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Principles, noticings and football

December 6, 2025 By Community, Football, Uncategorized No Comments

So many of the principles for work and community I use in my life have come through the people I met and who supported me back in the early 2000s when I started consulting (it’s the only job I’ve had this century!). One of those networks and collections of people were the folks associated with the Berkana Institute with whomI worked for many years. My buddy Tennesson, one of the OG Berkana guys and still one of my best friends, pulled up a set of principles that Berkana used back in the early days, and I’m grateful to notice how they continue to inform my practice today:

  • We relay on human goodness.
  • We depend on diversity.
  • We treasure the power of community.
  • We trust life’s capacity to create order without control.
  • We nourish our relationships and ourselves.

A few others I gained from Berkana include, “no matter the question, the answer is community” and “proceed until apprehended.”

Your algorithm may be giving you a false sense of confidence about what you know. I find this anecdotally true. Stuff I learn about through facebook or LinkedIn seems to make me feel knowledgeable especially on quicker moving issues, like the North Coast tanker ban. But stuff that comes through Bluesky, Mastodon or my RSS feeds are much more nuanced because of who I choose to follow.

Football is a game played with principles, becasue it’s a complex game and requires players to react and respond to a constantly changing environment. It was a joy watching Tottenham today cover some sense of purpose after a series of poor results, especially at home. Visiting Brentfod was no match for Spurs, and we dominated possession and played incredible defence off the ball. Van der Ven and Romero are probably amongst the best centre back pairs in the world when they are on their game, which they were today. Xavi Simons finally got the start at the number 10 position and generated the first goal and scored the second. Spurs were positive and exciting to watch and won 2-0. More of that would be much welcomed.

Elsewhere in the football world, today the Vancouver Whitecaps will play Inter Miami for their first MLS trophy in the MLS Cup Final. I used to be a huge supporter of the Whitecaps and for all kinds of reasons I stepped back from supporting that organization. But many of my friends are core parts of the Whitecaps supporters movements and they are having the time of their lives. Vancouver has played their best season of football in their 41 year history and have made every final they have competed in, winning the Canadian Championship and losing in the CONCACAF Champions Cup down in Mexico. But today they have a chance to make it two from three. They beat Miami on the way to that continental cup final, and the likes of Messi and Suarez will be side-eyeing the ‘Caps today who are on a wonderful run of form. We will see what happens.

Every year…

December 6, 2025 By Featured, Uncategorized No Comments

Never forgotten.

A monster of an atmospheric river.

December 5, 2025 By Bowen No Comments

My view for the next ten days or so.

We are settling in for one of the biggest rainfall events in years. Today it started raining and the expectation is that a series of increasingly intense atmospheric rivers will be delivering rain to the west coast in increasing amounts over the next couple of weeks. In some places there will be 300-400 millimetres of rain falling, some of it as snow on the mountains. It won’t be very windy, which is a good thing.

The atmospheric beast responsible for this is a set of stable systems out in the Pacific, a low to the north the north and a high to the south of us that are generating a trough of moisture between them and extruding it right at us. By the time what Cliff Mass calls the Godzilla Atmospheric River arrives next week, the flow of moisture will be almost 5000 kms long, originating in a part of the Pacific Northwest of the Hawaiian Islands, near Midway. It’s amazing to look at the modelling.

This kind of pattern produces lots of flooding, so we’ll have to be on the look out for that. The land is saturated with water now, so everything will run off. Waterfalls will be spectacular, gullies and culverts will overflow, our reservoirs will be full, and probably a little murky with the tannins and suspended particulates. There may be landslides in some places. It’s gong to make for some very wet events here on Bowen Island, like Light Up The Cove on Saturday.

Some thoughts on a Human-AI facilitation Manifesto

December 4, 2025 By Being, Complexity, Containers, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured 13 Comments

My friend Holger Nauheimer is busy working on The Human-AI Facilitation Manifesto (LinkedIn link). Here is his most recent draft:

  1. Perception is plural. Humans sense emotions and atmosphere. Al sees patterns and structure. Together, they reveal deeper coherence.
  2. Meaning emerges in relationship. Al offers structure, but humans bring the stories that make sense of the structure.
  3. Belonging is human. Al can stabilize language – but trust grows only between people.
  4. Depth matters more than speed. Al adds value not by optimizing, but by making visible what is hard to say.
  5. Neutral clarity is a gift. Al can name tensions without judgment — offering safety without shying away from truth.
  6. Courage is shared. Humans bring vulnerability. Al brings steadiness. Together, they hold the uncomfortable without collapse.
  7. This is not a tool upgrade. It is a shift in attention. Hybrid facilitation expands what can be seen, said, and sensed.
  8. Clarity is not authority. Al can hold patterns, but humans must hold responsibility. Hybrid facilitation works best when projection is named and agency stays human.

Here are some thoughts I have on this, simple thoughts, thoughts off the top of my head. Starting points.

First of all, I’m not loving the “AI does this, humans do this” construction of this manifesto. I think we shouldn’t put humans and AI on the same footing. If we want a manifesto to talk about how AI can be an aid to facilitation and sensemaking, we should talk about what it can do, and what it currently cannot do. I think there is always a place for human beings to talk about facilitation and also what OUR role is in it, because honestly, some forms of what passes for facilitation (especially the wrong processes used in the wrong contexts) can be more damaging than just letting AI ask you a bunch of questions and leaving your group to talk about them.

So given that…thoughts on these points.

Perception is plural. I don’t think AI “perceives.” At least not the AI that most of us are using in 2025. It analyses, and uses algorithms and probability tables to auto complete thoughts. It can be trained to be agreeable or be contrarian or be a nazi or whatever. But it doesn’t “see”. It offers material that becomes one more part of the information load that humans take in. But how humans perceive AI output matters a great deal. Some might dismiss it. Some might give it a kind of divine appreciation. I’m already seeing lots of blog posts starting with “I asked ChatGPT, and this is what it said…” as if ChatGPT is somehow more perceptive, or smarter or has access to better facts than anyone in particular. Perception is something human beings do. We do it individually, and we do it together in groups. Computers don’t perceive. And computers don’t understand depth. See below.

Meaning emerges in relationship. Yes. 100% yes. AI offers structure the way a banana offers structure, or a photograph, or a stray feather. AI does not offer the kind of relational meaning making that humans experience together because it does not have the same cognition that humans do. Human beings can take any object and use it to craft a ritual and stimulate new thoughts and experiences. This can be very helpful, in that it can introduce oblique stimuli into an environment and help us find new thoughts and ideas through association, metaphor, interpretation, cultural norming or culture breaking. We use tools like Visual Explorer or poetry and art for this in group work, and AI is an excellent source of obliquity and ambiguity precisely because it is capable of NOT being in relationship. We are capable of actionable insight that triggers a particular process in our brains that not only makes meaning, but does something to the relationship and the relational field as a result. Builds community, friendship, love. Or hate, and despair and panic. AI isn’t doing that.

Belonging is human. Which follows from the above. AI has no role in belonging. A person belongs when they are claimed by others. if you find yourself being “claimed” by AI, be careful. You are being manipulated.

Depth matters more than speed. Sometimes. Sometimes not. It depends. To AI, everything is speed. Has anyone asked AI to take its time and let its thought process really deepen? To go for a walk and let its brain tense and relax in ways that open new pathways? Nope. AI delivers things fast. I’m not sure it is capable of what we mean by “depth.” We perceive depth as a vertical axis of meaning. We order thoughts and experiences by whether they are shallow or deep. It has nothing to do with speed. AI, I suspect, uses flat semantic structures. It is associative. It would not understand depth the way you understand depth, as perceiving something being more meaningful in this moment to you and your context than not. If you say the word “John” right now it might mean nothing to you. But that was my father’s name and as I type it I look up at the picture I have of him I drinking our last whiskey together, a dram of Ladaig 10 year old malt, chosen because it was the distillery closest to Iona where I finished a pilgrimage in 2018, and because we were talking that evening about spirituality and remembering the drams we shared together on our trip through Ireland in 2012. But to ChatGPT 5, what does “John” mean? ““John” feels like an everyman name. A placeholder for the ordinary person — anyone and no one in particular” (emphasis the robot’s, not mine). Oof.

Neutral clarity is a gift. It is very hard for a human being to offer neutral, clear feedback to another person. But AI will not spare your feelings. My favourite use of LLMs is to critique my writing and ideas, tell me where I am wrong, where others will disagree with me. Tell me where I am about to make a fool of myself.. This is a helpful function.

Courage is shared. I feel like relying on AI to give me courage is foolish. I feel like I need courage NOT to rely on it. For example, this blog post. I’m writing it and dashing it off so Holger and others can reflect on it, and so OI can thinking out loud on these issues. And I’m not going to give it to ChatGPT for feedback. I am noticing that THAT requires more courage than hiding behind something that might polish it up. If I was publishing in a journal, I’d want that (and a good editor). But right now I’m wanting to write a fully human post in my own voice, so YOU all can weigh in and tell me what YOU think too, without using your LLM to critique it.

This is not a tool upgrade. Indeed. It’s just another tool. Not THE tool. Not a phase shift in how we do facilitation. I have seen facilitators discover a new tool like Open Space Technology and evangelize the hell out of it, saying that it should be used everywhere all the time and in exactly the same way for everything. Humans can be very good at creating and using tools, but we have also evolved practices of apprenticeship and mentorship in using and then making tools. AI doesn’t replace that. We need good mentors to apprentice to as facilitators. And then we can think about how to use our tools well.

Clarity is not authority. I don’t think AI offers any special clarity, and I do not think it has a lock on seeing patterns. Humans are exceptional at spotting patterns. Our brains are possibly the most complex things we know of in the universe (although as Steven Wright once said, you have to think about who is telling you that!). We are built to spot patterns. And we are full of filters and biases and inattentional blindness. We are prone to enacted cognition. We are neurodiverse and cognitively gifted in different ways. And so working with others helps us spot patterns and validate useful ones. If AI is part of your pattern spotting family, so be it. Just realize that it lacks all the tools we have to make sense of patterns in complexity. It can only work with what it has got. Its processes of insight are reducible. Ours are not. They are emergent.

That’s me. What do you think?

Hope and despair and all points in between

December 3, 2025 By Community, Complexity, Democracy, Music No Comments

Start your day with some Karine Polwart, The News:

What if the news were nothing more
Than the secrets of seashells on the seashore
Whispering which way the wind will blow this night
And how everything’s gonna be alright?

What if the very first sound you heard
At dawn was a wild and wonderful word?
And what if a smile was your first sight?
Wouldn’t everything have to be alright?

Polwart has an edge to her music, don’t let these lyrics fool you. She is a biting and incisive observer of the world as it is.

We don’t have to have hope to appreciate a better future for our planet and our species. We should, if we haven’t already, probably get better at holding the two ideas of hope and despair in mind at the same time. My friend Dave Pollard does that in his writing and signals today that he is embarking on a post-collapse series on his blog which I can tell you in advance will be worth reading. Not because you will agree with it, or because it will give you hope, or validation or solutions. Just because it will help you cultivate a more complex perspective on the world around you. That’s what Dave’s writing does for me, and that’s what Dave in person does for me too. And maybe that what’s Mylène Farmer – who he references in his post – is doing too in her joyful performance of Désenchantée, which seems so at odds with the lyrics.

Another fella who is writing a great series of posts is Ron Donaldson who is signing off from a career in complexity, participatory narrative inquiry, and facilitation with a series of retrospective posts about his journey. Today he has one up on his work with Participatory Narrative inquiry. the whole series is worth a read.

One of the reason why I think we get deluded into believing that the world can be saved is that we place a big emphasis on stories about how the small thing that happened has big implications. Well, on Taming Complexity, there is a great story about how one public participation design on a NASA program to literally save the plant went awry. This is important reading. We need to get good at public participation and deliberation around technical issues as well as complex ones.