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How self-organization works: short form

September 1, 2015 By Complexity, Invitation, Open Space, Organization One Comment

A small elevator speech I shared on the OSLIST yesterday:

Self organization works by a combination of attractors and boundaries.  Attractors are things that draw components of a system towards themselves (gravity wells, a pile of money left on the ground, an invitation).  Boundaries (or constraints) are barriers that constrain the elements in a system (an atmosphere, the edges of an island, the number of syllables in a haiku)

Working together, attractors and boundaries define order where otherwise there is chaos. We can be intentional about some of these, but not all of them. Within complex systems, attractors and constraints create the conditions to enable emergence.  What emerges isn’t always desirable and is never predictable, but it has the property of being new and different from any of the individual elements within the system.

Self-organization is where we get new, previously unknown things from.

 

Returning to the Basics

August 31, 2015 By Art of Hosting, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Leadership, Learning

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

— TS Eliot

Our Beyond the Basics team is about to host our last gathering of the current cycle of offers, back in North America.  Over the past five Beyond the Basics offerings I have learned more than I feel like I’ve shared. I can feel that my practice has changed as a result of doing this work, and I’ve become interested in the way our team’s ideas and lessons from working at scale have begun to outline a form and practice of leadership that is needed in much of our work now.

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Dave Snowden’s reflections on a theory of change

August 21, 2015 By Complexity, Culture, Design, Evaluation, Leadership 4 Comments

Dave is working on a theory of change, which I think is a good thing. In this latest post he has a nice summation of the way to move to action in complex situations (like cultures):

So where we are looking at culture change (to take an example), we first map the narrative landscape to see what the current dispositional state is. That allows us to look at where we have the potential to change, and where change would be near impossible to achieve. In those problematic cases we look more to stimulating alternative attractors rather that attempting to deal with the problem directly. Our method is the look at the narrative landscape and then ask the questions What can I (we) do tomorrow to create more stories like these and fewer like those? The question engages people in action without analysis and it allows us to take an approach that measures vectors (speed and direction) rather than outcome. The question also allows widespread engagement in small actions in the present, which reduces the unexpected (and potentially negative) consequences of large scale interventions.

In sum, complexity work is about understanding the context to understand where the potential for evolution might lie.  From there you try experiements to see what you can learn, and support what works while removing support for what doesn’t

It’s an old saw, but it’s actually a simple thing.  And I keep writing about it because it seems TOO simple for most folks.  Shouldn’t strategy be more ordered, laid out and thought through than this.

As always the answer depends, but with complex situations the answer is no.  Save your discipline and rigour for understanding things as they evolve rather than trying to get it all right from the start.

 

via Change through small actions in the present – Cognitive Edge.

Participating in our environment

August 20, 2015 By Art of Hosting, Being, Conversation, Culture, Design, Facilitation, Learning, Organization, Practice

Thanks to a rich conversation with artistic researcher Julien Thomas this morning I found this video of Olafur Eliasson at TED in 2009. In this presentation he talks about the responsibility of a person in a physical space, and discusses how his art elicits a reaction beyond simply gazing at a scene.  It address one of the fundamental problems in our society for me: that of the distinction between participation and consumption.  So much that happens in physical spaces and in our day to day lives has been geared towards gazing and consuming and away from participation and responsibility.

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Interesting reading today on shared leadership and action

August 19, 2015 By Collaboration, Design, Emergence, Flow, Leadership, Learning, Philanthropy

I’m prepping for a small gig with a non-profit moving to a shared leadership model, and also reading a bit more on Cynefin strategy, and so there are a lot of tabs open in my browser this afternoon.  instead of saving them all to an Evernote folder, I thought I’d share the best ones with you.

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