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Category Archives "Power"

A few little lessons about “changing culture”

March 8, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Complexity, Culture, Emergence, Evaluation, Facilitation, Featured, Learning, Organization, Power One Comment

I think it was 1986-87 academic year that I truly fell in love with the idea of culture. That was the year I began my BA in Indigenous Studies at Trent University and it was during a time when Indigenous cultures in Canada were going through a generational resurgence after recovering from 100 years of state-sponsored cultural, physical and intellectual extinction. I was able to be a witness to communities and organizations recovering by growing deep into traditional practices, and younger generations receiving the teaching of Elders and using them to create new political movements, organizations, economies, governments, and health and well being in their communities. I loved the idea of culture as the ground for this work and loved watching people work with it, and indeed being a part of cultural shifts and and catalysis. Culture was like magic. It appeared bigger than all of us, it shifted and changed and it enabled things to happen. Or not.

I so fell in love with culture that I did an honours thesis in my fifth year that compared two national Indigenous organizations in their attempts to root their operations and structures in traditional cultures. One did it by using artifacts and trappings and firm structures that ended in arguments about orthodoxies and heartbreak, and the other did it by creating a relational, caring, and connected context in which a unique but thoroughly Indigenous way of being emerged.

So early on I learned that culture is emergent, that it transcends individuals and specific artifacts and practices, that it is a context that shapes relationships and behaviours and that it is the product of relationships and interactions over time. Norms of behaviour can’t be dictated, they can only arise.

Since then I would say that the heart of my work with organizations and communities has been working with culture. The sources of joy and the sources of pain are the multiples contexts in which we live our lives. I’ve worked in one-off settings and multi-year large scale systemic settings. I’ve worked with large teams and with little groups of change-makers. And we’ve tried it all, from magic methods to the “this will finally solve it” conference, to multi-year narrative sense-making projects. I’ve spent decades surfing the rise and fall of supporter culture around the soccer teams I’ve been a part of. I’ve spent nearly 25 years living on an island with its own unique slant on the world, creating social enterprises, supporting community economic development and making community through music and play.

About a year ago on the Art of Hosting Facebook group someone asked about changing culture in a very large organization and which methods are best. For some reason that post appeared in the feed that I rarely check, and I responded to it. But because I’m never going to send you to Facebook, I thought I would catch this sketchy set of insights and share them here. This is a back of the napkin kind of list, but these are truths that I will no longer doubt in my work with organizations and communities. So here’s what I’ve learned about “culture change.”

  1. It takes years.
  2. Your work will be non-linear and unpredictable.
  3. All states are temporary.
  4. If it is necessary for senior leaders champion and support change work, it will only be sustained as long as they don’t succumb to their anxiety and fear of uncertainty and unpredictability.
  5. You cannot change culture directly, but you can work to change the way people interact with one another and see what kind of culture emerges as a result.
  6. Learning together is often a good way to approach many different strategic and cultural issues in an oblique and open way.
  7. If change of any kind in the organization or sector is predicated on the people needing to transform and be different then you are colonizing people. Don’t do that.
  8. Whatever you think is happening is only ever a part of the full picture.
  9. Whatever you think you have accomplished is only ever a piece of what you have actually done.
  10. It will never go according to plan.

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From the Parking Lot

February 3, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Culture, Democracy, Featured, First Nations, Learning, Links, Music, Poetry, Power

The light is returning to the northern hemisphere and we’ve had clear skies for the last 10 days. This is a photo of the twilight with Venus seen from my house looking southwest over Apodaca Ridge. Cloud has since rolled in and a little blast of coastal winter is coming.

Republished. The post I sent out last week had broken links.

My monthly round up of interesting links. These are posted nearly daily at my Mastodon feed.

Democracy & Politics

It has been a full month of politics here in Canada and in the US that has shaken a lot of things up.

  • What Could Citizens’ Assemblies Do for American Politics? | The New Yorker
    Participation and democratic deliberation require time, attention, and intention. It doesn’t solve all problems, but this kind of work is essential.
  • Job One for 2025: Protecting Canada from US Oligarchs | The Tyee
    A benchmark of the current state of US cultural and economic involvement in Canada, against which we can measure the increasingly imperialist tone of leadership in both our countries.
  • Danielle Smith is Undermining Canada: Former Chief Trade Negotiator | Rabble
    Another piece of evidence to support my long-running contention that populists are dangerous in a crisis because they simply don’t know how to govern.
  • A Decent Dive into the United States’ Geopolitical Interest in Greenland and the Arctic | Channel News Asia
    Trump signaling an intent to expand the US’ territory could set off a massive contest for Arctic resources. For the first time in my life, I’m worried that our neighbor to the south will actually invade this country.
  • Please Advise! How Dire and Disgusting Was Trump’s Day One? | The Tyee
    Just bookmarking this one because it kind of captures the spirit of the day.

Climate & Environment

  • We Saved the Planet Once. Can We Do It Again? | The Tyee
    Charlie Angus and I are about the same age and we lived in Toronto at the same time (I remember that hot summer of 1988!). This memoir charts my own recollections too. It’s been a ride.
  • What Are the 2024 Salmon Returns Telling Us? | Alexandra Morton
    Well, they appear to be telling us that closing salmon farms has a positive effect on returns and salmon health. Read the numbers for yourself.

Economics & Social Systems

  • Milton Friedman Blaming Governments for Inflation is One of the Most Pernicious Lies of the Last Half-Century | Dougald Lamont
    Lamont’s writing is new to me and absolutely compelling. A former provincial Liberal leader in Manitoba, he has a strong grasp of economics and governance.
  • How Communism Is Outcompeting Capitalism
    It’s nice to have something to compare the grift of North Atlantic capitalism to. An article not without flaws and blind spots, but a really energetic critique.

Arts & Culture

  • The Secret History of Risotto | The New Yorker
    I love risotto. I love making it and eating it and learning about it, and I love a love letter written to it.
  • Folk Music Legend Got Short Shrift in ‘A Complete Unknown,’ But His Songs Will Live On | PennLive
    A great piece that tries to rescue Pete Seeger’s legacy. Something about his portrayal in the movie didn’t sit well with me. Dylan was an artist who wrote anthems for activists. Pete was an activist who sang. Different. And we need both.
  • Close Reading Bad Poetry | 3 Quarks Daily
    I really enjoyed this article. Learning from the worst possible outcome is a time-honored tradition.

Technology & Innovation

  • I Love a Bushfix. But What’s the Future of ‘Right to Repair’?
    I don’t know much about farming, so this was an interesting article that also made me realize that some of the reasons why food is expensive might have to do with farmers being bilked by their equipment manufacturers.
  • How to Remember Everything You Read | Justin Sung
    As a person with ADHD, these kinds of videos are interesting. I’m currently actively learning two languages (Italian and jazz guitar), continuing to develop my understanding of complexity, and learning how to best teach and share it.

Indigenous Leadership & Legacy

  • Bill Wilson Has Died | He was an incredible voice of leadership from the Central Coast of BC. A history maker, a guy who always spoke his mind with absolute certainty and wasn’t afraid to trigger reactions in the service of blowing a conversation about justice wide open.
  • Listen to My Friend Kameron Perez-Verdia Tell the Story of His First Whale.

Books and music

Links are to publisher or artist sites where you can buy this art directly.

  • The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. A beautiful novel set in 2019-2020 about a haunted book store in Minneapolis during the first year of COVID and the events following George Floyd’s murder. The book is a deep story of identity, history, language and relationship.
  • The Keeper by Kelly Ervick. A graphic memoir about women’s soccer told through the eyes of a woman who comes of age in the 1980s, just as American women’s soccer bursts on to the scene.
  • Benjamin Britten’s Choral Works. Nearly all of Britten’s non-carol choral music collected and performed beautifully. The choir I sing in, Carmena Bowena, is currently adding Hymn to The Virgin to our repertoire.
  • Cassandra Wilson – New Moon Daughter. Her 1995 release explores multiple genres with cover songs and originals and is backed by musicians who have a wide range of fluency across multiple styles. Her voice sounds so much like Joni Mitchell’s voice from the same time. Deep and smokey and full in timbre.
  • Herbie Hancock – The Piano. An album of solo piano music from 1979 recorded direct-to-disc. Showcases Hancock’s improvisational chops and his curiosity about harmony.
  • Peter Hertmens Trio – Akasha. Every month I like to look for a new-to-me jazz guitarist and explore their material. This month I stumbled on the work of Belgian Peter Hertmens. Akasha is a 2018 release with organ and bass that is just a lovely collection of Hertmens’ original compositions.

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Time to leave the enclosures

January 21, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Being, Culture, Democracy, Featured, Power, Wordpress 6 Comments

It is time to leave the enclosures. It is not worth trying to make our social networks work under the terms of unfettered fascists and venture capitalists who prey on our attention for profit.

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Recent notes and inspirations from Alicia Juarrero

December 10, 2024 By Chris Corrigan Complexity, Containers, Conversation, Culture, Emergence, Featured, Leadership, Organization, Power

Context changes everything. This used to be a forest.

Alicia Juarrero is the source of so much great thinking on the role of constraints in complex systems. Her two books, Dynamics In Action and Context Changes Everything are brilliant discussions of the role of intention and how constraints shape complex phenomena. They are philosophical texts, and so are slow reads, but well worth the effort. You can find many videos of her sharing her insights on You Tube and elsewhere. She is generous with her time and enthusiastic about her work.

Last week I sat in on a seminar she gave for The Prometheus Project. I expect the video will be up on their “Past Voices” page soon. Here are a few thoughts that struck me from that session.

Dr. Juarrero’s work has been deeply concerned with how intention works as a constraint on action in complex systems. Her thinking underpins much of the way I have learned to think about complexity through Dave Snowden’s work, and most of us who are not philosophers have likely come to her work through Dave.

She used a term in the seminar which I have overlooked in her writings to described stable or coherent phenomena in complex systems: a “constraint regime.” Constraint regimes are phenomena which display coherence even in a dynamic and changing system. Disspative structures like whirlpools are good examples. There is a higher level order imposed on all the water molecules that enter the constraint regime of a whirlpool and they are entrained into becoming a part of that shape. There is nothing inherent about the shape of a water molecule that determines that it would eventually become a part of a whirlpool. This high level order is imposed by constraints on the system that cause the molecules to create a whirlpool shape until they flow through the constraint regime and down the drain. The whirlpool maintains a stable presence until all the water is gone, despite the parts of the system being in constant exchange. Watch some videos of laminar flow to see this stability in astonishing clarity.

This is not a new observation, but Dr. Juarrero’s contributions to this field place the influence of context on constraint regimes into the order of causes for behaviour in a complex system, which bucks the general trend in sciences that only forces between external bodies can cause action. Constraints create coherence in complex systems. Coherence can also look like identity. We are different people in different places. I’ve often used the example that, when gathered with our families, we are very different people than when we are in a business setting or a social setting with friends. There are actions available to us in one context that are not available in another. So context changes everything.

My own work with dialogic containers seeks to understand these phenomena as essentially constrain regimes that emerge out of encounters between people who are making meaning together. When those containers become stable over time – such as in a family for example – they can create dynamics in which our behaviour is highly path dependant, and the paths on which it depends can include the neurological pathways that are activated when we are in a particular context. What we are learning about the neurology of trauma and epigenetics confirms this. Our brain is wired by trauma and influenced by its interactions with environments to produce an identity that has a particular coherence, if not static stability, in particular contexts. When my father was alive and I was in his presence, I was the son of a father, in a relationship that grew and changed over time but had a certain stability. When my father died, I found myself at a loss as the son as a father. Who am I now? And who am I in a teaching environment, singing in a choir, sitting on my own, in the supporter section of my football team? All of these are different containers – constraint regimes – and when we are meaning-making in these places with others I call those dialogic containers.

I like the idea of constrain regimes to describe the class of structures that impart top down causality on a complex system. Dialogic containers are one kind of constrain regime.

In the seminar last week Dr. Juarrero talked about how we make change in complex systems by working with constraints. She had a few great answers to questions about working with constraints. She avoided going down the rabbit hole of working with a definition of complexity, because there simply isn’t one that works all the time, but she did say that the way to work with emergence is through FEEL. We feel when something isn’t right or needs changing and we take action on what feels better. Her pithy advice for leaders is helpful: if things are stable you need to stay in the centre and maintain stability with fail-safe processes. But fail-safe process DO fail, and when they do it is a catastrophic failure, as Dave Snowden says. So when things grow turbulent and more complex (or indeed chaotic) you need to move to the edges and manage in a safe-to-fail way from there, looking for what is coming, working from principles rather than procedures, and attending to the uncertainty. Leadership is context dependant. This is the great lesson of Cynefin as well.

Dr. Juarrero addressed the urge to map systems and try to understand root causes. When presented with a systems diagram – a picture of nodes connected by arrows – she said that such diagrams have some very limited usefulness but they have to be actively interrogated with questions such as:

  • What is in the white space in which the diagram is situated?
  • What is NOT mapped?
  • What is the nature of any given connection between the nodes?
  • What are the nodes? Do they change? How?
  • Is everything I am looking at stable?

Such diagrams also have a very short time limit. Try mapping the traffic on the street in front of you, or a given moment in a soccer game and then drawing certain conclusions from that.

The advice for dealing with turbulence in stability is to develop relational safe-to-fail practice into your system. That makes you better equipped to sense and notice what is happening in the context that surrounds you. The context is so important to the system in which you are working. If things are collapsing inside your system, but the context is stable, you might bring stability to your system from the high order. For example, emergency response relies on stable and predictable interventions being imposed from outside the place of immediate collapse. If your system is stable and the context is unstable, you may find yourself losing your stability quickly and in surprising ways. The fall of the Assad government this week is an example of that. No amount of order and control could overcome the contextual turbulence that caused his family’s regime to fall. Establishing institutional order in Syria is now the challenge facing that country and the region as a whole, because instability exists at nearly every scale in the Middle East at the moment.

If you are working in a stable system that is embedded in a stable context, making change is going to be very hard. Change needs to proceed along the vectors of rule and policy making. Financial systems are an example of this. A chartered bank in Canada operating inside of a well regulated legislative regime, which itself is embedded within a global financial order is essential for the stable smooth functioning of financial systems. Making changes to that system are very difficult and they are highly ordered. Catastrophic change is held at bay by this incredibly stable set of constrains regimes, but when it comes, it comes like a tsunami.

Finally change making in a turbulent system held within a turbulent context is hard, because what you are probably trying to do is seek some order and predictability and it isn’t available. The lives of refugees and migrants and chronically homeless folks who are in motion are like this. With no power to create order, they are at the whims of those that do have the ability to impose order and control. For them, life is a constant state of chaos, sustained that way by a constraint regime that constantly undermines their stability, in some cases out of pure cruelty.

Some of this is new to me, some of it is stuff I know, but am just being reminded of. People like Alicia Juarerro continually keep me learning.

I have time to integrate think about this stuff and will be bringing it into our course on Working in Complexity Inside and Out, where we introduce new material as we learn, test and stabilize ideas about how to work with complexity. The next offering of that course starts in February.

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Yes, there will be singing

November 1, 2024 By Chris Corrigan Featured, Music, Poetry, Power 2 Comments

            Motto by Bertolt Brecht


In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.


                 German; trans. John Willett

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