A quick note here to connect a key idea from complexity work with the two loops model of change that I’ve used essentially as a theory of change in living systems ever since I started working with it back in the Berkana Institute days when we were looking for ways to explain why networks alone weren’t the answer to change work.
Just a warning. This is a theory-heavy post, and I recommend you read the linked papers and blogs to dove deeper.
What is unique about the model pictured above (and click through if you’re reading this on email, as the featured images don’t appear in the email version of these posts) in terms of traditional change models is that the seeds of the new system is indicated as starting within the existing system. Like any living system, the future comes from a connected disruption with the current and the past. An elephant will not produce a codfish as its offspring, nor will a thistle grow from an apple seed. Living things over time can change and be changed by their environments and relationships, but they are more likely to evolve along some lines rather than others. A cod fish and an elephant (and indeed a thistle and an apple tree) may share a common ancestor 1.6 billion years ago, but that ancestor at some point differentiated itself into several Kingdoms and Phyla and Families with different characteristics shaped by the relationships inherent in its environment. Living systems have a history and those histories are carried forward as “affordances.”
I first learned about affordances through the work of Mark O Sullivan and his application of the theory to learning football, a complex sport requiring complex learning strategies. But these ideas have been around for a long time. In ecological psychology, the concept of affordances comes from J.J Gibson and is summarized nicely in this paper by Hugo Letiche and Michael Lissack:
The term “affordance” was first coined by the perceptual psychologist J.J. Gibson (1977, 1979); it referred to actionable properties between the world and an actant (person or animal). To Gibson, affordances are relationships. They exist: they do not have to be visible, known or desirable. Affordances entail the possible relationships amongst actors and objects; they are properties of the world. For instance, affordances are what objects or things offer people to be done with them. Affordances are bestowed by the environment. They are what it offers, provides and supplies. Affordances invite activity, reaction and point to possibilities. An affordance is a relationship between something in the world and the intentions, perceptions and capabilities of a person or persons.
— Letiche and Lissack, Making room for affodances
Affordances are important because, as they say in the paper:
Affordances can bring us from a possibility space to an activity. In the relationships between persons and situations, the move from activity to consciousness and back again, can be co-shared and co-experienced. Affordances are in effect ‘complementary relating contrarieties’, providing the non-dualist logic needed in social complexity studies. One will be drawn out by affordances, made to do thin
— Letiche and Lissack, Making room for affodances
The two loops model of change represents this space as the beginning of the line of the new and the space out of which it emerges. When we are looking for the weak signals of what might be the next state of a system or its replacement, we need to look within the present for the patterns of stability and the patterns of volatility that give us a clue about what to nudge, what to strengthen and what to disrupt. If we want to bring new relationships and patterns of behaviour into being, we can try to interact with these patterns to see which provides the greatest affordance for the direction in which we want to travel.
And so a critical part of using the two loops model is to spend a lot of time occupying that space in the nascent, unformed moment before the new begins to take shape. Study the stories and patterns of behaviour and the desire lines that limit and enable the evolution of the new from the cauldron of the current state of things. Affordances are rarely visible; they can be felt, perceived, apprehended, noticed and worked with. They show up as tendencies, habits, possibilities, opportunities and surprises.
