Maybe returning everything to the blog.
I want to invite you into a story about TSS Rovers FC, a little soccer club I am involved in that is doing amazing things. We are about to become the first semi-pro soccer club in Canada to have a significant amount of supporter ownership. Our initial share offering closes on March 9, and you buy into to this club now here: https://www.frontfundr.com/tssrovers. But read on to find out why i think this matters.
On the morning of August 6th, 2021 I sat glued to my TV screen absolutely riveted by the possibility of Canada winning a gold medal in women’s soccer at the Tokyo Olympics. After a tournament in which the team had dug deep against better teams and bitter rivals, they stood poised to capture a gold against Sweden. Nothing was certain as the match went to penalties, and as a long time supporter of Canadian soccer I found myself consumed only with hope, pleading with the soccer deities that our surse would be lifted.
And then when Julia Grosso scored the winning penalty, she ran into the arms of Jordyn Huitema and I burst into tears of relief, joy, pride, and astonishment.
On May 25, 2018 these same two women had appeared in a match between TSS Rovers and the Whitecaps women’s academy. Both women were on our roster, but Huitema had been loaned back to the Whitecaps for the match, as Bev Preistman was warming up her side for a U20 National Team match. The football was magnificent, and despite Rovers dropping a 3-2 result, the small groups of us there knew we were watching something special.
This country has been begging for a moment like what we witnessed on August 6, or indeed what we have witnessed this year as the Men’s National Team has found itself at the top of the table half way through the final round of CONCACAF qualification for the 2026 World Cup., Unless you were the parent of a player or one of the few involved in the development of talent in this country, all we had been able to do was stand by and watch, cheering from the sidelines, supporting where we could.
But the call has gone out to support Canadian soccer as we take the next step into the international game. Whether it is the call of the women for a professional league in this country, or the glaring deficit of BC-born and developed players on our men’s national team, the time is now to up our game.
When Colin Elmes, Brendan Quarry and Will Cromack had the idea to create TSS Rovers as a USL League 2 and later a WPSL franchise back in 2016, it was a thought based on a dream and a desire to meet this challenge with whatever tools they had. The idea quickly became a reality and it caught my imagination and that of a few local soccer supporters in the Vancouver area, who had long dreamed of investing in something tangible, of meaningfully supporting a team that was committed to do everything it could to build the Canadian game. Determined to play their games at iconic Swangard Stadium, the home of so many National team and Vancouver Whitecaps memories, the dream caught fire. I was astonished at the audacity of what TSS Rovers was doing, and I just had to be a part of it.
It was clear from the beginning they knew that if nothing else, this Dream would only succeed if supporters also saw the need and were given a way to make it happen.
On the basis of this simple and open invitation, The Swanguardians were formed, from a group of die-hard Canadian soccer supporters who could finally taste meaningful involvement in this effort. From the very first match in 2017, when the players assembled the supporters’ section themselves, the club has doubled down on what it means to offer supporters meaningful partnerships in the effort. They included the voices of supporters in the work of the club. Some of us were appointed to the TSS Rovers Advisory Board and in 2019 we began to imagine what it would be like to create a meaningful supporter stake in the Rovers Dream.
After three years of work, imagination, hard yards, and due diligence, we finally arrived at the idea of creating a Supporters Trust to seek an ownership stake in the club. The owners saw the opportunity to offer all supporters a chance to put their money where their mouth is and they made 49% of the ownership of the club available. Through much of 2021, the club and the nascent Trust worked hard to make this next dream a reality.
And we did it. On December 9 I purchased 4 shares in Rovers Football Club Ltd, and our Dream became a reality. Our initial offering runs until March 9 and you can be an owner too.
We have now made history as the first club in Canada to have actual equity ownership offered to supporters. We are one of a handful of clubs in North America that have catalyzed their communities into getting behind the dream of developing local players and moving them into the professional and national team ranks. There is no more tangible way to make a difference for Canadian soccer than investing in it and being a part of directing it, and this is the way to do it.
Until now, supporters of Canadian soccer could only stand by and watch as a small group of Canadian players, coaches, technical staff and investors tried to build the success that our national program has currently found. The establishment of the CPL has given a boost to the men’s game and the women are now loudly and rightly calling for a league of their own.
With the establishment of League1 BC, we now have a semi-professional environment in BC and a place for the Rovers Dream to continue for both women and men. And with the sale of ownership equity in TSS Rovers, the door is wide open for every person who said “we need to do more” to get on board, build on our success and deepen the pathways for players to take our country to the next level.
It is one thing to watch from the sidelines and cheer on our players, and another thing entirely to be tangibly invested in success for the future.
Whether it is that powerful blast of emotions I felt when Grosso and Huitema won their medals, the surge of pride I experience watching Jordan Haynes and Matteo Polisi lift the CPL Championship Shield, or the satisfaction of watching Joel Waterman winning a Voyageurs Cup and playing against the top teams in CONCACAF, that pride is born from the fact that over the past four years, I watched and sang for all of those players in the red and black of TSS Rovers. They answered the call and their success is just the beginning. And we who are connected to them, are riding the energy of their success.
We used to joke that “we don’t know what we are doing” But that has changed. We know exactly what we are doing. We are behind the calls of our national team players to get involved. We are meeting the hunger that supporters have to own a stake in the future. We are serious about the work now, and we couldn’t be more proud to be breaking the ground.
Join us now and be a part of history. There is space on this train for everyone to participate in what we are doing at TSS Rovers. And when we open our inaugural League1 BC season at Swanguard in May, we will do so in front of hundreds of people who are not just ticket buyers, or fans of the game or supporters of the club, but real owners who have purchased a stake in the future of Canadian soccer.
See you there.
Our Complexity Inside and Out course is now in full swing and after 3 of 7 sessions we have covered some of the basics that make up our understanding of complexity theory and some of the core practices to affect change in complex systems, both inner and outer.
One of those strategies of course is through shifting constraints. To work with self-organization and emergence in a system, finding the constraints that enable behaviour and creating different ones can have the effect of shifting the behaviour. Not always of course – we have to pay attention and monitor what we are doing – but these are the promising places to get a start.
Based on work from Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang, the constraints I work with are these, listed in order of ease to work with:
THe Connecting constraints of
- Connections between agents in a system
- Exchanges that flow across those connections
And the containing constraints of
- Attractors around which behaviours or actions coalesce
- Boundaries that define the context for actions
There are two other constraints which come to us from Snowden’s field of anthro-complexity and they are Identity and Dark constraints, both of which are a sort of subclass of the above. Identities create or maintain coherent connections or containers and the Dark constraints are simply the nones we don’t know about and which only reveal themselves in real time.
It’s not always easy to spot these in the wild as you are learning about them, but this article in The Conversation is a good example of thinking about managing complex behaviour. Every October in Ontario there is a traditional homecoming week at universities in which former students return and current students party. The flocking behaviour of students in these times creates emergent behaviours at the grouplevel that are not immediately present at the individual level, and the authors provide a handy link to one research paper that explains this.
The response to behaviour like this is typically banning certain kinds of activities, which, in Cynefin terms, is a misapplication of governing constraints aimed at control to self-organizing behaviour. What is needed instead are constraints that enable the emergence of different behaviours. It is hard to spot these because with events such as the ones described in the article, the tendency is to want to squash the problem.
But a harm reduction approach first begins by identifying the fact that there will always be these behaviours and always be these problems, and the way to address them is to create adjacent possibles (a Stuart Kauffman term) which invites the system to an alternative state. Such possibles cannot be too far away from the current state, but they must not be too close to the current state to be rendered ineffective. For example, proposing that students only consume alcohol in sanctioned places with oversight from police and campus security is likely to fail. Few students will love to party in such a heavily surveilled way. On the other hand, allowing students to party anywhere and then providing a ntip line for any issues that might come up is a weak response that is unlikely to affect the behaviour.
So the authors propose an oblique strategy, which is an excellent approach to complex problems. First, the say that students need to be empowered to co-create harm reduction approaches to these issues to create safety in a public health and gender-violence context. It is unlikely that on their own students will come to a meeting to co-create these, or if they do, their authority to enact the approaches may be compromised by their perceived identity of “goody two-shoes.” So instead the authors propose a new attractor in the field, a for credit course that is about generating harm reduction approaches but which alos teaches skills needed to address and manage public health issues:
Conversations are a good start, but a systemic approach that integrates understanding of these events and taking action through curriculum is essential.
One of these strategies could be creating a university credit based multidisciplinary course that is aimed at proposing solutions for how students could gather and celebrate in a safe — including COVID-19 safe — manner that reflects their own, and community values.
The students would learn (among many things) how to address diffusion of responsibility and gender-based violence. It would provide them with opportunities to learn about city bylaws, police costs and potential challenges to the health care system of large student gatherings.
The instructors could be an advisory team of mentors including members from the city, police, first responders and university experts. This initiative would challenge students to research the problem and be an active part of the solution.
Co-creating solutions with students by providing them with opportunities to lead with support and guidance will empower them to take ownership and responsibility when it comes to implementing positive change. If they lead the new way forward, students will come and be together in a way that meets their needs.
Backed with the power of the university to sanction this approach, makes this new attractor for action stronger. REQUIRING students to participate in this exercise would be too rigid a boundary, but for students that are charged with under age driking violations for example, they may be required to participate in these discussions in a restorative process designed to using their lived experience and also having them make amends.
Working with constraints gives us lots of ideas about how to shift things. The key is implementing what you can and watching for change. As for this example, what a great case study. I will see if I can follow up with Craig and Kolomitro about what happens with their ideas.
Just perusing through some of the stories of the Desert Fathers and found this little anecdote.
“Abba Joseph asked Abba Pastor, ‘Tell me how I can become a monk.’ The elder replied, ‘If you want to have rest here in this life and also in the next, in every conflict with another say: “Who am I?” and so judge no one.’”
That’s probably good advice before I go on Twitter.
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.