No, not a a post about facilitation tactics, just some notes on questions in different contexts: business, football and life hacks. Like these job interview questions from readers of The Economist. Some of these are truly anodyne, but some are interesting. And it gives you some insight into what an elite level job interview looks like (washing dishes at the CEO’s cabin?). I’m slightly disappointed there weren’t 42 questions. I’ve gifted you the link. Read it to find out why.
World Cup qualification all but wrapped up yesterday for most of the remaining spots in the 2026 Men’s World Cup. There was drama all around but perhaps the most incredible match of the night happened in Edinburgh where Scotland qualified for the first time since 1974 in a match for the ages. In our region, North and Central America and the Caribbean, there was late drama as Curaçao qualified for their first World Cup after Jamaica hit the woodwork 3 times and was denied a 95th minute from a VAR review. With 155,000 people, If Curacao was a city in Metropolitan Vancouver, it would be the fifth or sixth biggest municipality in our region. They are the smallest country ever to qualify for a World Cup, in a year in which 47 other countries will also take part. I hope they get to play Cabo Verde for some kind of small island trophy.
Canada, for the record, played their last game of 2025 and broke a three game goalless streak with a sometimes-feisty, sometimes-anemic performance agains Venezuela. Becasue we qualify by being co-hosts, we have had a dearth of competitive fixtures since a disappointing quarter final loss in the Gold Cup in the summer, where we also drew with Curaçao. Impressive friendlies against Wales and Romania in September failed to build momentum. Last night’s win was good, but with only two windows in March and June, we have only 4 warm up matches to prepare for the World Cup.
I like soulcruzer. I found him on Mastodon, and his approach to life is to use his brain and his sense of ritual and magic to hack reality. Here are a few of his Chaos Magik practices. Have a read. Some of these are really fun little games and rituals you can play using the tools of obliquity and complex cognition.
Yesterday Rowen Simonsen and I filmed a little conversation about AI in facilitation practice and perhaps inspired a bit by soulcruzer’s reality hacking, I suggested that AI, specifically LLMs can be a fabulous obliquity engine to help individuals and groups crack their pattern entrainment, much the way we can use art, poetry and music to create surprising associations in our mind. Use LLMs to stimulate your brain’s own meaning-making capabilities. Perhaps we can use LLMs as a way to introduce obliquity into deliberations (give me ten questions about this subject that might be asked by a river watching us work). This is the kind of thing that LLM AI might be best for in the world of sense-making and dialogue: generating nonsense that stimulates human brains to make unlikely connections. We could also use card decks, I Ching divination, coin flips and the like to introduce randomness that forces brains to get to work. Like all “oracles” though, if you believe that the tool has an answer informed by some kind of intelligence, you are more culpable for hallucinations that your LLM partner. Oracles are best used to force your own eyes to see what is really going on with you. The interview is part of a series that are being used for Beehive Productions’ current course on Hosting at the Edge of our Humanity.
I cant’t wait to see this film. Basketball is an essential part of the culture of the Indigenous northwest coast of British Columbia. Along with the Tribal Journeys events it is one of the most significant modern day gatherings of coastal tribal peoples and has been responsible in no small way for the resurgence in power and connection among these Nations. This documentary, Saints and Warriors, looks to be amazing. It tells the story of what basketball means to these communities. It is set against the backdrop of the Haida Aboriginal Title struggle becasue everything is political.
You cannot get to a creative, innovative, incredible society without investing in education. You just can’t. You can’t cut funding and hope for better outcomes. Don’t let the ideologues gas light this conversation.
The opposite can also be true, I guess: it is possible to overfund something to death, especially if by doing so you are trying to be as extractive as possible. For example, let too many countries into the World Cup of Football and you risk diluting the competition, putting players at risk and sending them game into boring cycle of circus acts for big bucks. The 2026 World Cup, partially hosted here in Vancouver, might be fun to be a part of but, according to Neil Fredrick Jensen, this is probably the beginning of the end for the men’s game at the highest level. Big changes need to be made to the men’s game at the elite level.
Lots to dig in here with this interview of Nora Bateson who discusses her father’s work and legacy, and her own work and legacy of working with Warm Data in the service of complex systems and the needs of our planet.
And speaking of our planet, which we should be, constantly, here is a list of five things that aren’t going to happen anytime soon including going to Mars.
We all won.
It was amazing to watch the Vancouver Rise win the NSL Playoff Championship last night and be crowned the first ever champions of professional women’s soccer in Canada. The Cup Final was an incredible occasion. AFC Toronto, the league champions, came into the match as favourites, having relatively cruised their way through the semi final against Montreal and with a winning record over Vancouver. The Rise have had an up and down season, but finished third in a tight field and made the semi finals with a couple of weeks to spare. They worked hard to beat Ottawa, winning 2-1 in the first leg of the semi final before going to Ottawa and needing penalties to settle the match. Yesterday’s match in Toronto was an occasion in so many ways. A lightning delay around 38th minute stopped play for a half an hour. Toronto dominated the first half and a goal from their 17 year old talisman Kaylee Hunter set them up with a 1-0 scoreline that looked like it would hold. But Vancouver found another gear, tightened up their defence and got a flukey goal to level the match before their own talisman, Holly Ward scored a beauty to take the lead 2-1. Vancouver needed to hold on for another 25 minutes though, which they did and toppled Toronto for the win.
There is so much that is amazing about this event, not the least of which is that there were 4 former TSS Rovers players involved in the match. For Toronto, Emma Regan and Ashley Cathro started and Kae Hansen was an unused sub. These players appeared for our club in 2018 when we had a team in the Women’s Premier Soccer League. For the Rise our former supporters’ player of the year Kirstin Tynan, who was our keeper and captain in 2023 and 2024, was the back up keeper behind goaltender of the year and Finals MVP Morgan McAslan. That’s Kirstin pictured above, losing her mind after the match!
Having watched these players develop, especially in the nearly invisible world of lower level women’s football, it was incredibly moving to see them on this stage, afforded this opportunity and doing it brilliantly. This whole season has been deeply meaningful for thousands of people and especially the women who played the game for so long at the highest levels without ever getting a chance to play professionally at home. You saw it in Amy Walsh’s sign off from the broadcast yesterday. She was one of Canada’s bad asses in her day, and has been a tireless champion of this league. You see what it means to her.
And on the other side of the country, our 2025 player of the year, Sofia Faremo (and 2025 TSS Rovers player Elyse Beaudry) won their Conference title for Simon Fraser University, so it was a day of championships for women’s soccer involving Rovers.
Support people to dream, learn, grow and build something and they will exceed expectations.
When you are looking for leadership, you look to leaders. And anyone who was looking to Canada for leadership on combatting climate change was never looking in the right places. Canada has been an embarrassment on the international stage since the days of Stephen Harper and before and we have missed every single target, KPI, milestone and commitment we have made because we are not serious about addressing climate change. We refused to make a choice to become a world leader in the development and deployment of renewable energy even though we have the material and intellectual resources to have done so. At the beginning of this century we had an OBVIOUS opportunity to completely reinvent our economy and energy system. Instead we pandered to a handful of oil and gas companies who held federal and provincial governments hostage to their rapacious need for profit at the expense of, well, the entire planet’s liveable future.
We faced a choice and we made it, and now the rest of the world is trying to ignore us and our neighbour as we just give up on trying to make a contribution to this cause and instead lay down and create the conditions for death merchants to acquire profits in these waning days.
So don;t look to us. Look to the people that are actually doing something about it. I have some faith – what else is there to have – that a behemoth like China has the scale and capacity to make some kind of dent in the catastrophic numbers the world is facing. And along with countries in the global south who are now buying the affordable renewable infrastructure that China is manufacturing at scale, there might be a tipping point for the world that will eventually reach North America, even as we erect walls around our temple of oil and gas.
Who knows? Perhaps that might be enough to get the world into the right lane on this journey. That would be great. But Canada will be a backwater in this new world, contributing a few minerals here and there if provinces can even be bothered to talk to First Nations and avoid the inevitable legal morass that will come when they pursue projects at the expense of the laws of the land. We have probably lost the ability to compete for any sector of the generation of the planet’s next form of energy dependance. The sycophantic governments in Alberta and Ottawa and elsewhere bleat on about fossil fuel projects as if they are the adults in the room, while the rest of the world tries to pry itself away from the poisons that will end us.
I’m encouraged by Bill McKibben’s observation about what’s happening at scale on this issue. And then I look at the current policies of our governments and just shake my head at their naiveté. Watching people year after year, government after government, burn their own house down to sell matches to the to arsonists is frustrating and infuriating. But I can only hope that the market they hold so sacred will finally turn their heads to the opportunities that have been lost and help them realize that they bet on a losing horse and all that is left to do now is cut our losses and get out before we are dragged into oblivion.
It’s November now, the snow is finally calling the mountains. The salmon are back on Bowen. And the Northern Super League is drawing its inaugural year of professional Canadian women’s soccer to a close. Our local team, the Vancouver Rise today secured a spot in the playoff final with a penalty shootout win after the two leg semi-final against Ottawa Rapid went to extra time. Holly Ward, a bright young forward who has seemed snakebitten for much of the season scored the equalizer in the 84th minute and penalities decided it.
I’m pleased for our former Rovers supporters’ player of the year, Kirstin Tynen, who is the backup keeper for the Rise. She’s only played once this year, but got a point in a wild 3-3 draw. On the losing side, Desiree Scott, a Canadian national team LEGEND played her last game today and former Rover Stella Downing sees her scintillating rookie season come to an end.
Toronto and Montreal are battling it out tomorrow for the second spot in the final. Whatever happens, a former TSS Rover will lift the cup next weekend. Watching these women finally get their chance to play pro at home is what this league is all about.