Dave Snowden concluded his six-part series on the Channel and the Estuary this week. He used gangster movies and TV Series to illustrate the different kinds of contexts in which people are sense-making. The series contrasted the categorical ambiguity and gradients represented by the ecology of a tidal estuary with the managed and ordered passageway through uncertainty represented by the marked channel. The metaphors are meaningful for coastal people, and anyone who has had to navigate these kinds of marine ecosystems. The point is that navigating in the estuary and in the channel requires different approaches to sense-making.
The whole series deserves to be read and thought through, as it is an important declaration of what “complexity thinking” really is and what it requires from the complexity practitioner. It is also a warning against the way in which we receive the world in a pre-channeled, dredged state, made easier for us; “facilitated” one might say, especially by the digitization of our experience, which has dredged and channelled the world and offered us pre-designed categories of experience.
Dave’s series contains an embedded tribute to those whose lot in life requires them to practice estuarine thinking in a world of pre-cut channels. It recognizes the loneliness that such people sometimes experience and the separateness they often feel. It is also a call to action for an approach to organizational life that treats complexity as a context in which we are required to deploy “estuarine thinking.” These are lost capacities – exiled capacities, if you like – and we lose something essential if they disappear.
I have been wrestling with this series from the perspective of a person who hosts conversations in organizations and communities. Dave’s work has deeply shaped the way I view and practice facilitation over the past 15 years or so. It has left me in a liminal space of practice. I try to locate myself adjacent to those in the ‘facilitation’ world, those who are dialogic practitioners, and folks who are exploring the implications that complexity has for their practice. I say adjacent because I am aware that although I use the language of facilitation, dialogue, and hosting, I find that much of the practice in these fields fails to confront the complexity of human groups and systems. We all have work to do to build our practice around Dave’s invitation, not just in these posts but in his work in general as it relates to complex facilitation.
The thing about complexity is that once you see it you can’t unsee it, and Dave’s refection on the gangsters and business mavens from Guinness, Peaky Blinders and The Godfather had me noticing similar patterns in the stories I was encountering. Last weekend, we attended a screening of the 1961 version of the film West Side Story, which is unbelievably contemporary in many ways, not the least of which is that it explores what happens when people are born into a world of tight constraints not of their making. I have never seen the film or the musical, so this was all new to me. There is A LOT I can say about this film, and perhaps it deserves a whole other post to explore some of the themes, but one scene stood out to me in particular, and I think anyone who engages in facilitation (or community development or consulting or organizing) might find it beneficial to watch this and reflect.
The two gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, are locked in a struggle against each other, divided by ethnicity, neighbourhood, history, and class. Tony, the former leader of the Jets, falls in love with Maria, the younger sister of the Sharks’ leader. Their love crosses the boundaries of gangs, race, history, and tradition. Both gangs sing about the constraints of their worlds: childhood trauma, exclusion, racism, homesickness, loyalty, and the struggle to belong. At a critical point in the film, both gangs agree to meet at a dance in what they consider ‘neutral’ territory.
The dance is run by a social worker called Glad Hand, played beautiful by John Astin. Glad Hand, armed with his clipboard and his whistle, has some activities planned for the dance, and he naively tries to mix up the crowd of teenagers, probably so that they might have a different kind of experience of getting to know one another. His design for the evening is almost totally ignorant of the contexts that make it impossible for this dance to have any kind of success. It is a well-intentioned effort that goes terribly wrong. You can see the painfully earnest effort on Astin’s face, convinced that he is bringing a hopeful and helpful evening to this group of poor immigrant youth.
In the key scene, Glad Hand organizes the teenagers into a circle dance. the idea is that the girls walk one way and the boys walk the other and when he blows the whistle you have to dance with who ever you are standing in front of. He says “form a circle. Boys will be on the outside, girls will be on the inside.” Action, one of the Jets who has the best, most cynical quips in the films asks “And where will you be?” Glad Hand chuckles nervously with an awkward smile and ignores the question.
It takes a few moments for anyone to move into the circle. There is no trust between the teens and Glad Hand and everybody is HYPER aware of the dynamics in the room which Glad Hand has just gleefully ignored in favour of his plans and his clipboard. He has tried to create “safe” space and the gangs understand this as “neutral” space, which is a very different thing. “Neutral” requires that you keep your guard up and restrain your instincts. While Glad Hand is committed to civility, the gangs are actually committed to an uneasy peace in a social field that is filled with tension.
As the circle dance begins Glad Hand is clearly waiting for his chance to impose a predetermined outcome, where the Sharks girls will end up with the Jets boys and vice versa. It’s transparent and manipulative. The kids in the dance are looking anxiously around themselves, scanning the room and knowing exactly where they are in every moment. Glad Hand blows his whistle when the circles are lined up perfectly for his agenda. Immediately everyone catches on to what is happening. They stop, look around and break the exercise and go back into their couples and groups, and the dance disintegrates into a ritualized gang war, with the two sides doing their own thing more divided than ever. As the circle breaks down you can see the police officer running to Glad Hand and clearly reprimanding him for the situation he has created. This is the last we see of the social worker.
This is deeply familiar to me, and perhaps you too. For many of us the facilitation journey starts with tools and methods. A devotion to these creates a situation in which the context and pre-existing constraints are pushed into the background. When a group rebels against what I am doing. my experience has been that it is almost always the result of my own ignorance to what is happening in the group. These are hard lessons to learn, but important. It’s why I wrote the series on theory, to recognize that the dialogic containers in which we are working are embedded in multiple constraint regimes and landscapes of context which exert a more powerful influence on the present moment than a facilitated method.
Dave’s recent series pushes us to understand the capacity needed not only to enter into the ambiguous and uncertain space of complex situations, but to navigate once we are there. It calls me to a practice of constant self-reflection, knowing that in any situations it is impossible to map the next step, and recognizing that the channel markers I encounter are often the ones I have put down before, to protect myself, to avoid the messiness I can’t handle, to steer the group into a place where I am most comfortable or hopeful. Channels are not bad in and of themselves. But one cannot lose sight of the estuary in which the channel is dredged.
Relentless self-awareness is critical to leading in the estuary. Being aware of where we are in relation to what is happening, and knowing how to respond to the steadily changing context is the capacity. It is not often what people are contracting you for; so often the client wants certainty and structure and guidance. What is needed in complexity instead is a kind of learning scaffolding that for developing the capacity that people have for being in the estuary. Dredging a channel does not mean that we are no longer navigating in the salt marsh. On the contrary, it may well rob us of the ability to be able to do so.
In this first instalment of this series I moved the focus of facilitation practice from tools to context. In this instalment I want to explore what it means to “hold space” and why this is only part of the work in the dialogic container.
Dialogic facilitation is concerned with meaning making events in a discrete space and time. This space and time is both physical and social, and it is what I call a “dialogic container.” These are places in which people come together to engage in meaning making and action. The dialogic container is context for the work that happens and the container gives rise to meaning between participants in the dialogue. Within the container, participants engage and interact and make meaning together. The dialogic container is the scale at which participants can take immediate action. It is intimate and vibrant. Meetings and gatherings host agency, and for this reason I think we often think of them as important for making larger changes.
Many people have talked about the role of the facilitator as “holding space” and I even wrote a book on that practice. “Holding space” is a vague term that has many definitions. It doesn’t even really convey the practice well. Nothing is actually “held” and “space” can mean a bunch of different things. The term describes a practice that is ineffable and intangible and yet important to good dialogue.
Despite its importance, I don’t want to talk about “holding space” as a practice. You can go and read my “Tao of Holding Space” for more reflections on the practice. Instead I want to point to the space that is being held: the dialogic container.
This is the first and closest level of context inside of which dialogue happens. In large group meetings, other containers form in small groups. In the large group facilitation work I do, it isn’t possible for one person to hold the variety of spaces that appear and emerge in complex dialogue facilitation. Instead the role of the facilitator is to shape the constraints of that space to enable maximum agency and self-organization of the participants and to encourage the emergence of desired insights, outcomes and actions.
Good facilitators make choices about how constraints are used to shape interactions between people. Once these constraints are put in place the role of the facilitator is to be, in Harrison Owen’s words, “totally present and completely invisible” until such a time as the group process needs to change. Facilitators have a great deal of power in these contexts. We can cut off a conversation, make a subtle adjustment in a space to separate people or encourage or prevent different things from happening. Conscious facilitation requires us to be hyper aware of our impact in dialogic spaces and to be clear and honest with our influence on the proceedings.
Take a moment to reflect on the meetings and conversations you are a part of. Think about how the setting influences what happens, how the physical space constrains or invites different possibilities. Think about how choices that are made in that meeting influence the conversations that are being had and what happens.
On reflection it should be very clear that this context is extremely influential in the process of dialogue. No two conversations are ever alike. No two conversations will render the same outcomes. No two people will experience the conversation in the same way.
In World Cafe conversations we see this happen all the time. Because that process is structured around small groups which change every 20-30 minutes, participants quickly get the sense that just changing two or three people in a conversation or taking up another spot in the room can significantly change the nature and quality of the conversation. That can be frustrating if a conversation is going really well, because a “sticky container” can form, one which is difficult to break. In other cases, having the conversation end can be a relief as people look to get out of an unpleasant discussion or an uncomfortable dynamic.
Dialogic containers form around constraints, including attractors that draw people’s attention together. A powerful and necessary question is an attractor. A shared purpose can be a strong attractor. Attractors bring coherence. In a conversation about the future of a social services agency, it doesn’t make sense to talk about manufacturing cars because the topic is incoherent in the context of the conversation.
Power is another form of attractor. When powerful people are in the room it changes the nature of the conversation. We say of circle for example, that the shape does not equalize power relationships. It simply gives people equal access to the centre of the room, and figuratively it symbolizes that participants are offered equal access to the dialogue topic. But power still exists, and it is endlessly fascinating in a highly democratic process to watch a group organize itself around the twin attractors of shared purpose and powerful people.
At some point in a dialogue session the facilitator is the most powerful person in the room. To the extent that there is trust between the group and the facilitator, participants will consent to the proposed process of dialogue. In situations of extremely low trust, it is possible that a meeting will simply fail to get off the ground. Sometimes the facilitator becomes the common enemy, and the group rebels against any shaping of its time together.
But in situations of high trust, a group may consent to a process because they are clear that it helps them to address as persistent need amongst them. As a facilitator I spend massive amounts of time with my clients in design and co-creation of processes – especially novel processes – so that we don’t show up on the day and need to overcome suspicion and anxiety before getting started. If I am to occupy to most important space in the room, even for a short time, I must be able to have trust to be there.
In this respect there are no neutral facilitators. The role is far from neutral; rather it is influential. One may be agnostic or even ignorant about the content of the gathering (and I’ve run meetings in languages I don’t speak, like Irish, Turkish, Estonian, French, and multilingual meetings too, which shows that connection to content is not essential) but you are not neutral in terms of influencing the group’s process. The choices that the facilitator makes, especially in a container in which one has a lot of trust, will shape the process significantly and influence the nature of relationships between people going forward.
So the dialogic container is important, because in any process, it is the space of immediate encounter and immediate agency. People will make meaning and act together. They will bring story and expectations and history into the room with them and they will form relationships (or break them) which will influence outcomes as much or moreso than the decisions made in the meeting.
While meetings are important, my experience is that the most significant results of most meetings is the relational field that is built by being together. Many clients expect high stakes meetings to produce miracles – fundamental transformations in insight or decision making that changes everything. In my experience, a single meeting is inadequate for this. However, dialogic containers can be powerful places where people learn new things, change views, form new relationships, or discover new insights. That is their promise.
Still, it is common to hear from participants in a container “this is all good, but how will it be when we return to the ‘real world’.” This is a valid question and it has to do with the next post in this series, on the contexts in which dialogic work is embedded. Dialogic containers are necessary for meaningful action, but rarely sufficient for sustained change. They are embedded in larger contexts that shape what happens once the meeting ends.
For now though the point of this post is to establish the importance of container and context in which dialogic works happens. The nature of the container, in all of its complexity, plays a significant role in the tangible and intangible outcomes of dialogue work. Once we see that, we can begin to see that the work of dialogue facilitation is both about “what happens in the room” as well as what happens in the context in which that room is situated.
We are deep in the rainy season here on the west coast of North America. I’ve been reflecting on my year of work and noticing a few patterns that are coming to mind as I think about the kinds of questions that our clients have been confronting this year. I don’t know that these observations are especially novel, but they do represent patterns that I have seen this year. they also represent places where I think our work can be helpful.
Something of the bigger context.
As it always has been. But that bigger context is currently full of austerity, fear and polarization. Much of our work is within the non-profit and public sector, and our clients have all been facing declines in funding, uncertainty about the future, skyrocketing need from their own clients and a deep questions about using their leadership to confront polarity and division in their organizations and communities.
It used to be that we were confronting a “scarcity mindset” where we feel to recognize the wealth of ideas and leadership that we actually have. This leaves leaders and organizations retreating into their own shells as they try hard to shoulder the responsibility of the work. Often in our organizational development work, we could do things that lift our eyes up a bit and help activate the leadership throughout the organization.
These days, on top of that dynamic, I think we’re facing an “austerity mindset” whereby that wealth of talent, attention and money is still present but it is actually locked away and not available to us. It has been concentrated elsewhere and everyone seems to be preparing to simply do without it.
I’m certainly not 100% sure of this shift, but it feels like the issues leaders are confronting are shifting in ways that we continue to explore with them and their teams, and my colleagues as well. What helps at this time is continued connection and sophisticated situational awareness to see and name what is happening and to be honest about what is available to work with. Maybe, dear readers, you are seeing it too. All work happens in a context and being able to name this context is important, without getting lost in it. I wrote about this back in September.
Five year strategic planning is dead.
The Covid-19 experience seemed to finally put to rest the typical five year strategic planning process. Everyone now has practical and tangible experience of how the best laid plans can be knocked sideways. And in the last year or two, as organizations have been recovering from Covid, they have no been hit with massive uncertainty in the world, including cuts to their funding. And it very much seems irrational, arbitrary and determined by bigger dynamics that are outside of the control of the organizations we get to work with.
In response, the kind of planning I have been asked to do more and more this year is about scenario planning and arriving at a set of practice principles that can help organizations lead towards a variety of futures. I do love this kind of work. It has relational benefits of visioning and dreaming together, but is rooted in deep and practical need for on the ground responses. I’m not an expert at operational planning – and there is always a need for that kind of work – but bringing people together to think about futures and develop some shared resourcefulness about responding to what might happen is useful.
Connection is needed but trust is shaky at the centre.
I have had a blog posts sitting in my drafts for a little while that talks about how we can move from centralized planning and control towards a more networked form of leadership. Ever since I ran across Open Space Technology in 1995 I have seen the need for this, because as Harrison Owen (who we lost in 2025) observed, Open Space activates an organizational structure of shared leadership and responsibility that is latent in any group of people. He called it “The High Performance Organization” and it checks a lot of boxes for what leaders want: engaged staff, ideas and responsibility sprouting up all over, connected and self-organizing teams that are working in a common direction, but meeting challenges where they are at.
The problem is that such networks really depend on the ability and willingness of organizational leaders to open up space for that to happen. We spend a lot of time in our longer engagements working with senior leaders to help them sustain their ability to truly trust the folks in their groups to do the work. It is sometimes a hard thing to bootstrap, but once it gets going, these types of networks can be quite powerful. Central leaders and organizations become conveners rather than resource sinks, and work becomes meaningful. It requires leaders to do the work they are uniquely positioned to do but to release to the community work that can be better done at the edges.
In the little supporter-owned soccer club I am a part of we do this but having our core leadership care for the fiduciary and technical responsibilities or the club and the rest of us live by the principles of “Assume your talents are needed, and proceed until apprehended.” In this way we activate community and true ownership over what we are doing.
And speaking of polarities…
This kind of things means that polarities abound: centralized control and distributed responsibility; continuity of tradition and new responses to emerging conditions; maintaining fiduciary obligations while stretching beyond; focus on the core external offering and building interior connections and development. Every planning process I have been involved in this year seems to hang on one or more of these polarities. Often the conversations about need and purpose start with an acknowledgement that both sides of the polarity are needed and the challenge is to lean into the skills and talent we have to do both. As contextual uncertainty has increased, our clients seem more willing to wrestle with these polarities rather than simply seeing their current conditions as a problem to be solved.
As always, we need to be thoughtful about how we think about change.
We are living in a world which seems to be revelling in ignorance about complexity. Every problem now seems to have a simple answer, with predictable and brutal results. We are fed this line in our civic conversations too, organizational realities and personal lives too. Social media algorithms have shaped our ideas about what is happening in the world and what we should do about it. I think complexity literacy is more important than ever. Just being able to think about the different kinds of change out there TOGETHER helps us to make sense of things in a more useful way and in a way that builds more relationships and therefore more resilience. Some of my go to frameworks for helping folks understand how change happens, the Cynefin framework and the Two Loops framework, continue to be extremely useful for helping people describe the spaces they are in, and chaordic planning has stood the test of time for collaboratively designing responses to these kinds of conditions.
AI is helping us delude ourselves into believing that we don’t need craft, or the ability to confront uncertainty with relationality.
It used to be fairly common that a client would discover that I was a facilitator and hand me an agenda and ask me to facilitate it. Its the reason I wrote the chaordic stepping stones guide in the first places, so that we could explore the possibility space together and design something that was fit to needs instead of simply rolling out a best practice. This year was the first time I received agendas generated by ChatGPT and asked to facilitate those. It took me a moment to figure this out, but I think that many people are probably asking their favourite large language model to give them an agenda for a two day strategic planning process. We are witnessing a massive cultural crises stemming from the destruction of craft across all the arts including music, writing, visual arts and process arts. Designing and facilitating participatory work is a craft. the two go hand in hand. One would never give an accomplished artist a paint-by-numbers set and ask them to use their technique to fill it out the way one wanted. Or hand a musician a piece of music to play that has notes in it, but no sense of development, harmony or rhythm.
Artificial intelligence is excellent at giving one the impression that the uncertainty they are confronting is easily solved. The tools that we currently have access to are extremely powerful aids to help with facilitation work, but they simply cannot replace the craft of relationship building and the time it takes to do work that generates meaningful contribution and ownership and sustainability. Facilitators and participatory leaders need to continue to develop the skills to work with groups of people in increasing complexity, within decreased time frames and a climate of austerity, polarization and uncertainty. Our chatbots are incapable of understanding what we know when we enter a space like that, but those of us that fear the ambiguity of these spaces can find ourselves retreating into the comforting certainty of a set of answers that come from what appears to be a divine and omniscient source. We just have to be careful not to lose the ability to sit together and figure something out. Keep watching sports like soccer and hockey. Keep making music with each other. Exercise the feeling and abilities that we have to make and undo things together without knowing where we are going or what might happen next. Move together, slightly slower than you think you should be, and seeking surprise along the way.
Stories and shared work are helpful.
I had a lovely call the other day with Cynthia Kurtz and Ashley Cooper are some folks Ashley is working with around using Participatory Narrative Inquiry to work with stories in communities and organizations. I continue to use that collection of methods for dealing with difficult and complex situations, including future scenario planning, because my experience has been that making sense of grounded stories together is the best way to engage with the uncertainty and opinionated conversation that passes for civic dialogue. I’m interested in methods and processes of civic deliberation and address conflict with process design. How can we bring difference into governance without confusing it with conflict? How can we work with conflict without confusing it with violence? This is not an area I have ever been comfortable in, but I have found that stories and circle are the best way to have a group of people dive in together on shared work that helps differences become resources and helps conflict become co-discovery. In watching the current kinds of conversations we are having in Canada around things like Aboriginal title, it’s clear that folks with opinions not rooted in actual experience have a hard time even beginning to understand issues, let alone seeing ways in which reconciling differences can be the work of a mature politics, and a potentially defining characteristic of the Canadian project.
So these are some of the things I have seen this year and I expect that these are threads that will continue to grow and bloom in the coming year too. I’m really interested what YOU have noticed?
It’s a grey muggy day here on the south coast of BC, and the photo above is from this morning’s ferry ride into Vancouver to begin a trip to Haida Gwaii this week.
Chris Mowles has a good post on the politics of uncertainty and writes about how that is unfolding in health care systems he is working with. I resonate with these words:
My colleagues’ dilemmas also made me think about the anxiety associated with uncertainty and how it is unevenly distributed. In times of crisis and hardship there is often a myth that ‘we are all in this together’, whereas in reality some are more in it than others. In his book The Politics of Uncertainty Peter Marris (1996) explains how group life, particularly in highly individualised and competitive societies, also comprises competition over who gets to sit with the most uncertainty. Your position in the hierarchy will determine how much you can pass on uncertainty to others. And Marris argues that the most marginalised are likely to bear the brunt.
This isn’t just true of inter organizational politics but of social politics as well. If you want to assert power, offload as much uncertainty as possible(and it’s accompanying anxiety) to others. That way you live with at least an illusion of comfort, shielded from the mental health challenges of being on constant stand-by for crisis or emergence.
It’s one of the reasons why I think it’s important to build capacity for working with complexity throughout organizations and societies, and especially deep in the lower middle management parts of these societies, where anxiety and uncertainty (and accountability) has been shifted. Of course, senior executives and government ministers have massive uncertainty to deal with, but typically they are resourced well to do it. Making complexity tools available to everyone helps everyone, becasue everyone is needed to deal with complexity.
If you want to to talk more about this and how we can provide accessible, lower cost training and capacity building to these levels of organizations and community, let me know. I’m constantly developing my practices and tools for doing this. We are doing this through story work and Participatory Narrative Inquiry, through sharing frameworks like Cynefin and the Two Loops, through our own bundle of complexity tools for facilitation and process design, and through facilitation and leadership practices that increase the relationships and participation that is needed to share the burden of living with uncertainty wherever you are at.
If nothing else, the deep divisions and culture wars in the US, and here in Canada too, are providing us with an opportunity to engage in deep practices of listening across difference. It’s harder now that it has ever been Dan Oestrich, who knows a thing or two about this, explains why.
Process artistry also has its place. Arts and well-hosted conversation are at work in Alberta where a group of researchers have initiated the Common Ground project to address stereotypes in the province. It is providing some useful lessons.
Depolarizing conversations is an initiative of my friends and colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum. It arose in 2021 during COVID when social media had divided families and small towns and disagreements had devolved into violence, assaults and the tearing of the social fabric. They have published some really helpful tools and resources on hosting these kinds of conversations. Get them while you can (and support them in continuing their work).
Irreconcilable difference is inevitable in a complex society but not every issue is an irreconcilable difference. Some are just conflicting perspectives. As long as we conflate conflict with war, we will maintain a tendency to want to avoid conflict instead of courting and supporting difference. Conflict transformation has long been the approach used to create a resilient container for what I call conflict preservation. We need this more than ever. And so do the orcas and the salmon.
One of the tools I use for working with polarities where there is a strong both/and situation is polarity mapping. I’ve written about it before but I love the way Kai Cheng Thom weaves it into her Loving Justice framework.
For more tools and training I can recommend Lewis Deep Democracy as one deeper approach to this work. It’s based in Arnold and Amy Mindel’s processwork. In Canada, I can recommend Camille Dumond and her colleagues at the Waterline Co-op. You’ll see my testimonial on their website. It’s accessible and practical training, even for experienced practitioners, and it will take your own practice deeper.