Back when I began this blog I called it “Parking Lot” which is a term in the facilitation world used for the list of things that we need to talk about at some point but just can’t get to right now. Now that I’m returning to the blog world I thought I would make a regular list of the things that have been accumulating in my own parking lot. So each time that list reaches ten, I’ll share them here.
Here’s the first bunch.
- My buddy Tenneson Woolf shares a stab at Slice of LIfe writing, which is intriguing.
- A surprisingly gripping scene from Mad Max 3 called The Tell of Captain Walker, in which an oral history in a post-apocalyptic world is recited. (h/t to What’s The Pont who shared it as an example of oral history dynamics.)
- Patricia Shaw shares a short and very clear talk on the characteristics of a good leader from a dialogic perspective. Again, surprisingly gripping and helpfully simple.
- Matt Webb with a lovely meditation on online identity.
- My foodie neighbours Rob and Laurel went to India about ten years ago to spend six months documenting their learning about Indian food and they kept a great travel blog which has many many excellent recipes. Long before there were great food blogs, there was this great blog about food.
- Interesting paper published in Nature which studies how virtual engagement affects brainstorming and idea generation. There is much that is good about moving online but it does seem to come at a cost. And now that cost is being researched. (h/t the MeetingsNet blog).
- In a short twitter thread, Professor Emily Bell traces some of the jurisprudence behind the Supreme Court of the United States draft decision overturning abortion rights, and finds it rooted in the opinions of Matthew Hale, a 17th century English jurist who executed women for witchcraft and whose decision have been used to justify marital rape. Just in case you thought the pending decision wasn’t medieval enough on its own.
- Thomas Piketty reimagines socialism as a participatory and intersectional recalibration of power: Long LIve Participatory Socialism! (h/t Allison Creekside on twitter).
- Manali Shah shares a short but moving piece on the activation of our sense as we return to in-person meetings.
- My friend Sonja Blignaut discusses thresholds in writing and in a lovely podcast interview. It’s lovely to hear her voice flowing and expanding into the ideas and practice that have long been adjacent to the organizational complexity work that she has been doing for so long. Poetry, reflection and life, all coming together.
I’m moving these posts to Monday morning and will try to provide a theme each week to connect the five links. Enjoy.
Dave Snowden’s 12 Shibboleth’s of Christmas
Back in 2015, Dave Snowden took on 12 aspects of organizational and corporate culture that were basically enemies of complexity thinking. The list is still very valuable these days. In each post Dave offers the problem and the way complexity theory helps you do better.
Evaluation and complexity – lesson from 5 big evaluations in the UK
I’ve recently found the blog of Marcus Jenal, who is yet another guy who is saying a bunch of stuff that I say too. Here’s a piece he wrote reviewing his work with complexity and evaluation, starting with the question: ““When is understanding complexity important for evaluation?”
Defining complexity as a messy human
Another blog new to me is Human Current. They have a podcast which serves as a place for them to talk about and learn more about these ideas. This post is an index to some of their episodes that have helped them understand and and explain complexity science and complexity thinking.
My friend Ria Baeck has been writing a book for years that combines her thinking about self, source, hosting and theory with harvests from the workshops and conversations she has hosted over the past decade. The book is being released like expressions of fine whisky, one barrel at a time at her blog. This chapter delves in complexity through Cynefin thusly:
I have already talked about ‘sourcing’, and ‘collective sourcing’ as collective embodied revelation. It takes some courage to learn to voice our subtle sensing, because we have to overcome our conditioned assumption that this is not ‘real’ or ‘true’ or ‘useful’ information. At the present juncture, though, I wish to give some attention to a next step that follows on from the subtle sensing: the precision of language and making (subtle) distinctions.
How chaos makes the multiverse unnecessary
Lastly, this wide ranging piece from the always interesting Nautilus takes my weekly reading on complexity back out to the cosmological level, through trying to understand why we see structure when we look at things in a fundamentally chaotic universe.
There is another, more interesting, explanation for the structure of the laws of nature. Rather than saying that the universe is very structured, say that the universe is mostly chaotic and for the most part lacks structure. The reason why we see the structure we do is that scientists act like a sieve and focus only on those phenomena that have structure and are predictable. They do not take into account all phenomena; rather, they select those phenomena they can deal with.
Some interesting links that caught my eye this week.
Why Black Hole Interiors Grow (Almost) Forever
Leonard Susskind has linked the growth of black holes to increasing complexity. Is it true that the world is becoming more complex?
“It’s not only black hole interiors that grow with time. The space of cosmology grows with time,” he said. “I think it’s a very, very interesting question whether the cosmological growth of space is connected to the growth of some kind of complexity. And whether the cosmic clock, the evolution of the universe, is connected with the evolution of complexity. There, I don’t know the answer.”
With a Green New Deal, here’s what the world could look like for the next generation
This is the vision I have been asking for from our governments. This vision is the one that would get me on board with using our existing oil and gas resources to manufacture and fund and infrastructure to accelerate this future for my kids. The cost of increasing fossil fuel use is so high, it needs to be accompanied by a commitment to faster transition to this kind of world. Read the whole thing.
Why we suck at ‘solving wicked problems”
Sonja Blignault is one of the people in the world with whom I share the greatest overlap of theory and practice curiosities regarding complexity. I know this, because whenever she posts something on her blog I almost always find myself wishing I had written that! Here’s a great post of five things we can do to disrupt thinking about problem solving to enable us to work much better with complexity.
Money and technology are hugely valuable resources: they are certaintly necessary but they are not sufficient. Simply throwing more money and/or more advanced technology at a problem will not make it go away. We need to fundamentally change our thinking paradigm and approach things in context-appropriate ways, otherwise we will never move the needle on these so-called wicked problems.
rock/paper/scissors and beyond
I miss Bernie DeKoven. Since he died earlier this year I’ve missed seeing his poetic and playful blog posts about games and fun. Here is one from his archives about variations on rock/paper/scissors
The relationship between the two players is both playful and intimate. The contest is both strategic and arbitrary. There are rumors that some strategies actually work. Unless, of course, the players know what those strategies are. Sometimes, choosing a symbol at random, without logic or forethought, is strategically brilliant. Other times, it’s just plain silly.
So they play, nevertheless. Believing whatever it is that they want or need to believe about the efficacy of their strategies, knowing that there is no way to know.
The longer they play together, the more mystical the game becomes.
They play between mind and mindlessness. For the duration of the game, they occupy both worlds. The fun may not feel special, certainly not mystical. But the reality they are sharing is most definitely something that can only be found in play.
How Evaluation Supports Systems Change
An unassuming little article that outlines five key practices that could be the basis of a five-day deep dive into complexity and evaluation. I found this article earlier in the year, and notice that my own practice and attention has come back to these five points over and over.
While evaluation is often conducted as a means to learn about the progress or impact of an initiative, evaluative thinking and continuous learning can be particularly important when working on complex issues in a constantly evolving system. And, when evaluation goes hand in hand with strategy, it helps organizations challenge their assumptions, gather information on the progress, effects, and influence of their work, and see new opportunities for adaptation and change.
Thinking of resuming a weekly round up of links that have come through my feed in one way or another. I haven’t gotten around to blogging about these links, but I’m sure my readers would be interested in some of them. I’ll post a few each week, on Sunday evening, if that works for you all. Let me know if you’d welcome this as a little repeated pattern.
Developing Human Capital: Moving from Extraction to Reciprocity in Our Organizational Relationships
Careful about the terms you use and the metaphors that drive our thinking about “resources.”
“Environmentalists and systems thinkers underscore the fundamental distinction between extractive and interdependent modes of interacting with one another and the natural world. They warn us that the extractive economy we are attempting to sustain now is, by very definition of its continuous mining of natural and human resources, unsustainable. As the writer and farmer Wendell Berry has written:
The expert assumption appears to be that the products of the soil are not included in the economy until after they have been taken at the lowest possible cost from those who did the actual work of production, at which time they enter the economy as raw materials for the food, fiber, timber, and lately the fuel industries. The result is inevitable: the industrial system is disconnected from, is unconcerned about, and takes no responsibility for, its natural and human sources. The further result is that these sources are not maintained but merely used and thus are made as exhaustible as the fossil fuels.
This ecological framework should give us pause as we consider notions of “human resource” and “human capital” in nonprofit organizations.”
A reflection on Zadie Smith’s “On Optimism and Despair.”
A beautifully annotated reflection on Zadie Smith’s 2016 speech:
Only the willfully blind can ignore that the history of human existence is simultaneously the history of pain: of brutality, murder, mass extinction, every form of venality and cyclical horror. No land is free of it; no people are without their bloodstain; no tribe entirely innocent. But there is still this redeeming matter of incremental progress. It might look small to those with apocalyptic perspectives, but to she who not so long ago could not vote, or drink from the same water fountain as her fellow citizens, or marry the person she chose, or live in a certain neighbourhood, such incremental change feels enormous.”
There is no middle ground for deep disagreements about facts
I think it’s high time to be clear that willful ignorance cannot be equated with subjective truth.
“Examining how deep disagreements arise will demonstrate the gravity of the issue. Why do we disagree with valid, knowable facts when we all live in the same world, we have roughly the same cognitive abilities and, in the Western world at least, most people have fairly easy access to roughly the same information?
It is because we use our cognition to support factual beliefs or value commitments that are central to our identity, particularly in situations where we feel that our identity is threatened.”
What do we expect from Innovation? Mostly disappointment
Let’s get good at handling the emotional component of innovation and creativity:
“Much of the innovation discovery journey is a disappointing one. A hunch or insight becomes a dead end. A promising idea did not foresee a roadblock that cannot be resolved. Resources constantly “churn” and get depleted, waiting for others to be brought up to speed. Those not involved directly within the innovation project constantly remain skeptical or require more proof. The status quo of the existing places an increasing drag on the forces of change.”
Building an Innovation Strategy from Cultural Insights
“Ethnographic thinking is a powerful approach that organizations and innovation teams can use to strategically guide how they innovate. Ethnography has grown in popularity as a research method, but as I’ve argued, it is more than just a tool. Ethnographic thinking operates at a strategic level,”
A very detailed and interesting account of how ethnographic research helps organizations see the complexity they are immersed in, and make decisions about what to do next.
I’m in a period of recovering from travel and work, over what has been a very busy spring. This weekend I just took right off and did some reading, cleaning and planning for a major kitchen renovation we will be doing this spring.
Reading-wise, it has been a luxury to sit on my front porch and spend hours in a book. My choice this week has been Kim Stanley’ Robinson’s “Aurora” which is a story about a human voyage to colonize a planet 11 light years away. It is an amazing book about problems solving and ontology and should be on every reading list for those who are trying to understand the kinds of philosophy, thinking skills and patterns that make it possible to live with complexity. It’s also a lovely meditation on the difference between technical and adaptive problem solving and leadership. Yes, this is a relaxing piece of fiction for me! I’m lucky to enjoy my work!
On other notes, several interesting links and articles have come my way through different sources this week. Here are a few of note:
So, you don’t think you directly benefit from nonprofits? / Nonprofit With Balls . On why you actually do.
Some Corals Survive Environmental Assault: Scientists Want to Know Why – Plexus Institute. An interesting summary of some of the ways that corals are beginning to demonstrate resilience in the face of massive environmental changes to their habitat. If you’v read Aurora, you’ll appreciate why this article in particular interests me.
Creative Leadership Workshop | Johnnie Moore . A pitch for a cool looking course from my friends Johnny Moore and Viv McWaters in Cambridge this summer.
A Modern-Day Viking Voyage | Hakai Magazine . A few years ago I was staying in Montreal with a Manx friend and learned about this form of governance. My maternal great grandmother’s family is Manx so I’ve always had a passing interest in the little country in the Irish Sea. But the viking connection and the form of council used to govern the country is fascinating.
Complexity Labs . A very interesting new site on complexity, featuring a lot of learning resources.
Saving the planet from governments and markets | Henry Mintzberg. This is the quote that you never expect to see from a business school professor, unless it’s Henry Minstzberg: ”
“It is not plans from some elite “top” that will begin the world over again, but actions on the ground. We are the feet that will have to walk all the talk, connected to heads that will have to think for ourselves. We shall have to confront the perpetrators of climate change—and that includes ourselves—not with violent resistance or passive resistance, but with clever resistance. Some years ago, the angry customers of a Texas telephone company paid 1 extra cent on their telephone bills. This tied the company in knots. It got the message.
Beyond resistance will have to come the replacement of destructive practices by more constructive ones, as has been happening with wind and solar energy. There will be more of this when we “human resources” pursue our resourcefulness as human beings. Imagine, for example, an economy based on growth in qualities instead of quantities, of better instead of more—in education, health care, and nutrition.”
The Secret History of Bioluminescence | Hakai Magazine : Hakai Magazine is one of my favourites, because it’s funded locally but covers global ocean issues. And because I live on an island in the global ocean, that matters. This article is a beautiful meditation on the natural and social history of bioluminecense, one of the many incredibly beautiful things that happens in the ocean here.