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What if I wanted this?

August 28, 2025 By Being No Comments

The older I get the more I realize that as people get older they witness changes and pine for the good old days. It’s cliche for a reason, because it seems nearly universal. I get it. Things aren’t what they used to be. Younger generations than me (and they are plural at this point) have a language and experience that I cannot be a part of. I occasionally break through with folks where we are enjoined in common cause, like in our supporter-owned football club, or in some of the workshops and courses I deliver. But mostly, I can my peers living in increasingly agitated nostalgia. Things are not as good as they were before.

Is this the default setting? Nostalgia is practically a genre in art, culture, and fashion. But what is it called when a person of middle or advanced age writes or paints or composes about how THIS moment is amazing. How things that he or she wanted in the past have finally come to fruition and the new people in the world and teethings they are making and the places they are building or protecting are awesome? I remember when I got my first iPhone. It was like a childhood dream come true. Finally, the device of my dreams was here in my lifetime! I made the above image the lock screen. If you know, you know.

It’s not a pollyanna-ish sentiment I’m after. It’s not a carpe diem, or affirmation-based gratitude practice. There isn’t a word for it in English, which is why I’m reaching. Is there art to be made that features characters who grow old feeling like their experiences are the ones they have been hoping to have, that the demographics and the culture and the things that are happening are what they wanted all along?

There is a lack of this, eh? We all pine for a future we can’t have yet, an alternative we will never have, or a past that is gone. It’s hard to listen for the good things in the present in the monotonous moan of complaint in all that.

(Yes there is suffering. There always was. The “good old days” my generation pine for featured apartheid in South Africa, death squads in Central America, a hole burning in the ozone layer, residential schools in Canada, acid rain, and famine. I’m not naive.)

Wow, Grimsby Town!

August 28, 2025 By Football No Comments

Me in my Grimsby Town shirt in 2016, wearing it in support of the team in advance of their successful playoff promotion back to the Football League that year.

Back in 2015 I started an accidental and unlikely friendship with the supporters of Grimsby Town FC. Grimsby is a small fishing town on the north east coast of Lincolnshire, on the estuary of the Humber River. Their football team was founded in 1878 and is one of the oldest in the world. They have had a full history of ups and downs, have played at every one of the top five levels of football in England, and have a modest trophy haul, including divisional championships and playoff promotions and two Football League Cup wins, the second most important cup in English football.

Of all of those matches played over a century and a half few were as big as last night’s. Grimsby Town were drawn at home against Manchester United in the League Cup. It was a classic David v Goliath set up. Town is settled mid table in the fourth division (League 2) and Manchester United, despite horrific form in the last couple of years, are who they are, one of the most valuable global sports businesses, with a legendary history and a near permanent (but not absolute!) lock on Premier League and European football.

Last night was a match for the ages. The struggling visitors went down 2-0 on a couple of well worked, if a little lucky, goals from a hugely motivated home side, who were playing in front of some of the most diehard supporters in lower league English football. The only question in the second half was whether Town had the legs to sustain what was certainly going to be an onslaught from the billionaires from Manchester. Withstood it they did, but it cost them two goals, and when the referee blew for full time after 98 torrid minutes, much of which was played in a monsoon, the two sides remained drawn.

That meant penalties. The first five penalties for both sides were near perfect, but Town missed their third, requiring their keeper Christy Pym to come up with a spot of magic or risk going out. Pym saved United’s fifth penalty and the context continued. Every kick was scored from then out, including both keepers scoring on each other and it wasn’t until they started into the second round off penalties that united’s Bryan Mbeuno hit the cross bar and sent the supporters into giant-killing heaven.

Having been on the winning end of a historic giant killing myself, I LOVE watching these things happen, something which is unique to football in general in which clubs from different levels of the pyramid play each other in Cup matches. For supporters it is an indescribable moment. The tension builds and builds, especially if you are defending a lead. Going to penalties makes it worse. But the relief and joy and pride that is released after the victory, and the subsequent sinking in of the magnitude of the occasion makes it a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

This is why we follow our teams, especially the ones we have a real stake in. It is for the drama and community and the emotional roller coaster ride that passion takes you upon. I’m so happy for my Grimsby Town friends. I know what they are feeling today – the glow of something truly special still lingering in their hearts, stunned smiles pasted across their faces. A lifetime of suffering through cold nights and desperate relegations and crappy ownership and a glory era that ended 90 years ago – all of that gone by the wayside this morning, traded for a feeling that you will never know except by experiencing it.

Slow down and integrate

August 27, 2025 By Notes, Uncategorized No Comments

A propos of yesterday’s post on strategic planning, Cameron Norman has a nice post today on working with organizations as a consultant engaging in strategic design and helping contracted work land and be integrated within client organizations.

My buddy Tenneson is inviting a little weekly practice with his Wander Wednesday series. Today he asks What is a gift of slowing down for you? I’m about to join him on a call with a client in the next hour, so this little space here, a chance to read inspiring bits from my blogroll and take a moment to reflect on them without just scrolling by, that is the gift. In face since I’ve been blogging nearly daily again since June, I find that this practice has slowed down how I consume the great ideas that surround me and invited me to reflect on them. I’m not really writing for anyone other than me (but I hope if you drop in here you also find stuff that resonates with you). The gift of slowing down is the chance to try things on. Like I’m looking at some really nice shirts on the rack at the store, but unless I can see how they look on me I may never remember that I saw them. And the way my brain works, it’s not a slam dunk that anything I post here or reflect upon will stick, but by writing about things – by ACTUALLY engaging – I get to try them on.

Do things because they are just worth doing. Not everything nets you a return. Blogging is to social media what hiking is to commuting I think.

Some interesting notes on emergence in AI, cities and international bridges

August 26, 2025 By Emergence, Notes No Comments

The Ambassador Bridge is a crucial piece of international infrastructure connecting Canada to the US, between the cities of Windsor and Detroit. I had no idea it was a privately-owned bridge, nor did I understand the extent of to which this bridge has exacerbated misery in Detroit for decades. The emergent outcomes of this structure stemming from what it is, who owns it and what it means are incredible. 99% Invisible has a great episode on the bridge with a harrowing postscript. That’s my “today I learned…”

As things scale they become their own things, different from the parts that make them up, and exhibiting characteristics that are unpredictable given the way smaller scales work. This is the phenomena of emergence. When I was a kid, being a geography nerd, I learned about Bosnywash, the megalopolis that stretches from Boston to Washington. The only region like that in Canada is the Golden Horseshoe, perhaps including Ottawa and Montreal. Travelling in these spaces, one realizes that the mega city operates similar to the smaller cities, but at a huge scale, and without regional governance. Instead of subways there is a regional train network. Instead of markets there are hundreds of thousands of hectares of warehouses and distrubtion hubs. A new kind of city emerges, similar but different from its constituent parts. And those constituent parts are themselves emergent aggregations of the original villages and settlements that existed before. Doc Searles reflects on this phenomenon today in a post worth reading with some great links.

If you want to really go down the emergence rabbit hole, check this out. Here is a short paper on consciousness as an emergent property of life. Consciousness is not a guaranteed outcome of a living system but life is neseccary for consciousness. That paper is a response to this one: “Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism”, which is seeking to understand the issues of consciousness in AI form an emergence perspective. Anil Seth argues for biological naturalism, which to me is a relief. But the story isn’t easy.

Strategic planning is changing, that old saw

August 26, 2025 By Chaordic design, Complexity, Design, Facilitation, Featured No Comments

The folks at Network Weaver are professional kin to me. Almost everything they post on their blog is something that I resonate with. They are about to publish a short series of blog posts about their approach to strategic planning in 2025, and I resonate with their practice principles:

1. Clarify Your North Star

Ask: What is the core purpose that must remain constant, even as the world shifts? How can you stay emergent and responsive to crises while still focusing on building long-term power and transformation?

2. Plan for Multiple Futures

Ask: What are the factors we know or can imagine, and what is beyond? How can we hold the future lightly as we plan and move with purpose?

3. Design for  Flexibility, Iteration, and Collaboration

Ask: Is our strategy flexible enough to adapt, and do we have strong processes in place to support ongoing experimentation and collaboration?

4. Center Equity and Building Power for Your Organization and Community

Ask: What are we building? Who are we accountable to? Are we building in ways that foster a more equitable future?

5. Strengthen Internal Capacity for Resilience and Well-Being

Ask: What do we need to sustain our people, funding, and infrastructure in the long run?

There is, of course, a time an a place for linear and predictive planning, but many folks are still wedded to the idea that if we just double down on a more ordered line of reasoning, we’ll be able to work ourselves through the massive amounts of uncertainty we are currently facing. If you look online for strategic planning templates, you’ll find a flood of these processes, all offered as if context doesn’t matter.

Something I would add to this list is Develop good situational awareness of the people and issues in context. The ask here is “What is going on? How do different people see the situations we are in? Who has what expertise and experience and how can we bring it to bear on the work?” With large scale initiatives I use Participatory Narrative Inquiry and often NarraFirma as a tool to gather and work with the stories of experience that illuminate the current situation. I have also taken to talking to folks close to the situation for more than I used to as a way of preparing for this kind of work. I am finding that these days many people in decision making positions, on boards or in leadership roles, are operating with an incomplete picture of the situation or an inability to grasp of the issues at stake. That doesn’t mean they can’t be useful to the process. Folks that sit on boards, for example, who are not subject matter experts in the core work of an organization may still have immense wisdom on engagement or process or lived expertise with the consequences of decisions. Taken as a collective, a good board or a leadership has a diversity of experiences and perspectives. But if unquestioned assumptions about power and status are at play, that diversity can be sidelined with the result that organizations make decisions with a narrowed scope of awareness. You are always starting from somewhere.

Strategic planning is one of those terms that means a bunch of different things to folks depending on what they need, what their experience has been and what they have done in the past. I usually begin strategic planning engagements with a client by asking them “tell me what you want to do without using the term ‘strategic planning'” and from there we explore a design for the work that gets them where they need to go. The issue, however, is making sure that the folks participating in the process have a clear view of the need and purpose of the work, which is why we spend time on that part of the design to craft a good invitation process. It helps people show up well and helps to bring clarity to what we are doing, especially if the work is unfamiliar.