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The most Canadian morning possible

October 8, 2026 By Uncategorized No Comments

Crossing Otter Creek near Smiths Falls, Ontario on the VIA 643.

I’m on the VIA train from Ottawa to Toronto. We’ve just passed through Smiths Falls, streaking past paper white birch trees, golden fields, blazing orange maple trees, marsh reeds turned red, scarlet sumac all under a clear blue sky.

I’m listening to The Great Lakes Suite by Rheostatics, which features poetry read by Ann Carson, who today was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I’ll meet my brother in Toronto and spend the next week with family in southern Ontario celebrating Thanksgiving together.

This just might be the most Canadian moment possible.

The idea of a complexity entrepreneur

October 7, 2026 By Art of Hosting, Complexity 5 Comments

Gabriele Bammer and Jean Boulton identify a role and a set of capacities needed for research teams, and they call that role a “complexity entrepreneur.”

This style of operating in a complex world requires engendering a milieu in which people regain confidence in working with intuition, making sense of subjective and evolving information, and are able to hone the skills of judgement. Traditional methods of mapping and modelling have their place in surfacing less visible systemic patterns in relatively stable situations, but such methods can also mask the qualitative, contextual and emerging aspects central to facilitating a deeper understanding of the dynamics of change, stuckness and opportunity. Complexity entrepreneurs need to go beyond the analytical and gain experience in handling the ambiguous, the paradoxical and the co-evolving nature of context and action.

To brand these skills as entrepreneurial puts them in a positive light. It is hard not to feel at odds in a world seeking predominantly hard evidence and clear evaluation of alternatives to support conclusions and action strategies. And even with those intent on ‘embracing complexity’ there often lurks the hope that methods can be identified that will reduce that complexity sufficiently so that objective clarity is found. This can lead to a search for methods at the expense of enhancing and valuing the cognitive and emotional qualities needed to apprehend the terrain, judge what can be done and take action.

I’m sure some will seize on the brand title without seizing on the actual role, but I think there is some decent descriptions in this article that can help teams of researchers and others see the role of those who are skilled nd experienced at working with complexity. I especially like their description of the shadowy forces that drive our search for methods. We are teaching this week a cohort of labour educators in the Art of Hosting and we have a two day workshop that deliberately dives below methods. Even though we are sharing and using methods to ground the learning, the focus of the workshop is on the role of hosts as people who work with constraints to work with emergence.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this!

Bandcamp Friday 

October 2, 2026 By Music 2 Comments

It’s Bandcamp Friday, the first Friday of every month, where 100% of sales on Bandcamp go to the artist. Today I pre-ordered the new album from Martyn Joseph (The Bruce Cockburn of Wales) “Revolved and Evolved” and picked up the new release from Bowen Island’s own Le Ren “Don’t Be Funny Without Me.” which is getting some good press and good play here in Canada.  It’s a really good album and the quality of production is OUTSTANDING.  

Go buy something and make a musician happy that you supported them.

Some good links

October 2, 2026 By Complexity, Emergence, Leadership, Organization 2 Comments

Some good links on complexity

Roope Kaaronen’s: The Ecology of Design. A nice introduction to path dependancy, affordances and ecological psychology.

Alicia Juarrero being interviewed by Jim Hutt on her book Context Changes Everything and on how constraints create possibility landscape and constraint regimes.

The Vampire Problem is a thought experiment that demonstrates why it is so hard to act in uncertainty. Maria Popova does her usual brilliant job of unpacking it.

Martina Dimopoulou takes over then Cynefin blog with a fabulous post on salience and how we notice the world and the weak signals within it.

Brian Ponch Rivera takes a deep dive into John Boyd’s development of his thinking behind the OODA loop. It’s an interesting exposition of how a curious learner assembles a framework over time and worth a read for that reason, even if you know nothing about OODA.

Other good things to read and listen to.

The elephant in the room is a subject that never gets old. Cheyenne Coxon talks about how and why to make friends with the pachyderm: “The elephant affects everyone in the room, even if they’re not directly involved in the situation. After a certain point it all becomes so distracting and ridiculous to pretend and navigate around it that something has to give. There’s no real telling on the timeline there, but it becomes a volatile situation that ramps up everyone’s anxiety as they wait for an impending fallout. It actually takes a lot of energy to pretend something is fine when it’s not, and the dissonance it creates in our bodies is an insidious source of stress and poor health for people and organizations.”

Part Two continues the exploration with some reflections on living with the elephant, finding friends and when it’s time to leave the elephant enclosure.

Weak signals from the “breathing grounds.” That term is used by Ramon Kataquapit to describe the precious James Bay Lowlands, a bleak region of estuary and peat lands that ring the southern end of James Bay. It’s Ramon’s backyard and what he says as a youth leader about the future of these lowlands is a weak signal about the dangers of our current federal government’s major projects initiative.

A segment on CBC’s The Current about a new reality show on Netflix based on the Stanford Prison Experiment. I won’t be watching the show. But the segment today had an interview with psychology researcher Jay Van Bevel in which he shares some interesting insights that are relèvent to my triangle tool for understanding dialogic containers. Leadership matters, not just authority or design.

Noticing the smallest differences

September 30, 2026 By Being, Bowen No Comments

It is a quiet morning here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island. The equinox has come and gone and the mornings are darker and cooler. We have stopped changing the clocks in this part of the world, so the mornings will only ever grow darker by the clock until the solstice.  I'll be walking in pitch black in a month or so. 

My partner is the walking champion of our household, taking her morning and afternoon walks everyday as a non-optional part of her morning. She is the one that walks around in every weather.

Our walks are different. Hers takes her through the forest and meadows of the Terminal Creek valley and mine skirts the north side of Mannion Bay along David Road, crosses the point-with-no-name through the Miller's Landing neighbourhood and visits the tiny cove of Sunrise Beach at Miller's Landing.  

I always walk with a head full of music and thoughts, but my eyes and ears are wide open and in that way, walking is less the action and more the practice of noticing. Every morning I am rewarded with a moment of novelty. Today it was the rare sound of a Western Tanager calling from a Big-Leaf Maple. It was no doubt on its migration south, but it was making a call I had never heard before. Merlin very clearly confirmed it.  At the beach, I drained and stowed my kayak on the driftwood kayak rack made by one of our neighbours. It had somehow turned upward and caught a few centimetres of yesterday's rain in the cockpit. 

I sat in the cool outflow wind for a moment watching a single seal sleeping on a rock that had only recently emerged from the falling tide.  I took the photo that graces this post as the sun snuck a chance to pierce the gloaming. 

It's a holiday here Canada, so the usual business of school buses and commuters on the road was absent.  On my walk back up the hill to my home, about one kilometre and 75 meters of  climb, there were few cars, no dogs – none of my regular friends Elvis, Annie, Scout, Legend, or Lola were up yet – and only the sounds of kinglets, nuthatches and ravens in the canopy around me. 

Slow, sauntering, quiet, attentive.