Proin pulvinar nulla id nunc hendrerit feugiat. Proin porta accumsan est, eget consequat mi pulvinar vel. Aenean luctus ac lorem ac varius. Ut a urna euismod, dictum eros ac, accumsan turpis. Donec placerat, elit vel vulputate rutrum, lacus lorem ultricies dolor, non hendrerit neque lorem a lorem.
For a couple of years now I have been teaching myself how to SUP (stand up paddle board). It’s a pretty simple process. But like all simple things there is a depth to practice and technique that helps you get better and better. And the changing context of the ocean and the winds and weather means there is never a way to “win” at it.
The thing about SUP is that the conditions change radically all the time. One day is flat calm and the water is like glass. Another day – like today – it’s windy and the chop is sloppy and the currents are really strong. Almost every time out is a new challenge with new little victories and little defeats.
Mastery is like that. It’s about learning a technique and then applying it as the context shifts. It’s about getting good at something and then facing a humbling experience that teaches you something about yourself.
Today it was learning about the power of the currents whipping around Dorman Point. Lately it’s been about trying to offer quality process when there is fear and ego and expertise at play.
Mastery comes from a myriad of little learnings gathered from a myriad if different context. There is no flash of insight that makes you a master and there is no way you can ever feel you have arrived. That we are all human and always falling short of our ideal for ourselves and others is the great secret that helps us to connect, if we can see it. If we instead hold ourselves so far above or below this line of vulnerability that we can’t see our small tender selves in others then the benefit of our little learnings are lost, mere spindrift in the current of our learning lives.
I think it was my friend Toke Møller who said “never trust a sword teacher without scars.” Truly.
A post I made to the OSLIST today…
I seek simplicity in trying to describe where and how Open Space does it’s magic.
One of the ways I have had excellent success over the years in describing this work is derived from David Snowden’s work on the Cynefin framework.
The short story is this:
We are faced all the time with problems that are basically knowable, and problems that aren’t. Knowable problems mean that with the right knowledge and expertise, they can be fixed. A technical team can come together and analyse the causes, work with what’s available and craft a solution. Then they can get an implementation plan in place and go ahead and do it. These kinds of problems have a start line and a finish line. When you are done, you are done. Building a bridge is one of those kinds of problems. You build it and there is no tolerance for failure. It needs to be failsafe.
Open Space doesn’t work well for those kinds of problems because the solution is basically already known, or at least knowable.
Then there are problems for which no know solution exists, and even if you did get a solution, you can’t really “solve” the problem because the problem is due to a myriad of causes and is itself emergent. For example, racism. Look around and you will find very few people that identify themselves as racists, but look at the stats for Canadian society for example and you see that non-white people are trailing in every indicator of societal success. Essentially you are seeing the results of a racist society but no racists anywhere. This is an emergent problem. Racism itself is a self-organizing phenomenon, notwithstanding the few people that actively engineer racist environments. Such a problem didn’t really start anywhere and it can’t really end either. What is needed is a way of addressing it, moving the system away from the negative indicators and towards something else.
In other words, this is a complex problem.
The way to solve complex problems is to create many “strange attractors” around which the system can organize itself differently. Open Space nis the best method I know of for creating such strange attractors, as they are born from the passion and responsibility of those that want to create change, and they are amplified by people coming together to work on these things.
It’s “post and host” rather than “command and control.”
And because you can’t be sure if things are going to work out, you have to adopt a particular mindset to your initiative: one that is “safe to fail.” In other words, if it doesn’t work, you stop doing it. If it does work, you do more of it. And all the way along you build in learning, so that the system can see how change is made and be drawn towards those initiatives that are currently making a difference. Certainly this kind of problem solving is not useful for building a bridge, as you cannot afford a failure there. But for problems with no known solutions, it is brilliant.
Harrison has spent decades outlining this simplicity in even less words than I have now and his writing and thinking is, and continues to be far ahead of it’s time and maybe a little under appreciated because it is delivered in simple terms like “don’t work so hard.” But ultimately this is the best and most important advice for working in complex systems.
Open Space. Do it. Learn. Do it again. Don’t work so hard.
More than that really starts to build in the delusion that people can possibly know what to do. From that place solutions will be deluded. That they may work is pure luck. Open Space offers us a disciplined approach to addressing complexity in an ongoing way. Don’t be fooled by its simplicity.
Duis dui lorem, lobortis sit amet lectus ac, luctus molestie odio. Phasellus sodales nunc in nunc vestibulum, convallis semper ipsum blandit. Quisque at nunc quis arcu aliquam pretium at vel quam. Morbi ornare molestie pretium.
Donec bibendum arcu et nunc pulvinar venenatis. Morbi hendrerit volutpat orci, in dignissim nulla rutrum eget. Vivamus tempor venenatis est eu condimentum. Ut non arcu mauris. Quisque sagittis suscipit eros, vel consectetur ligula feugiat. Etiam ultrices gravida lacus, a facilisis dui varius ut. Nunc gravida semper eros sed accumsan. Sed accumsan pulvinar mi, a vulputate felis pulvinar sit amet. Ut et libero massa. Fusce vulputate nec ante eget ornare.
Cras non tincidunt est. Pellentesque consequat faucibus est et fringilla. Praesent dapibus mauris sed dolor rutrum, at lobortis tortor sollicitudin. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Pellentesque et suscipit augue, non venenatis sapien.