network as a part of the leadership development work at that time.
Of all the frameworks I have worked with over the years, this one has been as important as Cynefin. Both help us understand complexity, make sense of current conditions and both help people find affordances to action. I am immensely grateful for everyone I have ever worked with on this model, from my friends in Berkana to the Art of Hosting community to folks in the churches, transition movements, education systems, and elsewhere.
From a lovely video post from Johnnie Moore: “
Sometimes giving instructions, offering advice and explanations or information may not be the best way to help people to progress and grow.
And that sometimes what’s needed is a spirit of playful experimentation and a sense of companionship.
When I coached kids at football, I was the third coach on our team. I am not a great player, so I couldn’t teach the kids deep strategy and techniques. But I was able to help them understand how they were learning the game. We had rotating subs, so when kids came off the pitch, I asked them what they noticed out there and what they wanted to try when they went back out. Sometimes, we debriefed their failures or looked at how they succeeded or what surprised them. Still, because we never had too much time, and 10-year-olds are not into deeper reflective conversations, we would land on simple rules to ground them in what they were trying.
For example, my son, who was playing keeper, came up with the statement “magic hands” to focus on the ball at every moment. He held his hands out in front of him between his eyes and the ball and had the thought that he could pull the ball onto his hands like a tractor beam. His ability to make saves and focus increased because he was always ready to get a hand on the ball, and he found it a very satisfying strategy. I used it myself playing goal in an adult rec league and it also improved my keeping. Partly, I think these strategies are down to obliquity, breaking up the patterns we are trained to do.
Having coaches yelling advice to kids on high alert who are focused on the game around them is never more helpful than having the kids themselves remind themselves what they want to try out there. There is a movement in youth soccer to stop doing this and have silent touch lines. You work on things in practice, and when it’s time to play, you let the kids go out there and solve the problems and learn the game. The debriefing and reflection strategy is really helpful, as are the simple rules – the heuristics – that help a person stay focused on an experiment.
This is a great way to teach people how to thrive in complexity.
I asked DALL-E to make this image, because I can’t find the great photo i took of streams converging on a beach.
This is one of the things I love about my daily RSS feed. The first thing I see today on my NetNewsReaders list is this blog post from my fiend Mark McKergow in Edinburgh who shares his framework of time, which he has articulated in the Uers Guide to the Future. I like this conception of time, because of the big hole in the which he calls “Ant Country”. Ant Country is that time when the context you are in is important. Mark describes it as the “least useful zone” for planning, becasue it is too far away to predict wat will happen there, but not far enough away that it provides the somewhat reassuring clarity of a vision or a destination. It’s where anything can happen, where life is going to self-organize around your efforts in unpredictable ways, knocking you off course or delivering the resources you need right when you least expect them. “Planning” is rarely helpful here – think about the five year plans we all made in 2019 – but you can and should be prepared for this zone.
Here’s the framework:
User’s Guide to the Future Framework, originally published in McKergow and Bailey, Host, 2014.
I am working with a couple of clients right now looking at their future and it strikes me that there is always an oscillation between that far future and the immediate here and now, and many people can’t actually distinguish between the two, or worse set, they see them as closely connected. Here it is useful to distinguish once again between ordered systems and unordered systems, which helps us distinguish between knowable future and unknowable ones. In his article, Mark talks about ascending Everest, and also uses the metaphor of taxi drivers getting passengers to knowable destiations. These are “knowables” even if the route from here to there is yet to be discovered.
In many ways the near future zones and the far future zones are equally easy to identify. What is right in front of you is yours to do, and you can see what you’re doing when you take a step forward. For the far future it is easy to identify where you want to go, whether that is a knowable and fixed place like a peak or an address, or a hoped for dynamic state, like a generally productive and meaningful work culture, one which might look very different from where we are today. The more knowable and fixed the future state is, the more you can concentrate on backcasting, using experts perhaps who can advise you how to get there (like a map or a cabbie with The Knowledge), or who can help you deal with the technical challenges (like a Sherpa). Linear planning can be very helpful in these cases, as the act of moving into that future is a process of discovering knowable information. Much of that information might already be available, and if it isn’t there are probably people around who can help you find it in a good and accurate way. That doesn’t take the influence of context out of the Ant Country stage, but staying true to the line you have marked through that country will give you a strong sense of direction and a robust plan to get where you are going. One must be careful to pay attention to the vagaries of Ant Country, but in general fidelity to a well put together plan is what you need.
But in the case where you are trying to shift a culture or engage in other highly emergent kinds of work, two things come into play that will help you through Ant Country. The first is knowing that your present state does indeed matter. A lot. Even though you might still be making adjustments and evaluating your immediate need, the history of the system you are in and then nature of the current state actually liit what is possible if you intend to make a move from a current place (overwork, poor morale, a sense of purposelessness) to a more desired state (ease, support and connection, meaningful work). Identifying that far off horizon is important because it orients you in a direction of travel. Instead of worrying about what needs to be in place before getting over the horizon, essentially everything from here to there is ant country. What I typically advise then is to look for patterns in our surrent state of being that provide us with information about what is more possible. That could ean looking for examples or patterns where small hints of our desired future are present. If what you want already exists somewhere in the system, it might be easier to try to grow more of that than to start fresh. This is what we call “affordances.” And it also means looking at the reason why these things never seem to take off, because that gives us some sense of things that we might try in the here and now and the near future. When we are heading in a direction with an unknowable future state, playing with emergence is the goal.
This means that we need to drive directly into Ant Country. We can start doing some things and then open ourselves up to the influences of context and the swirls of randomness that alter our course. Ant Country suddenly becomes the source of creativity and outside knowledge that helps break us out of the patterns that have hindered us and starts giving us options for new ways to get to the better place we have been aiming at. Instead of our plans, especially when we are trying to discover new things and break old habits, we need to get good at participatory leadership and iterative Adaptive Action…what? so what? now what?…probe, sense, respond…observe, orient, decide, act…all the little heuristics that help guide us in this zone are about making sense of the present moment and holding on to the desired future. And then comes the Deep Breath Moment.
Mark’s piece talks about the Deep Breath Moment:
This dynamic steering and adjustment is fine… until, sometimes, a more fundamental adjustment is called for. I call this a ‘deep breath moment’. It’s the time when the far future is re-examined, hopes and aspirations are revised, and a new direction is set.
I’ve experienced this several times in my life and work. What surprises me is that it can creep up without being noticed and appear suddenly, a realisation that something needs to change. Other times it can be a dawning realisation, something that starts as a quiet idea, keeps coming back and seems to get louder and louder until it’s inescapable. But when you do a re-set, a revision of hopes and set a new direction, the effect can be dramatic. Often previously stuck things start to move quite quickly – like pushing on the (push) door when you’ve been fruitlessly pulling and getting nowhere. Things fall into place in different ways. New connections get made. New possibilities arrive. And what was a frustrating stuckness becomes once again a moving and flowing process.
The first thing to say is that this is not a sign of bad planning. On the contrary; it’s a sign that the User’s Guide to the Future is being used well. One of the wonders of viewing the world as emergent is to acknowledge that the unexpected will sometimes happen, and that’s just how it is. The key thing is not to totally prevent the unexpected (which would be futile) but to respond to it well and to use it constructively.
In complex work, I recognize this deep breath moment as one of two things happening. First, it may be that I have found myself in a productive channel flowing towards that desired future. That is a sweet place to be in, but it means, like all affordances, that other options are now closed off to me. I am clearly committed to this path. Deep breath. “We all choose our regrets” as Christopher Hitchens was reported to have once said. Even in the service of the good and right thing that you wanted, possibilities are now forever gone. I find this an important moment of threshold crossing: especially the older I get. It’s poignant. I want my kids to grow up and be strong, but that means there will be that one moment when I picked them up and held them in my arms for the last time. Sigh.
The other deep breath moment I have experienced is the one where I have reached a dead end and I have to move out of the deep channel I am in and make the trek up and over a ridge to a better valley. In our lives perhaps we experience that with relationships that don’t work out businesses that fail, ideas that never take off. We put a ton of time and energy into them and they are over. Sometimes we double down, engaging in sunk cost redemption until someone takes a hold of us in the wilderness of Ant Country and says: “buddy, you’re done. Use your lats amount of energy to get up here and we’ll carry on.”
Working with clients, there is always a temptation to reassure them that the path from here to there is knowable, if we just study things are little more and make a good choice. But remember, the moment of a decision is a madness. Entering Ant Country is inevitable, and it’s going to require a deep breath, some keen awareness of where you are and where you have come from and some solid personal practice to stay in it.