Menu

Staring over the edge

March 22, 2026 By Football No Comments

The cliffs at the end of the world, near Sagres, Portugal.

Tottenham 0 – 3 Nottingham Forest

I moved to Cheshunt, Herts, in England in 1978, just six weeks after the English football season ended. Under the guidance of Brian Clough, Nottingham Forest won the First Division that season, setting them up for an epic couple of years in which they were the dominant force in European football. Tottenham on the other hand had been dire. They were relegated to the second division in 1976-77, and won promotion the following year on the strength of goal difference alone. When I arrived on the scene, Tottenham was back, a top flight local team stacked with fresh talent like Glen Hoddle and World Cup winners Ricardo Villa and Ozzie Ardilles. That team grew in stature and swagger, winning the FA Cup in 1981 and 1982 and then the UEFA Cup in 1984.

So I never knew the pain of relegation for Spurs, nor could have I ever imagined that Nottingham Forest would not be the best team in the world. And yet here we are, Tottenham coming off our first European trophy since that UEFA Cup, and Forest FINALLY pulling themselves clear of 23 years outside of the top flight.

This morning, a six point game beckoned. Forest, who have struggled this season travelled to north London to play Tottenham. Six points were on the line here. It was Nottingham’s chance to leap frog Spurs towards 16th place and some modicum of safety. Tottenham, West Ham and Forest are trying hard to NOT finish in 18th place. We had to win.

And we didn’t. We outplayed Forest for much of the game, sending corner after corner harmlessly into the box. We hit a couple of posts and crossbars and exacted a couple of key saves. But in the end? It was dire, terrible, uninspired, without shape or identity or any kind of idea. Forest found three goals from think chances, and on a normal day you might say that the scoreline flattered them but not today. Today our undoing was the collective shrug we played with. Archie Grey, the 20 year old midfielder was the only one who see to show any kind of creativity. Mattias Tel, cutting in from the left wing provided a handful to deal with, but there isn’t much point winning corners if they serve no further purpose.

I can’t help think that we are going down. Two home wins in the premier league all season. No wins in 2026, and it’s almost April. The only good news today was Arsenal bottling the League Cup Final, but even a lost trophy to our biggest rivals is no salve for the wounds. Spurs are bleeding.

Why we create music

March 19, 2026 By Music No Comments

I am so grateful that I can make music. It’s a language that allows me to speak in the pure vocabulary of emotion with people. It allows me to relate to people in a way that is totally different from every other form of social interaction, even sport, which comes closest.  And it allows me to connect with myself as well.

A bunch of musicians have put together a short film that aims to tell you why they make music. If you are not a musician, it’s almost impossible for me to tell you WHY I make music, but I can always give you an experience of what it feels like.  No one needs to be laden with the identity of “musician” to make music. I can show you right now. They next time you meet me, ask me to make music with you. We will do it on the spot and you’ll taste what it is that all musicians chase with this language.

I found that by following a link from Patti Digh to a site about creativity.

The nature of epistemic landscapes

March 19, 2026 By Complexity, Containers, Facilitation No Comments

From Dave's post today on the relationship between anthro-complexity, Human System Dynamics and the OODA Loop.: 

If orientation is constitutive of observation, and if the relevant unit of analysis in most complex situations is not the individual but the community of practice, the organisation, the institution, then the question becomes: where does collective orientation live? The answer is not inside any individual generative model. It is distributed across the epistemic landscape, the structured field of what is perceivable, thinkable, and actionable within a given community at a given time, prior to any individual act of observation or deliberation.
An epistemic landscape is not a shared mental model. It is not a consensus. It is the pre-reflective background that makes certain things available for perception and certain kinds of thinking possible before anyone decides to attend to them. It has terrain: available distinctions that make certain differences legible, narrative structures that make certain sequences of events coherent, inscribed artefacts that hold certain patterns stable, silences where distinctions have not been developed, and differences therefore do not register. Moving through it does not feel like a constraint. It feels like the world’s natural shape.

This is tremendously geeky stuff, but important reading. As he has been exploring these ideas in chapter-length essays, he is bringing clarity, for me, on the role and position of the practitioner within the field in which the practitioner is working.  These observations and declarations about the nature of epistemic landscapes, contexts, and constraints are important. 

Interventions that work on the landscape itself are of a different kind. You cannot do it by training people to think differently within existing categories, because the categories are what you are trying to change. You cannot do it through after-action review, because after-action review operates within the narrative structures the landscape already makes available. You have to work obliquely, through the practices, artefacts, distinctions, and narratives that constitute the background before anyone starts deliberately attending. This is harder, less amenable to programme design, and less visible as an intervention. It is also, in conditions of genuine complexity, the more consequential one.

Dave's essays are so timely for me assignee January I have been thinking a lot about how to make this same point within the dialogue tradition that privileges the container as the primary space of change. I think dialogic containers are very important but I believe that without understanding them in the context of the many layers of context – landscape, substrate, form of life, constraint regimes – we can only have limited effect in "making change."  And because dialogic containers are important places of encounter and the spaces in which people feel and experience change most intimately, they become seductive. They seem to be the easiest places to control and contribute which gives everyone a warm fuzzy feeling, but without attending to the larger scales of context and the affordances and avoidances that appear there, deeper structural change is impossible. Facilitation will not save the world, nor will hosting or any other kind of dialogic practice. Not alone, and not without attending to context. 

Dave concludes:

We still have much to do in anthro-complexity, both in terms of our own methods and in market acceptance, to make the shift from containers to landscapes and to substrate management. We’re not there yet, and the pressure from purchasing executives with Augustinian expectations can require compromise for survival. But we’ve started the journey, and the invitation is open for others to join.

This is the work.

Farewell to Europe

March 18, 2026 By Football No Comments

Tottenham 3 (5) v 2 (7) Athletico Madrid

It might be the last Spurs match in Europe for a while. Having navigated the league stage of the Champions League with style, Spurs were dire in the round of 16 versus Atletico Madrid.  Last week in Madrid a series of goalkeeping mistakes from Kinsky and then defensive lapses from everyone else put us down 5-2 in the first leg. 

Returning to London, the crowd was surprisingly loud at home. After a week in which we barely survived a tie against Liverpool, and Igor Tudor survived his day to day career as manager, Spurs had no choice but to start bright. 

We did, and the breakthrough came at 30' when Archie Grey created a fine chance that led to Kolo Muoni heading home to narrow the difference to two goals. Madrid, who had absorbed pressure in the half finished with some very dangerous chances but couldn't convert.

As the second half began our defensive openness led to a goal by Simeone. We responded with a beautiful strike from Xavi Simons five minutes later. Madrid ramped up the attack as the second half progressed, taking advantage of our need to score, and that paid dividends as Alvarez, who was sending our defenders into conniptions all night, found Hancko at the near post, where he walked through three stationary defenders and headed home.  

From there the game petered out.  A late penalty to Xavi meant we ended the match with a second leg win, which the crowd appreciated. but bundled out of Europe. This season now sees us with nothing left to play for now but our survival in the Premier League. That's not guaranteed, nor is Igor Tudor's tenure.  

Dark times.

Groove and harmony are different things

March 18, 2026 By Featured, Flow, Music, Uncategorized No Comments

A screen cap from the video of Thibaut Garcia & Antoine Morinière playing Bach together with tremendous groove.

Brian “Ponch” Rivera writes a lot about the OODA loop, learned from his experience as a fighter pilot. His latest post dives into the OODA Loop basketball and Constraints Led Approaches to coaching in sport. I like most of what he writes about but one thing kind of sticks in my craw is his use of the word “harmony.”

I’ll quote him here:

Before we go anywhere, we need to kill a common mistake.

Most coaches and leaders in highly interdependent activities — basketball, soccer, rugby, business — think the goal is synchronization. Get everyone doing the right thing at the right time. Run the play. Execute the plan. Sync up.


That is not harmony. And Boyd was very specific about the difference.

Synchronization is rigid. A scripted play synchronizes five players into a predetermined pattern. It looks clean. It breaks down the moment the defense does something unexpected, which is every single time against a good team.

Harmony is something else entirely. Boyd described it as the “power to perceive or create interaction of apparently disconnected events or entities in a connected way.” He listed it as one of five essential ingredients for survival and growth, alongside insight, Orientation, agility, and initiative — what we now call IOHAI.¹

Think about a jazz ensemble. Miles Davis didn’t hand John Coltrane or his session players a script. He gave them a key, a tempo, a direction, and trusted each musician to interpret what they heard in real time and respond. The result wasn’t chaos. It was coherent, adaptive, and unrepeatable. That is harmony. That is a reciprocal team. That is what high-performing organizations look like when they’re actually working.

A high-performing team works the same way. Every player reads the same environment, operates from the same principles, and responds to what actually unfolds rather than executing what was planned in a locker room thirty minutes ago. The connection between players isn’t mechanical. It’s mutual understanding.

Okay…I’m not sure about that. When Ponch says that getting everyone doing the right thing at the right time is not harmony, I think he’s wrong.  That exactly what harmony is. If I play a C and you play an E and someone else plays a G we have a very nice C major triad. If we want it to sound as a chord (which creates overtones and a richness in the sound) we have to get everyone doing the right thing at the right time.  

In his work, I believe John Boyd uses the term “harmony” to point to a kind of coherence and alignment that allows different actors to act as a coherent whole. In music, especially jazz, from which Ponch draws an example, we call that groove, not harmony. 

When Miles Davis handed out music, he did in fact hand out a kind of script, with a melody line and chords which contained the harmony. The tempo and direction might be indicated on the lead sheet (but not always). Even tempo and direction are not groove. Groove is what they create together in the playing of the piece. If the band was really smoking hot that night they might play the piece fast and hop to it, or they could take some tempo off and play looser. But what they were doing in the moment was groove, not only harmony, and I think groove is what Boyd and Ponch are trying to get at.

This matters because how you KNOW what the groove is very different than how you know what harmony is.  Groove is so very embodied. You know it when you have it and you know when you don’t. Harmony is captured right there on the lead sheet. You merely need to sound two notes together to hear it. It’s actually pretty mechanical, and has very little to do with the musicians themselves.  What they bring to the work is the groove. 

The other day at a music rehearsal, after we were finished, the young daughter of a friend of mine sat down at the piano and started improvising some music. She was playing on the white keys, not paying attention to the melody, but more just practicing independent fingering. The music made very little sense.  It was random, harmonically and rhythmically, but there were patterns.  It sounded a bit like Bach, runs of eighth notes heading in different directions, but without the harmonic relationship that Bach writes.  

I was trying to have a conversation and what started bugging me was not the dissonance, but the lack of time feel. So I sat down beside her and just played a gentle pulse on a C note, quiet enough that it didn’t get in the way of her playing, but I asked her to just listen to the beat and play along with it. Immediately, her random meanderings continued, but we both started nodding along with the groove, intuitively, naturally. Her lines started becoming a little more funky.  She improvised some syncopation, threw in some triplets, and left space. Instead of a wandering set of kind-of-eighth notes, she started improvising with time as well.  Harmony wasn’t big deal. She played lots of “wrong” notes, but what we were doing was WAY more musical. It was coherent, aligned and coordinated.

So I get what Boyd and Ponch are saying, but harmony isn’t the right term for it. What they are pointing to is different and much more important than harmony in the context of dynamic decision making, because it is an ineffable, felt sense of togetherness that arises in the space of dynamic interactions between people and is perceived socially and corporeally.

The other thing that kind of sticks in my craw is that Ponch only allows comments on his substack from paid subscribers which means I have to post this here and hope he finds it with some trackback ping. I have no idea how Substack works, but remember, paywalls break hypertext.

And if you want to witness a bit of what I am talking about, check out Bach’s Goldberg Variations arranged for two guitars, performed by Thibaut Garcia & Antoine Morinière. You can hear the harmony that Bach wrote, but you have to watch and feel the groove these two fellows create together. It’s intimate, sensual, deeply responsive, kind, perceptive, generous and spacious. Bach didn’t write that.