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Solving for uncertainty

October 26, 2026 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Complexity, Containers, Conversation, Design, Emergence, Facilitation No Comments

A really good post from Chris Mowles that talks about how we seek to outsource our discomfort with uncertainty to an algorithm or a method or a process.  

Why is it so scary that unexpected things might happen when we get together to try and achieve something, unless we have things all planned out? Where is the room for the spontaneous, the novel and the eccentric?

Two contrasting recent events have made me think about the technologies that we apply to meeting together, that aspire to create what my late colleague Doug Griffin used to refer to as the doubling of process: feeling that we need a process in order to have a process. The aim is often to make meetings more ‘effective and efficient’, to make maximum use of our precious time together, but perhaps also to render them friction-free and more predictable. For me this is the same kind of instrumentalised thinking that informs AI.

I agree with him wholeheartedly. This is an important challenge to practitioners who find themselves designing interventions. I don't think we need people who are better at their "tools."  I think there are other capacities and capabilities practitioners need to develop as they host interventions and work with change.  How about you?  What do you think?

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