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What’s for us will find us

September 8, 2026 By Being, Complexity, Emergence, Leadership, Uncategorized One Comment

I work with lots of organizations in transition, and always have done. Specifically organizations who leadership is leaving, often representing a transition from a founder to the next generation. These situations are fraught with new and unexpected emotions, states, and situations. The folks that remain find themselves relying on stuff that was invisible before the transition but which is missed now. It is a time when movement forward needs to be slow and deliberate.  

Today I read a lovely and heart-filled post from Jasmine Williams at the Interaction Institute for Social Change describing this moment.  It's a moment of aporia – "being at a loss" – and a moment which demands that a group and individuals be in a different way.  Jasmine writes about the practices she is relying on in these moments including ,

**What's for us will find us
**This is one of those affirmations, mantras, that I keep on a sticky note attached to my computer. It’s a grounding reminder to myself that we will move through this in the way we were supposed to. Whether you believe in fate or some grand design or not, I believe there’s wisdom to be found in returning to a foundational trust in the winding path that leads to the abundant future (however different that future may be from current expectations).

A side benefit of rooting in this reminder is that it’s allowed me to hold on more gently and leave space for the emergent, unexpected, and confronting. How freeing it can be to release the tight hold on an outcome when you trust it will be the right one, reached at the right time, by the right people!

There is an art to this kind of waiting-to-be-found. It requires sensitivity and awareness. It requires quieting and emptying so that one is available to be found. And it also requires slow movement and lots of scanning for possibilities.  If what is needed hasn't revealed itself yet, it's a sign to slow down. It will come. I love that these virtual friends are being so transparent with what they are practicing.

Groups, brains, and the fallacy of digital thinking

September 8, 2026 By Collaboration, Complexity, Emergence, Facilitation, Organization No Comments

Dave Snowden publishes a post today thick with some interesting brain research and some musing about how we might structure organizations along the lines of what we know about how brains work:

What would be different is an organisational design practice that treats cognitive profile distribution as an analogue substrate to maintain, not individual variation to manage toward a norm. It would assess tools, processes, and frameworks for their effect on that substrate — asking, in Clark’s terms, whether each is scaffolding or substituting, rather than measuring only their effect on output. It would recognise that anything enforcing cognitive convergence at scale- process environments, competency frameworks, uniform AI policy- is making a trade on behalf of the collective that the collective has not been asked to consent to, and may not be able to reverse.

Pause Pairs and the Praxis Lab

September 7, 2026 By Art of Hosting, Complexity, Facilitation No Comments

I spent a few hours this morning reading about the Oxford Praxis Lab. I know of Rob Poynton who is the director of the Lab, and whose book, Everything’s An Offer was one of the seminal books I read 15-20 years ago as I was exploring improv and embodied exercises and the teaching and hosting practices that I was developing.

Praxis Lab is an interesting place where a number of the questions I have recently been in seem to have a good home, where they are watered and fed and well cared for.

Each of us are entangled in a series of systems – personal, familial, organisational, professional, societal and ecological – that are themselves interconnected. But the only point of view you have on any of those systems is your own – a point of view which has, built into it, a series of assumptions, values, beliefs, measures and metrics that you take for granted (if you even see them at all).

Grappling with such systems, seeking to understand them (so that you can disturb them in an intelligent way) requires you to look at yourself, in the context of that system. You have to understand how your own history, perspective, personality and so on, affect how you see and how you act.

This is not navel gazing. It is simply to recognise that we are all, always, in some measure, participant-observers. There is nowhere to stand that is neutral and no privileged or ‘correct’ level of analysis. Whichever perspective you adopt, it is always one of many.

Acknowledging that and learning from it means knowing yourself and your own predilections – which is also a valuable outcome in itself.

They are currently beginning a research project called “Pause Pairs” which I’m going to do with my friend Tenneson Woolf.

Following one of Rob’s links brought me to Nick Askew’s video page, which is another place to lose oneself in these questions and experiments. His collection includes a playlist of interviews with Complexity Facilitators as well as some interviews with my friend Ria Baeck.

Labour Day

September 7, 2026 By Democracy, Uncategorized No Comments

Anne Lamott, from an old post on Labour Day (which she spells in the American way):

    I guess it is a plank of the Christian right to be anti-union now. But remember, there are still a lot of us in the Christian left, and we don’t feel that way. When I was growing up, everyone I knew was pro-union, just like everyone used public libraries and everyone in California was proud of the public education system and loved the state’s natural beauty. People would fight and rally and protest and donate to help preserve it.

     Then Ronald Reagan came along, and having seen one redwood, he had seen them all, and it was pretty much a straight line from there to Arnold’s shaking his mighty broom at us as he trash-talked the nurses and teachers.

     I understand why politicians want to see labor as the cause of most of our societal and economic problems. It takes the focus off the banks, the corporations, the military-industrial complex. But public school teachers? I guess they really are sort of greedy and grabby — not to mention rich. Especially those greedy-grabby public school special ed teachers

Happy Labour Day.

The turning

September 2, 2026 By Bowen, Practice, Stories One Comment

Back in 2001 I wrote a song about the end of summer here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island that contains the lines “The winds have turned southeast again/And the Sound is full of cloud.”

Today is that day, right on time. Blustery winds in the channel in front of my house, a steady blow in the tree tops and a sprinkling of rain. What has been a fairly normal summer is turning to a fairly typical autumn. What happens next is anyone guess, as an unusually strong El Niño is predicted to arrive in the next few months.

On the subject of turning, this morning as I was sitting in the spot pictured at the top of this post, I was reading an address by Joan Chichester from 2001 where she addressed the urgent condition of women in the Catholic Church. If you’re in mind for a dose of fierce prophetic voice this morning, this will raise your dander. And it’s twenty-five years old, and structurally speaking, nothing has changed.

It is true that theological debates are raging everywhere; but it is also true that everywhere the Holy Spirit is breaking through – as the Holy Spirit did in Rome in the 60’s. In Asia, Buddhist women are demanding ordination and the right to make the sacred mandalas. In India, women are beginning to do the sacred dances and light the sacred fires. In Judaism, women study Torah and now carry the scrolls and read the scriptures and lead the congregations. Only in the most backward, most legalistic, most primitive of cultures are women made invisible, made useless, made less than fully human, less than fully spiritual. The humanization of the human race is upon us. The only question for the church is whether the humanization of the human race will lead as well to the Christianization of the Christian church. Otherwise, discipleship will die and the integrity of the church with it.

A tip of the hat to the daily email from the Centre for Action and Contemplation.

Turning and churning. In Participatory Narrative Inquiry we talk about “churning” as a way to let stories and meaning and people work each other through different kinds of connections. Today Ron Donaldson has a beautifully rich field note in which he looks at how a single piece of knowledge entered into a field of expertise because of exactly this phenomenon.

A good story doesn’t necessarily give us the answer. It changes what questions we are capable of asking.

Different narrative ecologies (living, evolving, adaptive patterns of knowing distributed through people, practices, stories, environments and relationships) can preserve different parts of a phenomenon for very long periods, even when one community has developed sophisticated explanatory knowledge that never reaches another.

Expertise is often deep knowledge of a domain. But phenomena don’t necessarily respect our domains…

Perhaps that is one of the things we mean by expertise. Not knowing everything within a domain but knowing when the answer might live somewhere outside the domain.

“The knowledge wasn’t lost. The connection was lost.”