Riding waves that have come up from the deep oceans of theory

The famous wave at Nazare, Portugal on a light day. The wave is generated from the complex motion of water travelling up a very deep underwater canyon nearly to shore where it rises and meets strong currents coming in many directions. It produces some of the biggest waves in the world. Not easy to surf.

It’s not my title. It’s the title of a book/treatise by Mark Downham, who publishes very long treatises on issues of philosophy, organization, and complexity. This one looks at hosting containers as seen against ideas embedded in Classical Chinese philosophy and it’s going to occupy a big piece of my attention over the next little while.

This has been a spring of considering some of the deeper philosophical issues that meet in the intersection of complexity, hosting, and leadership. I’ve been beavering away a digesting a number of very, very long posts principally by Downham and Snowden in order to clarify my own thinking and practice as a process host, and a teacher of participatory process. It has been a case of getting very clear about the why and where the practice of hosting and holding containers in complexity lies, what is implied by those words and concepts, and why the deep inquiry into the theory brought by these thinkers this spring helps to challenge and sharpen my practice, and help us grow as a field.

It’s not easy. The texts I’ve been reading and engaging with have my mind spinning in several ways and I have been writing bits and pieces here and there to think out loud about them. For me a big benefit of this period of reflection has been to continue to refine the material we are teaching in Complexity Inside and Out, which is a body of work that represents Caitlin’s and my developing practice on working with complexity as and where we find it in our work and lives. That work has been an extension of the work we teach in the Art of Hosting workshops we run. It goes much deeper into practices of working with complexity and introduces people to the work of Snowden, Kurtz, and Eoyang as well as our own work. It is intended to introduce practitioners to complexity tools for working with change in the contexts in which they find themselves, including how to support a personal capacity to host and lead well in complex situations. It grew out of work that we did ten years ago and more when we offered Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics with Tim Merry and Tuesday Rivera, in which each of us extended our own inquiries that started in the Art of Hosting community and took us out to other bodies of work and practice to look at change, complexity, power and personal practice.

So my restless mind and spirit of curiosity has been aroused and shaken and challenged by this rather mammoth collection of works that has appeared this spring. For background I’m going to gather the texts here.

First Downham. These are dense, unexpected texts that draw together strands from fields that are familiar to me and those that are completely outside of my experience. I told Mark he would be a great player of the Glass Bead Game:

• The Architecture of Held Space: The mountain that holds — and the host who learns to hold like one. Here Downham uses many of my writings on the Art of Hosting to discuss the idea of container, so it is getting most of my attention at the moment.
• The Geometry of the Vanishing Container: Breath and Form, Faerie and Field: Pneumatology, Gestalt, and the Liminal Topology of Emergence in the Work of Harrison Owen and Patricia Shaw. which looks at issues of hosting and container work and is one of the few pieces I’ve ever read that sees Harrison Owen’s deep commitment to liturgy in its many forms and guises.
• Cynefin Dynamics and the Choreography of Organizational Change. A commentary on my favourite paper on Cynefin written by Cynthia Kurtz and Dave Snowden in the early days

Snowden’s posts:

• Stacy Unresolved
• Leadership in the Estuary
• The whole series on estuarine thinking, beginning with part one
• Trialectics, or thinking in threes. Alos the start of a series which is inspiring me to think through some ways of talking about containers and de-binarizing some of the dualities we talk about in the art of hosting.
• Foreclosing the territory. A three part series on theories of change that is deeply important in describing the implications of anthro-complexity in change work

None of this is easy reading and these texts have been consuming my thinking over the past few months. I think they are important to my practice, and to the practice of the Art of Hosting community for these reasons, amongst others:

• They offer important claims about epistemic justice, power and subsequent practices of sense-making that help me thinking about positionally of the host, what is visible and what is invisible.
• They offer important reflections on what it means to “design” processes and what it means to host them.
• The offer oblique insights on the notion of theory and practice of working with dialogic containers, especially in complex spaces.
• They challenge the universality of methods, approaches, and tools and invite a more rigorous and context-focused consideration of what to do and how one might do it.
• They surprise me constantly and have offered illumination to some blind spots in my own understanding, generated some aha’s in my own practice, inspired some sharpness in my own thinking, and placed me in a position where I can say more clearly what it is that I do and why that matters.
• They invite us to a reflection on what has built up over time as “ways of doing things” that we take for granted, and invite us back to a renewed view of our works, its sources and the places that it might grow and evolve.

My blog is, as Mark Downham named it, is a field book of notes on practice and theory that I have assembled over the past 20 years. Taken in its totality it represents a journey of a practitioner formed in and adjacent to meaningful communities of practice, bodies of work, teachers and teachings. It is and always will be a place of half-formed thoughts and questions, offered to others as a way to connect and grow a field of practice that honours voice, agency, and community in the pursuit of a better world. It is, as Mark Woods named his blog back in the 1990s using a quote from Stendahl, “the fitful tracing of a portal.” And so I will continue musing out loud here and hope others will join the inquiry.

This inquiry is not everyone’s cup of tea. It is a theory-heavy string, and that theory is positioned in a narrow field of inquiry. It challenges and at times does not pull punches. These blog posts that Downham and Snowden have produced this spring are the deepest and most sophisticated responses to the Art of Hosting body of work I have ever seen in the 20+ plus years I have been around the community. They deserve a serious response, which I have promised to both people. This response though will come in a messy way, informed by practice, thinking, new ideas and conversation. I welcome partners in this. It’s a lot of work but I think this is a serious and important inquiry for those of us who identify, and are identified, as stewards of this work and who are willing to jump in. Just getting the questions right is going to be the first step!