Dave Snowden concluded his six-part series on the Channel and the Estuary this week. He used gangster movies and TV Series to illustrate the different kinds of contexts in which people are sense-making. The series contrasted the categorical ambiguity and gradients represented by the ecology of a tidal estuary with the managed and ordered passageway through uncertainty represented by the marked channel. The metaphors are meaningful for coastal people, and anyone who has had to navigate these kinds of marine ecosystems. The point is that navigating in the estuary and in the channel requires different approaches to sense-making.
The whole series deserves to be read and thought through, as it is an important declaration of what “complexity thinking” really is and what it requires from the complexity practitioner. It is also a warning against the way in which we receive the world in a pre-channeled, dredged state, made easier for us; “facilitated” one might say, especially by the digitization of our experience, which has dredged and channelled the world and offered us pre-designed categories of experience.
Dave’s series contains an embedded tribute to those whose lot in life requires them to practice estuarine thinking in a world of pre-cut channels. It recognizes the loneliness that such people sometimes experience and the separateness they often feel. It is also a call to action for an approach to organizational life that treats complexity as a context in which we are required to deploy “estuarine thinking.” These are lost capacities – exiled capacities, if you like – and we lose something essential if they disappear.
I have been wrestling with this series from the perspective of a person who hosts conversations in organizations and communities. Dave’s work has deeply shaped the way I view and practice facilitation over the past 15 years or so. It has left me in a liminal space of practice. I try to locate myself adjacent to those in the ‘facilitation’ world, those who are dialogic practitioners, and folks who are exploring the implications that complexity has for their practice. I say adjacent because I am aware that although I use the language of facilitation, dialogue, and hosting, I find that much of the practice in these fields fails to confront the complexity of human groups and systems. We all have work to do to build our practice around Dave’s invitation, not just in these posts but in his work in general as it relates to complex facilitation.
The thing about complexity is that once you see it you can’t unsee it, and Dave’s refection on the gangsters and business mavens from Guinness, Peaky Blinders and The Godfather had me noticing similar patterns in the stories I was encountering. Last weekend, we attended a screening of the 1961 version of the film West Side Story, which is unbelievably contemporary in many ways, not the least of which is that it explores what happens when people are born into a world of tight constraints not of their making. I have never seen the film or the musical, so this was all new to me. There is A LOT I can say about this film, and perhaps it deserves a whole other post to explore some of the themes, but one scene stood out to me in particular, and I think anyone who engages in facilitation (or community development or consulting or organizing) might find it beneficial to watch this and reflect.
The two gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, are locked in a struggle against each other, divided by ethnicity, neighbourhood, history, and class. Tony, the former leader of the Jets, falls in love with Maria, the younger sister of the Sharks’ leader. Their love crosses the boundaries of gangs, race, history, and tradition. Both gangs sing about the constraints of their worlds: childhood trauma, exclusion, racism, homesickness, loyalty, and the struggle to belong. At a critical point in the film, both gangs agree to meet at a dance in what they consider ‘neutral’ territory.
The dance is run by a social worker called Glad Hand, played beautiful by John Astin. Glad Hand, armed with his clipboard and his whistle, has some activities planned for the dance, and he naively tries to mix up the crowd of teenagers, probably so that they might have a different kind of experience of getting to know one another. His design for the evening is almost totally ignorant of the contexts that make it impossible for this dance to have any kind of success. It is a well-intentioned effort that goes terribly wrong. You can see the painfully earnest effort on Astin’s face, convinced that he is bringing a hopeful and helpful evening to this group of poor immigrant youth.
In the key scene, Glad Hand organizes the teenagers into a circle dance. the idea is that the girls walk one way and the boys walk the other and when he blows the whistle you have to dance with who ever you are standing in front of. He says “form a circle. Boys will be on the outside, girls will be on the inside.” Action, one of the Jets who has the best, most cynical quips in the films asks “And where will you be?” Glad Hand chuckles nervously with an awkward smile and ignores the question.
It takes a few moments for anyone to move into the circle. There is no trust between the teens and Glad Hand and everybody is HYPER aware of the dynamics in the room which Glad Hand has just gleefully ignored in favour of his plans and his clipboard. He has tried to create “safe” space and the gangs understand this as “neutral” space, which is a very different thing. “Neutral” requires that you keep your guard up and restrain your instincts. While Glad Hand is committed to civility, the gangs are actually committed to an uneasy peace in a social field that is filled with tension.
As the circle dance begins Glad Hand is clearly waiting for his chance to impose a predetermined outcome, where the Sharks girls will end up with the Jets boys and vice versa. It’s transparent and manipulative. The kids in the dance are looking anxiously around themselves, scanning the room and knowing exactly where they are in every moment. Glad Hand blows his whistle when the circles are lined up perfectly for his agenda. Immediately everyone catches on to what is happening. They stop, look around and break the exercise and go back into their couples and groups, and the dance disintegrates into a ritualized gang war, with the two sides doing their own thing more divided than ever. As the circle breaks down you can see the police officer running to Glad Hand and clearly reprimanding him for the situation he has created. This is the last we see of the social worker.
This is deeply familiar to me, and perhaps you too. For many of us the facilitation journey starts with tools and methods. A devotion to these creates a situation in which the context and pre-existing constraints are pushed into the background. When a group rebels against what I am doing. my experience has been that it is almost always the result of my own ignorance to what is happening in the group. These are hard lessons to learn, but important. It’s why I wrote the series on theory, to recognize that the dialogic containers in which we are working are embedded in multiple constraint regimes and landscapes of context which exert a more powerful influence on the present moment than a facilitated method.
Dave’s recent series pushes us to understand the capacity needed not only to enter into the ambiguous and uncertain space of complex situations, but to navigate once we are there. It calls me to a practice of constant self-reflection, knowing that in any situations it is impossible to map the next step, and recognizing that the channel markers I encounter are often the ones I have put down before, to protect myself, to avoid the messiness I can’t handle, to steer the group into a place where I am most comfortable or hopeful. Channels are not bad in and of themselves. But one cannot lose sight of the estuary in which the channel is dredged.
Relentless self-awareness is critical to leading in the estuary. Being aware of where we are in relation to what is happening, and knowing how to respond to the steadily changing context is the capacity. It is not often what people are contracting you for; so often the client wants certainty and structure and guidance. What is needed in complexity instead is a kind of learning scaffolding that for developing the capacity that people have for being in the estuary. Dredging a channel does not mean that we are no longer navigating in the salt marsh. On the contrary, it may well rob us of the ability to be able to do so.
Earlier this month, Cynthia Kurtz announced that she was re-launching her Participatory Narrative Inquiry practicum courses. This a really good opportunity to discover this set of practices and approach to working with stories.
I was part of her first deep dive cohort a few years ago and it really was good.It stretched me and grounded me in this approach. Cynthia is intending to offer these course three times a year starting in May. If you are curious about PNI, the introductory course is the way to go. If you'd like to apply PNI to a small project, the PNI Essentials course will help you do that.
For a bigger project using NarraFirma, the Deep Dive course is what you need. It's important that you have a project in mind and ready to go for this course, because after all these are practicums. You'll learn at a steady pace over 20 weeks with Cynthia and a cohort of co-learners. This is a significant investment of time, but it is well structured and incredibly useful and resource-rich useful learning.
I'm really glad she is offering these programs. Spread the word and consider joining one to learn directly from this font of knowledge and wisdom. Cynthia's work is powerful, practical and will almost certainly fill a need you're curious about, especially if you are a regular reader of this blog.
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.
Dave continues and concludes his posts on anthro-complexity, with an important post that captures my feelings exactly about the role of the facilitator-host-practitioner*:
When the practitioner’s contribution is methodological rather than interpretive, the basis of their authority shifts. They are not authoritative because they can see what participants cannot; they are useful because they can design conditions that the system itself cannot easily design from within its existing patterns. That is a more modest and more honest claim, and it is one that can, in principle, be contested and revised by participants rather than being grounded in a theoretical framework that participants are not trained to evaluate. The mandate question remains: who commissions the work, on what terms, accountable to whom, but at least the answer is no longer occluded by the mystique of expert interpretation.
The whole post is an important read – as is the whole series. It offers a very important set of observations about the work of the complexity practitioner and should spark discussion in the facilitation community amongst thoughtful practitioners around the areas where their roles and work still sit uncomfortably with themselves.
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* I use this hyphenated term because in conversations with Dave about this thinking over the past few weeks, and with others, I recognize that what we call ourselves, and how we are viewed as “facilitators” or “hosts,” has much to do with the assumptions we all make about each other’s practice. Most facilitators don’t have much experience seeing other facilitators in action. Certainly almost all of my clients have seen far more facilitation approaches and actions than I have. So I find it important to try to tell people HOW I work rather than what title I use for myself, especially if we are contracting for work. Nevertheless, I’m appreciating Dave’s “practitioner” label as it is a neutral enough term that avoids a named role that comes with so much baggage. Me, I frequently use the terms ‘”host” and “facilitator” interchangeably and loosely, because I am trying to reach people and communities that describe themselves this way, so we can be in a much more sophisticated conversation about practice in complex systems and situations.
Participants in a meeting of the Japanese OD Network self-organizing in a dialogic container to discuss what they learning from an embodied experience of constraints, Kanzan University, Nagoya, 2019
Dave Snowden is publishing a TON of stuff these last few weeks, much of densely theoretical and full of references to thinkers and traditions that would probably take years to properly unpack. Nevertheless I appreciate these posts because “anthro-complexity” – the name he has given to his body of work – has been the most influential body of theory in helping me to think through the ideas of dialogic containers, hosting, sense-making, and leadership.
What has been missing from his work is a clear definition of anthro-complexity. I have described it as “the complexity of human systems” as a short-hand way of differentiating it from other ways of thinking about complexity. At any rate, Dave took a crack at a provisional definition this week:
Anthro-complexity holds that human complex adaptive systems are part of the natural world and embedded within it, while being irreducibly different from other natural systems in ways that matter for how we understand and intervene in them. Their agents have intelligence, identity, and intention: a reflexive capacity enacted in language, relationship, and cultural practice rather than located in any bounded interior; a sense of self always constituted in interaction with others, shaped by history, narrative, and cultural membership, and never fully available to conscious inspection; and the ability to act toward imagined futures in ways that alter the very conditions being acted upon. These are not complications to be managed but constitutive features of the system. Meaning does not simply emerge; it is enacted through embodied experience, narrative, and distributed social interaction, and it is always path-dependent, culturally situated, and shaped by history that cannot be undone.
This shifts the practitioner’s question. Not what this system is for, but what it is doing and what is becoming possible or impossible within it. Not “what should this system become?” but “what are the energy gradients, what can be shifted and what cannot, and what micro-interventions change the conditions under which different futures become available?” The role is not to design outcomes but to attend to what is already emergent, to read the terrain: what flows, what resists, what the material, the skills, the habits, the experience and the natural evolved talent (in other words, the craft) affords; and to intervene with and through the natural grain of how meaning actually forms rather than imposing frameworks from outside.
I like this for a number of reasons:
- The embedded nature of human systems means that we have to take into consideration the many contexts in which they are embedded and to which they are related.
- Meaning is both emergent and enacted, which means that people are making and enacting meaning alongside the emergence and enactment of the system. And as they do so they influence the system in different ways.
- Dave’s “practitioner’s question” is one that I too am trying to address. Yes to not designing outcomes. Yes also to attending to what I call (borrowing from Juarerro) the constraint regimes at play, which shape emergence, affordances, flows, exchanges, boundaries. attractors, connectors and identities.
- And furthermore, I agree strongly that the practitioners’s role is not imposition of frameworks or methods. In my practice I see methods as something I might call constraint-craft.
My own exploration of this world uses the term “host” for this work, as it connects to participatory practice in the Art of Hosting community and takes the emphasis off of the action of “facilitation” which essentially means “to make things easy.” I don’t do that. I design and offer scaffolding for experiences to for participants and groups to be together making sense of the work in order to act. And a lot of my writing here has been in-the-public thinking through of this problem of “facilitator as a person with an outsized profile” and “facilitator as a person who uses that power and trust to immediately vacate the field for participants to get to work.”
So I appreciate this definition and Dave’s continued clarity on these topics both as a way to clarify what we are actually talking about and as a set of ideas from which we can truly critique facilitation while also building up a role of host as complexity practitioner who crafts with constraints to enable meaning and action through and understanding of emergence, interaction and affordances. I think I have one more post in me on the series on theory that I have been writing (part 1, part 2, part 3) and it will be about the role and craft of the practitioner, the host, the person who builds the scaffolding of constraints, and what that craft looks like and what pitfalls we have to avoid.