Just off a call with a potential client today and we were scoping out some of the work that we might do together, with a small organization facing unprecedented change. They are in a place of finally realizing that they are not in control of what is happening to them. They are completely typical in this respect. I am constantly struck by the fact that we have so few skills, frameworks and so little language for dealing with complexity. Clients all the time approach me looking for certainty, answers and clear outcomes. It’s as if they are searching for the …
We have an Art of Hosting event coming up in February 23-26 on Bowen Island. This is my home based offering, which I have been doing for nearly ten years with friends Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and Caitlin Frost, and lately with our new colleague Amanda Fenton. All of these folks are incredible facilitators and teachers and great humans.
One has to be very careful attributing causes to things, or even attributing causality to things. in complex systems, causality is a trap. We can be, as Dave Snowden says “retrospectively coherent” but you can not know which causes will produce which effects going forward. That is the essence of emergent phenomena in the complex world. But even in complicated problems, where causality should be straightforward, our thinking and view can confuse the situation. Consider this example. Imagine someone, a man, who has never seen a cat. I know, highly implausible, but this is a hypothetical from Alan Watts’ book, …
Our traditional Boxing Day movie this year was The Imitation Game, the new film about Alan Turing and his team’s efforts to break the Enigma code used by the German Navy in the Second World War. While the film itself was good it was full of fictional scenes that were intended to point at some of the interesting things that happened at Bletchley Park during that war. Having done a bit of reading on the subject, it’s clear that the film simplified many things, took liberties with others and glossed over what is a really interesting story, but the movie …
Another one today from whiskey river: Today I want to resolve nothing. I only want to walk a little longer in the cold blessing of the rain, and lift my face to it. – Kim Addonizio New Year’s Day Tell Me Happy New Year.