{"id":21053,"date":"2026-09-14T11:26:40","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T18:26:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/?p=21053"},"modified":"2026-09-14T11:26:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T18:26:42","slug":"circular-causality-it-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/circular-causality-it-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Circular causality: it matters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Warning: Dense thoughts on complexity and emergence here.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other day I was discussing a metaphor that a friend raised about “emergence.” Her idea is that a car exhibits a kind of emergence in that it does something as a whole that none of its parts can do. And while that is true, that doesn’t make a car a complex adaptive system. The car’s motion is a knowable and predictable outcome. It is engineered to do that. Mechanics understand the optimal state of motion that the car is designed to operate in and if it stops operating that way, the know how to fix it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Cynefin terms we would describe most of this as Complicated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the things that is different about complexity is a phenomenon called downward causality. We understand that a complex system is something that is greater than the sum of its parts. A forest cannot be found just by looking at a tree. Or a fern or a slug. But taken together and at some level of scale, what emerges is “a forest” and anyone can see that. That’s “upward causality”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In complex adaptive systems, the characteristics that emerge at the level of the whole constrain what is possible for the parts that make it up. That’s what “downward causality” is. So a mature coastal rainforest might produce the constraints that contain the adaptation of a bird like a marbled murrelet, which can only lay an egg on a thick mossy branch. It does that to build nests that are hard for predators to reach. Over time the murrelet becomes completely dependant on those big mossy pillows that only grow in mature forests. It evolves within the constraints of the system that it helps create. This is true of all the species that make up old growth forests. The soil, understory and canopy of relatively stable old growth forests is home to life forms that together create the environment in which they live, and which are in turn affected by that environment. They all co-evolve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That deep dependance makes creatures the murrelet vulnerable to changes in the forest structure. Much more vulnerable than, say the animals that can live at a forest’s edge. A deer won’t find much food inside the heart of a mature forest because very little light gets to the forest floor. Instead, they prefer to live on the edges, and if a forest is cut down, the deer can thrive because it will find more edges. The murrelet will not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is “circular causality.” The higher level characteristics on a system influence the lower level ones, which in turn influence what is possible in the higher level systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Human social systems add another wrinkle. We don’t simply respond to the constraint regimes inside of which we live. We interpret them. We make meaning of what is happening, act on those interpretations, and communicate them to others. Those actions and interpretations then become part of the context that constrains what happens next. That’s central what Dave Snowden means by “anthro-complexity”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

in anthro-complexity, Alicia Juarrero’s work<\/a> has been very influential in defining how this works. She talks about how constraints shape behaviour of the parts that in turn shape the system they are a part of. That’s what underlies the thinking in my own recent work of trying to understand how we work with dialogic containers as particular kinds of spaces defined by specific constraints. These are specific “constraint regimes” as Juarrero would say. They are emergent in that they arise out of a set of constraints that come from the interactions between people, the underlying and persistent structures of the context and the intentional constraints introduced by the designer of a specific process. As containers develop through time, they change – including changes introduced by the facilitator – and those changes create a new constraint regime that change behaviours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So you can see that there is a relationship between the parts – a room, a purpose, a facilitation design, the people in the room, etc. – and an emergent whole – what I am calling “the dialogic container.” When we work with the constraints in a dialogic container, we change the interactions between the parts, including the people. Choosing a process, shortening the time available for a conversation, selecting a particular question, intervening in people’s interactions to explicitly tell them to do one thing and not another, putting people in different rooms, even suggesting how they should talk and listen to each other are all interventions that will change what is possible in a container. And the subsequent behaviours that arise will also shape the container itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Including the behaviours of the facilitator\/host and how that person interprets what is happening, because the power of the host is significant in a hosted container. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this was inspired by a-LLM assisted reading of a new paper that I read last from Tim Gebbie<\/a> called “Reflexivity from Hierarchical Causality<\/a>.” Gebbie is a physicist and applied mathematician who does work on complexity in finance, machine learning and markets. The paper itself is heavily based in statistics, which I do not understand, but the implication is important: interpretation of conditions can change the constraints on what happens next. It participates in emergence, but importantly does not make it predictable. And therefore we have to take the presence of interpretation among the actors in a dialogic container into account. Including the host. Including the pre-existing substrate of structures, including the power that is introduced into the system by them, and including the agency of the people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This quote captures that: \u201clower-level activity produces the market state, while actor interpretation of that state changes the subsequent admissible dynamics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In short, this paper helps to develop a theoretical basis for putting the role of the facilitator in a more realistic position: as a consequential actor in a dialogic container, whose own interpretation of what is going on matters, and whose interventions may carry particular weight because of the role they occupy. This has many implications for hosting and harvesting conversations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we say \u201cwe host emergence,\u201d we need to be careful about what we mean. We aren’t hosting emergence itself. We are hosting interactions and working with constraints that change what is possible. We participate in shaping the conditions from which patterns emerge, but we cannot specify what will emerge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We don\u2019t actually \u201chost emergence.\u201d We host interactions and work with constraints that change what is possible. In human systems, interpretation matters too: how people, including facilitators, make sense of what is happening changes what happens next. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21070,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[28,29,53,18,6,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-of-harvesting","category-art-of-hosting","category-complexity","category-emergence","category-facilitation","category-featured"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piBp1-5tz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/IMG_1400-scaled.jpeg?fit=2560%2C1920&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21053"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21071,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21053\/revisions\/21071"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}