Yesterday we were walking an incredible cliff top trail in East Sooke Park, in Scia’new territory on Vancouver Island. The Coast Trail there is rugged along the Juan de Fuca side of the park and although it is well travelled, there are sections across bare rock cliff top when the path is all but invisible. It requires a deeper kind of seeing to discern where the path is, especially if you follow what looks to be an obvious route which can take you to some dangerous places. As an experienced trail walker, I find myself in moments like this looking for evidence that I am NOT on the path. Is there broken foliage? Is the soil compressed and eroded by boots rather than hoofs or water? Are the roots underfoot rubbed clean of bark? Are there any trail markers about? When I find myself answering “no” to these questions I move slower, until the evidence is overwhelming, and I stop and track back to find out where I went wrong.
You can see why looking for evidence to DISPROVE your belief creates a safe to fail situation. If I find a single piece of evidence that confirms my belief that I am on the right track, and I follow it unquestioningly, the results become increasingly dangerous, and failure becomes unsafe.
A lot of my life and work is about paying attention to these weak signals. Whether it is making music with others, facilitating groups, helping organizations with strategy, playing and watching sports like soccer, rugby and hockey, it all comes down to paying attention in a way that challenges your beliefs.
The other day I offered a pithy comment on facebook to the question of “what is the difference between critical thinking and buying conspiracy theories?” and it really came down to this: critical thinkers look for evidence to disprove their beliefs and conspiracy theorists look for evidence to confirm their beliefs.
I think the latter is quite the norm in our current mainstream organizational cultures, even if it doesn’t lead to conspiracy theory. The pressure for accountability and getting it right leaves very little space to see what’s going wrong in the organization. The desire to build on what is working – while being an important part of the strategic toolkit – is not served without a critical look at the fact that we might be doing it wrong.
This is why sensemaking has become a critical part of my practice. And by sensemaking I mean collecting large numbers of small anecdotes about a situation and having large numbers of people look at them together. The idea is that with a diverse set of data points and a diverse number of perspectives, you get a truer picture of the actual culture of an organization, and you can act with more capacity to find multiple ways forward, including those which both challenge your assumptions about what is right and good now and those which discover what is better and better.
Recently in Canada we have been having a little debate about whether celebrating Canada Day on July 1 is appropriate given that fact that this month – National Indigenous Peoples Month, as it turns out – has been marked by a reckoning with the visible evidence of the genocide that has been committed here. While hundreds of thousands of people here are in mourning or grief, and are reliving the trauma that has travelled through their families as a result of the genocidal policies of residential school and the non-consensual adoption of children, many others are predictably coming out with a counter reaction that goes something like this “yeah, well let’s get over it. Canada is still the best country of the world to live in.”
And that makes sense for many people – like me – who live here and have a great life. But as I have been saying elsewhere on Twitter: don’t confuse you having a great life with this being a great country. There is nothing wrong with people having a great life. That is what we should want for all people. But Canada is not a place where that happens for everyone. The story is very different for lots of people who struggle to find contentment and acceptance inside this nation-state. Canada’s very existence is owed to broken treaties, environmental destruction, relational treachery, economic injustice, and genocide.
Paying attention to the weak signals is important here. If all you can see is how great your own life is, and you think we just need to keep doing whatever it is that we are doing that assures that continuity, then we are headed for a precipice. We are headed off an environmental cliff, into a quagmire of injustice and economic inequality that destabilizes everything you have in a catastrophic way.
Listening to First Nations – really paying attention to possibilities – is mutually beneficial to everyone. If one wants all lives to matter, then one has to ensure that every life matters, which means taking the lead from those whose lives have been considered dispensable in the project called “Canada.” And it’s not like they haven’t been out here for the past 250 years calling for a better way. It’s just that the mainstream, largely led by commercial interests who have hungered for and exploited natural resources that never belonged to them, have cheered on the idea that if Canada is good for me, it must be good period.
Let seeing be disbelieving. This country is not an inherently GOOD place. But it could be. It could be great. It could be safe, healthy, prosperous, balanced, creative and monumentally amazing. But it requires us to first question the limiting beliefs we have that it could never be better than this and second to pay attention to the weak signals that help guide us onto a path that takes us there.
It is far too early to celebrate Canada Day. We haven’t yet fulfilled the promise of the treaties and the vision with which indigenous Nations entered into relationships with Europeans oh so long ago, and that vision which is continually offered up to settlers through reciprocity and relationship. If there is anything to celebrate, perhaps it is the fact that we do have the resources to make this country work for all and we have the intelligence and creativity and willingness to do it, but you won’t find that in the Board rooms and the Parliamentary lobbies and the Cabinet offices and the global markets.
It is in the weak signals, the stories and small pathways of promise out there that are born in struggle and resilience and survival and generate connection, sustainability and the promise of well-being for all.
I sometimes feel like I’m repeating myself here, but please indulge me. When I get my teeth into learning about something I come back to it over and over, finding new ways to think about it, polishing it up. I love blogs because they offer us a chance to put drafting thinking out into the world and get responses, forcing me to think more deeply and more clearly about things.
Likewise teaching, which for me is always the best stone that sharpens the blade, so to speak. Tomorrow I will rise at an ungodly hour – 4am – to teach a two hour session to some amazing social justice activists in Eastern and Central Europe, who are fighting for things like environment justice, and racial and gender and sexual orientation equality, among other topics. I get to teach about working with complexity.
As part of that, I will elaborate on my little model of constraints, which for the record is now described as Connections, Exchanges, Attractors, Boundaries and Identities the short form of which is CEAB(I). In this blog post I’ll explain why.
These five types of constraints essentially cover all the ways that complex systems or problems are constituted. They function as a mix of constraints that govern and constraints that enable. These two terms come from the work of Alicia Juarrero and Dave Snowden. Governing constraints stop certain things from happening (a door keeps the public out, a bolt attaches two pieces of metal). They create a limitation on action. Enabling constraints create a space, a context or a container in which action can happen within boundaries. They are essential for emergence and coherence in a complex system. Think about form in poetry, or the kinds of direction that managers give their workers. If these constraints are too tight, we compromise and stifle emergence. If they are too loose, we create too diffuse a context for action. A manager that says “do whatever you want” is going to make trouble in the organization. So too will one who says “let me review every single move you make.” Managing enabling constraints is really the high art of working in complexity especially as you can never know in advance what “too tight” and “too loose” looks like.
So far so good.
Now this little model, CEAB(I) can be used to both analyse a situation and to take action to change that situation. When I am confronted with a stuck problem in ir near the complexity domain, I will often do a quick survey of the constraints that are active in the moment. From a social action perspective, lets just look at a relatively straightforward (!) case or trying to change policy around affordable rental housing. What are the constraints at play that create the emergent situation of “unaffordabilty?” Here are a few sketched out thoughts:
CONNECTIONS – Landlords can use AirBnB to get a better revenue stream rather than long term rental; tenants need to be “connected” to find good deals;
EXCHANGES – Insiders in communities recommend “good” tenants to landlords, thereby gaming the market for accessibility to affordable spaces;
ATTRACTORS –Landlords have few incentives to offer long term housing over short term rentals that give them more flexibility; landlord regulations make long term rental prohibitive, but lax regulations on BnB’s make it easy to rent short term; high mortgages and house prices mean landlords charge high rents to recover costs.
BOUNDARIES – Government regulations make developing a suite to be prohibitive (secondary suites are often banned in residential neighbourhoods due to concerns about traffic and noise); restricted zoning means rentals are located only in certain places making them more scarce and therefore higher priced on the market; lack of rental increase guidelines that allow landlords to charge maximum rather than affordable rents.
IDENTITY – Renters perceived as poorer than the home owners in the surrounding neighbourhood; rentals and density considered undesirable as it is perceived to lower property values; density considered a change to the character of a neighbourhood opposed by people with a vested interest in the status quo; fear of outsiders or transient residents.
Okay. You see where this is going. Complex issues are so named because these factors (and many many more) work together to create the emergent characteristic of unaffordable rents.
To change the system we need to change the constraints.
There are some high value targets. For example, you could create a governing constraint in the system that bans rents above a certain price point and creates expensive fines for breaking that law. This may have the unintended consequence of forcing rentals OFF the market and possibly into shotr term rentals OR having a black market emerge of unregulated suites and apartments. It may limit the supply and force renters into tent cities for example, creating another situation. On the other hand such a law may give everyone clarity and force a change for the good. But this is a very high energy solution and requires a great deal of power to effect.
At the other end of the spectrum, you could create different kinds of connections in the system. You could ban AirBnB (as some jurisdictions have done) but also incentivize rentals by providing a property tax breaks to people renting out affordable suites or apartments. Tenants can organize to strike against high rents by creating tight connections and limiting the exchanges that go between them as a class and landlords as a class, forcing political action.
You could also change the nature of the problem by allowing different kinds of rentals (such as secondary suites in single family homes, which happened in my community and instantly increased the amount of rental housing in the stock). Potential renters could form new connections, such as co-ops and co-housing groups (or indeed create tent cities) to create new forms of housing and community.
The four constraints of connection, exchanges, attractors, and boundaries offer places for action. As you go from C —-> E —-> A —> B you require more and more power to act. Creating and enforcing boundaries is very difficult for community organizers to do. But creating new connections and changing the exchanges that happen are accessible tools for people without formal power in a system. This is how people organize and build movements for change. If your hands are not on the levers of power, you need to mobilize to get them there.
Identities are a special class of constraint, and everyone plays in this space. You are often forced into a certain class by the ethos of a culture: in a white supremacist culture like Canada, BIPOC people are often marginalized as outsiders. But white people have choices about using power and privilege, to either uphold the status quo or change it. Identity and context play together. Some people are able to code switch, or form alliances, or play along with epectations and then make surprise moves. The film Black Klansman is a great example of this. How you name yourself, appear, code-switch, separate and join groups is a tactical consideration for making change. Do you join certain clubs and networks to gain influence? Or is it better to stand outside the system and protest? Do you join the mainstream or offer alternatives? Do you participate in advisory panels or critique and tear down the process? Or do you do all of these simultaneously. Identity and identity politics are a big deal.
To set up new attractors and new boundaries is possible only if you have some power. That power can be formal coercive power, or it could be charismatic influence. Even a social movement without policy making capability can force change through boycotts (limiting exchanges), shifting the story (through re-casting identity), creating alliances (connections acorss power gradients) or creating alternative glimpses of the future (off the grid experiments, tent cities communities) that might force policy makers to stabilize good ideas or finally confront the constraints that create problems by breaking them.
Being effective in mobilizing for change requires a huge amount of creativity, collaborative relationship, collective intelligence, and situational awareness. You need to ask:
- How does this problem work?
- What do we have the power to change?
- What do we not yet have the power to change?
- What can we change now that will create more stories and examples of what we want to see and fewer examples of what we don;t want to see?
Then you make small plans, try to catalyze new patterns in the system and see what happens. And you fail. A LOT, which is something that all activists know, but which doesn’t stop them from organizing and working anyway.
A long ramble, but hopefully it gives you a peek at some of the thinking that I’m doing about how power comes into play in influencing complex systems and addressing complex problems. Let me know what you think in the comments.
I was watching this great interview with Roger Penrose this morning speculating on the origins of the Big Bang, and sharing some of his most recent thinking on how the universe might be in an eternal cycle of recreation in which, at certain points in the cycle, size and time don’t matter.
My early morning mind connects a lot of things together, and today that video led to a reflection on smoothness and lumpiness. And the universe, mushrooms, and jazz.
One of the fundamental patterns in the universe is that there are clumps of matter. This always amazed me. The idea is that at the moment of the Big Bang, everything was smooth and evenly distributed, and therefore every possibility was in play. Think of it like a calm lake. In wintertime time, if there is no wind and nothing else disturbing the water, it forms smooth ice, with no lumps or pits.
But often lakes freeze while there are waves on the surface, and the water becomes “lumpy.” In other words, if you lay a flat board down on the ice, there are places where the ice touches it and places where it doesn’t. Something influences the system and it gets lumpy.
The same is true of the cosmos. As Penrose says in the video, the sun is over there and not here. It emerged from a smooth cloud of gas, but now it exists next to places where it doesn’t exist. Gravity does that work, creating attractor basins in space-time into which stuff falls. A spaceship travelling close to the sun will fall into it and become part of the sun. One that travels near and stays outside the boundary – the event horizon – will pass on through space. There is a point somewhere on that boundary where you cross from probably to certainly.
In a lumpy universe, some things are more likely to happen than others. There is not an equal opportunity for things to emerge in every place at every time. It is highly unlikely that a black hole will emerge spontaneously in the centre of the earth, but it is a near certainty that one will emerge when certain types of stars die.
This lumpiness is caused by constraints in the system. An unconstrained system is just smooth and random with equal opportunity for anything happening, even if that opportunity is equally near zero. But a system in which gravity exists, for example, will become less random and star get more ordered. Certain things will happen and not happen. Certain constraints are immutable – such as gravity – and so, will influence stuff, in the same way, every time. (Penrose talks about how gravity is constant in the universe regardless of time and size).
At smaller than cosmological scales this we see this same pattern repeating. Yesterday I was out hunting mushrooms, and I am learning that certain species – like the boletes I found – will live in certain places, around the roots of mature cedar trees. There is no point looking for them in the alders. The constraints of the system help you find them.
In the same way, after 40 years of playing guitar and appreciating jazz, I am finally learning how to play jazz guitar, and I am learning about how the music moves, why we are likely to find a dominant fifth between a minor second and a root major seventh chord.
In mushroom hunting, one must sink into the system and observe it deeply to learn about how mycorrhizal fungi live. Understanding the constraints makes it more likely to find these beauties, and every time I pick one I get this strong sense of joy at having joined the system so closely that the mushroom and I could find each other.
There isn’t much I can do to influence a bolete to grow in a place it doesn’t want to grow. But if I wanted to cultivate boletes, I’d have to start by growing a forest.
With jazz, however, there is a lot I can do to mess around with the music. It’s true that a ii-V-I chord progression is nearly ubiquitous in jazz standard repertoire at all kinds of levels of scale, from single melody lines to whole songs. Its a reliable pattern and if you are lost in improvising, it’s something you can often come back to, to find your way back to the melody.
But the other thing about the ii-V-I is that is can make a creative musician lazy. It is so smooth and reliable that it can become too constrained and one falls into repetitive patterns, just “going through the changes” and not adding anything interesting. When I am trying to find chord voicings for songs I’m learning, my teacher will often say “hey trying adding that sharp 11 to the chord” and instantly something different happens, some delight emerges, a new colour appears. Not only that, but the alteration gives me more options for what the NEXT chord voicing might be, because adding that sharp 11 note makes my ear want to go to a different place. It gives me permission to move somewhere I had never imagined before.
This is what we mean by “enabling constraints.” In jazz, you have a choice about what you do with the enabling constraints. You can try to improvise within a tight framework of standard chords or start finding “adjacent possibles” – notes that sound good because you have altered a chord in such a way that a new note or interval comes into play. These alterations are small. They need to be because they have to work both with the base chord you are altering AND link to the new place you are going. There is a logic to this, and you’re working within constraints.
And of course, you can utterly dispense with this logic too, choosing to play entirely improvised music. But even total improvisation finds a “lumpiness” around emergent patterns. It might be a rhythmic pattern, a dynamic move between soft and loud, or a small set of notes or intervals. It might be a moment in time that repeats or a call and response with another player. Free jazz and improvised music is not random music (although it can often sound that way). It is a natural evolution of art that discovers emergent attractors and uses them as enabling constraints to create some lumpiness, to lightly constrain creativity and see what might happen. Sometimes it fails completely and sometimes incredible experiences are had.
You’ve read this far, maybe hoping for a conclusion, but I feel like leaving this post here with a question. What does this make you think of? What does this musing about lumpiness, likelihood, cosmology, mushrooming and jazz leave swirling around in your brain?
Edited later to add some theology: if I understand Penrose correctly, the only thing that survives the cycles of universe manifestion is gravity, which means that, at least in my theology, gravity is God. And gravity pulls things together and provides perturbations in smooth fields that help create new things, which kind of equates with own humble theology…so more to think about…
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.
I’m in trouble. In the best way. So get ready for a long and rambling post about geeky dialogic philosophy and complexity practice.
I’m a little bit known in some communities as a person that is writing and working with the notion of “container” in dialogic organization development. The word and concept itself comes from a lineage of thinking about the spaces inside which dialogue takes place, and there is certainly lots written about that. I think I first learned the term from the work of William Isaacs whose classic work, “Dialogue,” is a seminal reference in this field. He describes a dialogic container as the “sum of assumpitions, shared intentions, and beliefs of a group.”
While that was the first place I learned of the concept of container in dialogue, my learning about it was also informed by reading about complexity science, and especially learning about dissipative structures and autopoiesis, two key concepts in self-organization in living systems. Furthermore, I learned of the notion of sacred space in both Christianity and indigenous ceremonies, especially the Midewiwin, to which I was exposed in my University years. Finally, my thinking about container with respect to complexity has been heavily influenced by both Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang‘s work, as they have explored how these concepts and dynamics from the natural sciences show up in human systems. In this context, Dave’s work on enabling and governing constraints is incredibly useful and Glenda’s broad palette of tools helps us to illuminate and work with containers.
So that is a brief survey of where my understanding has come from. I find the concept incredibly helpful in understanding the dynamics of self-organizing systems and it helps us to find places to intervene in a complex system with a rigorous approach to explore and change the patterns of self-organization and emergence.
So I use the word “container” with a very specific meaning, but it’s not a meaning that is shared by everyone and it definitely not a meaning shared by folks who have a history of being contained. Occasionally I get scolded for using the word, and I own that. We must be VERY thoughtful about language in this work so this is a long post where I think about the implications of this troublesome word which is used to describe a useful concept badly.
The word and concept are useful in understanding and describing dialogic practice. But it has some SERIOUS baggage because in contexts of oppression and colonization the history of colonization, enclosure, and imprisonment is entirely the history of containing people; on reserves, in jails, in schools, in groups defined by race and marked by lines, in ghettoized neighbourhoods, in a million places in which people are contained, enclosed and deprived of their agency and freedom to create and maintain boundaries.
In these contexts, the word “container” is often heard as a reference to places that are created by people with the power to contain others, and very often they contain people who have a lesser amount of power to change or free themselves from that container.
It is true and important to note that any discussion about how to manage dialogic spaces – containers – is entirely dependant on the power one has to create and influence the boundaries, and manage the connections and exchanges. Creating a dialogic container is an act of privilege. Using the word “container” will almost always trigger a negative reaction in people that have been SUBJECTED to containment, against their wills, against the interests, and in the service of depriving them of power.
Liberation movements all over the world in all moments of history are about creating alternative spaces to the oppressive culture and conditions of the present. These are expressed in all kinds of ways. In land reform movements, for example, colonized lands are recovered and returned to their original owners. In movements to free people from enclosed and coercive spaces like exploitative labour, prisons, residential schools, oppressive child welfare practices, or human trafficking, alternative spaces are built for equality, justice, freedom, learning, self-actualization and growth. And the metaphor and reality extends to spaces where people change the language to talk about their conditions and create spaces where conversation, dialogue, and organizing can happen in a way that draws a line between the oppressive practices of the past and the liberating spaces of the future. Socially constructed narratives can provide alternative stories that begin to link, connect, and differentiate people in a way that helps them organize their conditions of freedom.
So one major problem with this troublesome word is how it works in English. The word “contain” can be brutal, because in English it is a transitive verb that is not continuous, meaning that it implies an action conducted upon a object and then arriving at a resting place, where the object is contained and the action is done. That is a troubling truth of the word “container” and partially explains why it rests so uncomfortably on a dialogic practice that is intended to create spaces of generatively, creativity and life. It objectifies the object of it’s action and it acts upon that object to bring about a final conclusion. There is a lot buried in the particular grammatical function of the word. There is no room in the English definition of the word for self-organization and emergence.
Truthfully, the space required for dialogic practice needs a type of verb that doesn’t come so easily to English: a collectively transitive verb that is generative, continuous, and describes something that changes in its use. I suspect, having been a poor student of Anishinaabemowin and a bit of Skwxwu7mesh snichim, that there are maybe such verb forms in these languages. In my long study of the Tao te Ching, I’ve come to understand the concept of “yin” to be this: the form that life takes, in which creative energy is contained so it can do it’s work. It is created and changed in its interdependent relationship to what happens within it, like the way a river bed both holds the river and gives water its form of “river” instead of “lake” and is changed by the river being in it. It implies “receptivity” to creative energy. In Japanese where there is a sophisticated vocabulary for these kinds of spaces, “ma” (?) might be the word I’m looking for: a word that my friend Yurie Makihara defines this way: “Ma is the time concept expressing the time between something and other thing. We say how to create Ma is really important to encourage you to speak or “it’s kind of nice to have this kind of Ma.” For me Ma is the word to include some special sense to say, so we don’t use it just to express the time and the place.” Even though Yurie’s English is quite good, it’s clear that translating this into English is nearly impossible! But I think you get a sense that Ma is a collective sense about the shared time and space relationships that create a moment in which something is possible. Ma describes that moment, in a spatial way.
So. As is often the case, I’m left with the hidden poverty of English to give me a word that serves as both verb and noun and that is highly process-dependant. Over the years folks have suggested words like “nest” “hearth” and “field” to describe it. These are good, but in some ways they are also just softer rebranding of the word “container” to imply a more life-filled space. The terms still don’t ask the question of who gets to create, own and maintain the container nor do they fully capture the beauty and generativity of a complex adaptive structure in which meaning-making, relationship, healing, planning, dreaming both occur and act to transform the place in which they occur.
If we cast our eyes about the culture a bit wider, they quickly land on the word “space.” We use the word “space” a lot in social change circles, but it has its own troublesome incompleteness. The problem with “space” is that it often tends to turn attention towards what is between us and away from the boundary that separates us from others. This can be the way in which creating space for social change can fall victim to an unarticulated shadow: inclusion always implies a boundary between what is included and what is not included. Many social change initiatives falter on an unresourceful encounter with the exclusion that is implied by radical inclusion. A healthy social system can speak as clearly and lovingly about this boundary as it can about the relationship within the system. And for me this is the important part of talking about dialogic practice. So I can understand the helpful neutrality of the term “space” because it can be a result of a tight and impermeable boundary or it can simply be what we give our attention too as we come into relationship around attractors like identities, ideas, purposes, or needs. It can beautifully describe the nature of the “spaces in between.” But it still doesn’t do enough for me to describe the relationship between the spaces and the forces – or constraints – in the system that give rise to a space and enable self-organization and life. Still, it’s a pretty good word.
So perhaps what is needed is a true artistic view of the problem, to look away from the problem and towards the negative space that defines it. That is indeed what I have started doing in my work, by focusing more on the factors that influence self-organization and emergence and less on naming the structure that is created as a result of those factors. This is a critical skill in working with complexity as a strategist, facilitator, manager, and evaluator. These constraints include the interdependent work of the attractors and the boundaries which help us create a “space” for sensemaking and action, whether dialogic action or something else. There is a place where you are either in or out, and there can be a transition zone that is quite fluid and interesting. There is also an attractor at play, which can be a shared purpose, a goal, a shared identity, a shared rhythm or something interesting and strange and emergent that brings us into relationship. Anywhere you find yourself, in any social space, you can probably identify the attractors, the boundaries and perhaps even the nature of the liminal space between completely in and completely out.
This brings us back to the power conversation, rather more helpfully I think. If we let go of the “container” and focus instead on the factors that shape it, we can talk about power right upfront. Attractors and boundaries are VERY POWERFUL. They are created by power and maintained and enforced by power and the negotiation about their nature – more or less stable, more or less influential, more or less permeable and mutable – is by definition a negotiation about power. As a facilitator one carries a tremendous amount of power into the design of dialogic spaces. The most energetic resistance I have ever received in my work is always around the choices I made and the nature of the attractors and boundaries I am working with. I have been told I am too controlling, or not controlling enough. I have been told that we aren’t asking the right question (“who are you to say what we should be talking about?”). I have been removed from my role because what I was doing was far too disruptive to the group’s culture and norms of how they work, and in enforcing the disruption, I was actually depriving people of accessing the power they needed in the work.
(See the stories from Hawaii here and here and this story from Nunavik. Being an outsider with this power is perilous work.)
So yes, the terms we use to describe dialogic spaces matter. Finding a word to describe these spaces is important, and this is an important piece of critical pedagogy for anyone teaching dialogue and facilitation.
But don’t let your work rest on the definition of the space. Understand where these spaces come from. Actively work to invite more self-organization and emergence into these spaces that are in service of life, love and liberation. Become skillful at working with boundaries and attractors, limits and invitations, constraints that enable life rather than govern outcomes, and get good at knowing what kinds of relationships and constraints are the best fit for what is needed. That is what we need as we co-create spaces of radical participation and liberation and to transform the toxic use of power and control so we get more and more skillful at inviting us all into life-affirming moments and futures.
What do you think?