Laureen Golden is one of those people that is able to just get me talking. From the first time we met back in 2015, she and I have had dozens of great conversations about complexity, facilitation, participatory design and leadership. I’ve supported her in her work with leaders and Montessori educators and also in teaching a course on system work and trauma.
Here are a couple of offerings from her YouTube channel, where she has edited some of our conversations into teaching pieces that we are happy to share with you
- A playlist of four short videos on working with complexity in trauma. These interviews were for a series called “Looking at Systems with a Trauma-Informed Lens” taught at Portland State University.
- Introduction to Participatory Narrative inquiry. A short interview with Montessori educator Jacqui Miller where I talk about using story to make sense of the world. Here I talk about why we work with anecdotes and story fragments and how PNI helps us to gather information for collective sensemaking about our world and how we should act. If you want to learn more about PNI, Cynthia Kurtz shares all her resources here, and I’m told she’s thinking of making a workshop for deeper learning, for which I cannot wait.
Enjoy these offerings.
One of the quotes I keep rolling out all the time is this one from Christina Baldwin:
No group can prove itself safe by the definition of one member; it can only prove itself healthy and responsive to the the needs of different people over time
Christina Baldwin, Calling the Circle, p. 172
I sometimes reframe this quote as “No one person can be responsible for safety in a group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for its own safety.”
For a group to work well, especially if it is confronting challenges, uncertainty, complexity, or conflict, it needs to be safe enough for members to freely share and contribute, and also challenging enough that ideas that no longer serve can be questioned, stretched and broken to make space for the new. Rather than saying “we will create safe space” it’s useful to take some time to explore the polarity of safety and danger. We often talk about “safe enough” or “brave space” or similar terms that capture this space of leading and facilitating.
So the way to do this is to enlist the group itself in co-creating the conditions that create a creative, generative, challenging and supportive space. I usually do that by facilitating this process that I call The Golden Rule Principles Setting Exercise.
The Golden Rule, of course, is the principle that underlies the perennial tradition of many religious and spiritual traditions. In Christianity it is worded as “Love your neighbour as yourself.” It recognizes our interdependence with others and it invites us to practice offering to others the same things that we ourselves need.
The process is very simple.
- Invite people to reflect and discuss these two questions: During this meeting how do I want to be heard? During this meeting how do I want to be spoken to?”
- It’s good to do this in pairs and folks can record some of these needs and place them on stickies or a virtual whiteboard or chat log.
- Have the pairs share a few of their needs into the whole group.
- Next invite people to reflect on how to offer to others what they want for themselves. If I need to be allowed to ramble a bit uninterrupted because I think out loud, I can put this need in the centre and also commit to not interrupting others.
- Have people commit to a single practice that they will endeavour to live up to, one that they may even be willing to be accountable to, and place it on a sticky note.
That’s it. Except under very specific circumstances, I don’t ask the group to vote on these principles, or approve them in any other way. Rather, I trust the people to do their work. From time to time of course as a facilitator one needs to step in, but usually when this process is put into play, I need only offer a period of silence and reflection on the commitment for a group to restore its collective responsibility to care for the container.
As a way to begin a meeting, this is a first foray into co-creation of something that the group all needs and is therefore an excellent way to set the tone for collaborative work, creating a space that can hold the range of emotions that show up in complexity work
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…