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.
What is going on? My friend Alison shared this story on Mastodon with this intro “Fake news features about things that didn’t happen in places that don’t exist written by people who don’t exist is pretty much what we expect from AI journalism.” Read on about the elusive Margaux Blanchard.”
Dave Pollard shares a thoughtful post on the intelligence of crowds, in which he explores both the wisdom and the incoherence of large groups of people and asks good questions about the characteristics of a crowd that contribute to it’s thoughtfulness in acting. It makes me think of the “intelligence” of crowds, as in the emergent property that creates a set of constraints that directs action in certain ways. This seem to co-arise with the emergence of the quality of a a collection of people that makes it a “group” or a “mob” or an “assembly.” There is intention behind those words – we want a team and not a gang – and it’s worth asking the question how do we create coherence that guides the emergence of the form and intelligence we want froths group, without the pitfalls of too much coherence so that what alos emerges is a cult. This is something I’mexploring in the container book I’mchipping away at.
Back in 2018 a Whitecaps Academy grad and former WFC2 player, Patrick Metcalfe joined TSS Rovers for the season. He appeared in 10 games as a defensive midfielder and helped us on to winning our first piece of silverware as a club, the Juan de Fuca Plate. Following that season he signed a professional contract with the Vancouver Whitecaps where he made 20 appearances in 2020 and 2021. The Whitecaps cut him after 2022 and he went to Norway where he found a job with Staebek and helped them get promoted to the Eliteserien. He was cut again at the end of that year and signed on with Fredrikstadt, who were in the second division. Again he helped a club to promotion and after a great 2023, the club did well in their first season in the top flight and won the Norwegian Cup, meaning they qualified for European play in the Conference League. Patrick played 70 matches over those two seasons and had his contract renewed in March just before the season started. Today he started for Fredrikstad against English FA Cup winners Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park and played the whole match in a defensive masterclass that held the Premier League team to a 1-0 win in the first leg of their two-leg qualification tie.
Patty’s is one of those players, like our former defender Joel Waterman – who just got transferred to Chicago Fire in MLS – who make their own way in the world of professional football. They travel to find a place they are wanted, where they can make a contribution. They know their talent alone is not enough to keep them in the professional game, and so they work hard, stay true to themselves, and give as much as they can wherever the end up. In as much as it’s great to have the flamboyant heroes of the pro game for younger players to look up to, I’m always lifting up the likes of Metcalfe and Waterman and Tynan and Friesen and Haynes, all players who have stopped in with out little club, the TSS Rovers, and seen it as the step they needed on their own journey. When they come through us though, they pick us up as well, so that even 7 years later a small group of people in Vancouver are watching a far flung European tie and can’t take their eyes of the number 11 from the Norwegian underdog.
I’m not sure that this shows up in the training set
About 8 years ago I remember Dave Snowden coming to Vancouver directly from a conference of security experts where they were discussing the top existential threats to humanity. In ascending order, at that time, they were: nuclear war, climate change and AI. At the time I remember thinking that how strange that seemed given that climate change is an absolute certainty and at least with nuclear war, we could actively try to prevent it. I had no idea what AI could really look like.
Nevertheless this particularly dystopian view of things had me on alert as I watched for signs that this might be happening. I am no AI expert, and the only AI I regularly and consciously interact with is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is now the best search engine out there, as everything else has become ruined by algorithms. It works, but it is also highly flawed and there is a simple reason for that: It acts like a human being.
If you’ve used ChatGPT you will be familiar with its major flaws which include approval seeking, hallucinations and, an overinflated sense of its own abilities. It will often say it can do things – like a harmonic analysis of a jazz tune – that it cannot actually do. And when it does the work and confidently provides the user with absolute garbage, my instinct is, that if it was an employee, I’d fire it. The inability to say “that is beyond my current limitations” is maddening. I was asking for this musical analysis the other day and after it couldn’t provide it, I discussed the fact that there is a price to this misplaced confidence. ChatGPT uses a tremendous amount of energy and water, and when it does so to just waste my time, I explained, there is an ethical issue here. It acknowledged that issue but it didn’t really seemed bothered by it.
That shouldn’t be a surprise because it was trained on the documented behaviours of certain classes of humans, for whom performative ethics is the norm. We do almost everything here in the global north with a detached knowledge that our ways of life are unsustainable and deeply and negatively impactful on our environment and other people but we don’t seem particularly bothered by that, nor to we display any real urgency to do anything about it.
This training is why Yuval Noah Harari is so worried in this video. AI is unlike any other tool that humans have invented in that it has agency to act and create on its own. As Harari says, printing presses cannot write their own books. But AI can, and it can choose what to write about and what not to, and it can print them and distribute them too.
The issue, and we have seen this recently with Grok, is that AI has been trained on the detritus that humans have left scattered around on the Internet. It has been raised on all the ways that we show up online. And although it has also been trained on great works of literature and the best of human thought, even though most of that material appears to have been stolen, Harari also points out that the quantity of information in the world means that only a very, very tiny proportion of it is true.
When I watched the video and then reflected on the post I wrote yesterday about difficult conversations, I had the insight that AI will know all about the stupid online conversation I started, but will know nothing about the face-to-face conversation that I later had. Harari points out, very importantly, that AI doesn’t understand trust. The reason for that, he says, is that we haven’t figured out the trust and cooperation problem in human society. That’s the one we should be solving first.
AI has no way of knowing that when there are crises in a community, human beings often behave in very beautiful ways. Folks that are at each other’s throats online will be in each other’s lives in a deeply meaningful way, raising money, rebuilding things, looking after important details. There is no way that AI can witness these acts of human kindness or care at the scale with which it also processes the information record we have left online. It sees the way we treat each other in social media settings and can only surmise that human life is about that. It has no other information that proves otherwise.*
For me, this is why face-to-face work is critically important. Meetings are just not the same over zoom. We cannot generate the levels of trust on zoom that we can by spending a significant amount of time in physical proximity to one another. Face-to-face encounters develop contexts of meaning – what I have called dialogic containers – and it is in those spaces and times that we develop community, trust, friendship, sustainable commitment and, dare I say, peace. The qualities of living that we ascribe to the highest aspirations for human community are only generated in their fullness in person. They require us to work through the messiness of shared life-spaces, the conflict of values and ideas and paths forward, the disagreements and confusions, by creating multiple ways in which we encounter and relate to one another. Sustainable community life requires us to see one another in multiple identities so that we discover that there are multiple possibilities for our relationships, multiple ways we can work around blockages and unresolvable conflict.
We are fast losing this capability as human beings. When people ask me to work with their groups there is always the lingering question of whether we can do the work of three days in two, and the work of two days in one. The answer is no. We can do different work in limited times and spaces. Narrowing the constraints on the act of making meaning together creates more transactional relationships based on incresingly incomplete and inaccurate information. This is world we are showing to AI agents. The actual human world is also relational, multi-faceted, subtle and soaked with meaning. As we feed our robots a particular picture of ourselves it’s possible that we are also becoming that very picture. Depth of relationship and meaning becomes replaced with a smeared, shallow breadth of connections and transactions.
There is no better way – no faster way, even – to develop trust than to be together. I think this is so true that it certainly is axiomatic to my practice and how I live my life. And if trust is the critical “resource” we need as human beings, to not only live well but to also address the existential threats that we face – which are all entirely created from our own lack of trust – then being together face-to-face working, playing, singing, struggling, discussing, and figuring stuff out is the most radical act of hope and generosity we can make, to ourselves and to our descendants.
I suppose there will always be a top three list of threats to human existence, but it would be nice if those top three were things like “sun goes supernova” or “super volcano blankets the earth in decades of darkness” and not actions for which we are entirely responsible.
* It also occurs to me that alien cultures who are able to pick up and understand the electronic signals we have been radiating towards every planet within 100 light years of ours will also get a very particular picture of who we are as a civilization. Never mind what was on the Voyageur record. Monday’s TV news has already overtaken it.
The golfer Scotty Scheffler, who just won The Open Championship, has made some waves recently with the interview he gave before that tournament where he talks about what is fulfilling in life. It’s not winning golf tournaments. In fact he expresses a little astonishment and confusion about why he does what he does, even though he is one of the best in the world at it. “You work all your life for two minutes of euphoria…” As a musician I can relate. We puts hundreds of hours of practice into learning a piece, only to perform it once, perhaps, for a couple of minutes of interesting music. And that’s not even counting the lifetime of work that goes into the training the voice, the fingers, the ear, and the heart to be able to perform competently enough to even be on a stage in the first place.
I was struck by the moment in his press conference where he says “am I making sense?” At that moment, I nodded, but clearly the golf and sports press gallery didn’t. And that is what separates artists from those who value the end line. As Alan Watts once said, if the result was everything people would only go to hear the final chord of a composition, or dancers would head to one spot on the stage and stay there. It’s a cultural error, which is what makes Scheffler’s comments seem so confusing, in a culture that worships the final result.
More patterns that are everywhere. Last week I shared a link about how the Golden Ration is over represented in our ideas about the universe. Today comes a beautiful article from Aeon which talks about the prevalence of the branching network (like a river valley or a bronchial passage) and the web (like neural networks or cosmic galactic clusters) and how they operate across scales. Interestingly in the article, the author Mark Neyrinck doesn’t seem to distinguish between networks with ends and those without. Networks where things arrive at certain places, and networks where they don’t.
I wonder if we are losing our ability to organize and work in networks at scale for social good. Here in North America we are very individual focused in terms of meeting needs and our current governments are most focused on creating the conditions for an efficient return on capital investments and concentration of wealth, following the long discredited trickle down theory of Neo-liberal economics. We are probably going to need networks of care, becasue the federal government is about to gut a number of public facing service personnel to pay for national defence spending and tax cuts. Most of these jobs are the liaison people that help folks with their federal pension plans, employment insurance, and federal taxation issues. The Department that serves First Nations communities and maintains Canada’s end of the bargain in terms of treaty benefits, stands to have substantial program cuts. This is one journey that is going to result in some dire destinations for vulnerable folks, newcomers, and Indigenous communities
Don’t build beautiful things that need to capture life before they are functional. Start with life.