I’m writing about dialogic containers these days. They are tricky to describe, and in the same way that Mike asserts a sophisticated understanding of systems, it’s important to find helpful metaphor for a dialogic container. As facilitators we are used to using the world “container” to describe something that we can sense, feel or even physically see. The term does not convey the nature of an actual thing, but if you ask people what they mean by container you find yourself in a metaphorical world. And also, it feels like a finger pointing at the moon. Dialogic containers are important to dialogic organizational development. In the Dialogic Organization Development book there are several metaphors employed by several of my co-authors to describe containers. What I’m finding is that we commonly refer to containers in four distinct ways…
Lots of new stuff is bubbling up into the Art of Hosting we teach, including different ways of teaching. Read on to find out more.
Gabriele Bammer and Jean Boulton identify a role and a set of capacities needed for research teams, and they call that role a “complexity entrepreneur.”
This style of operating in a complex world requires engendering a milieu in which people regain confidence in working with intuition, making sense of subjective and evolving information, and are able to hone the skills of judgement. Traditional methods of mapping and modelling have their place in surfacing less visible systemic patterns in relatively stable situations, but such methods can also mask the qualitative, contextual and emerging aspects central to facilitating a deeper understanding of the dynamics of change, stuckness and opportunity. Complexity entrepreneurs need to go beyond the analytical and gain experience in handling the ambiguous, the paradoxical and the co-evolving nature of context and action.
To brand these skills as entrepreneurial puts them in a positive light. It is hard not to feel at odds in a world seeking predominantly hard evidence and clear evaluation of alternatives to support conclusions and action strategies. And even with those intent on ‘embracing complexity’ there often lurks the hope that methods can be identified that will reduce that complexity sufficiently so that objective clarity is found. This can lead to a search for methods at the expense of enhancing and valuing the cognitive and emotional qualities needed to apprehend the terrain, judge what can be done and take action.
I’m sure some will seize on the brand title without seizing on the actual role, but I think there is some decent descriptions in this article that can help teams of researchers and others see the role of those who are skilled nd experienced at working with complexity. I especially like their description of the shadowy forces that drive our search for methods. We are teaching this week a cohort of labour educators in the Art of Hosting and we have a two day workshop that deliberately dives below methods. Even though we are sharing and using methods to ground the learning, the focus of the workshop is on the role of hosts as people who work with constraints to work with emergence.
I’ll have a lot more to say about this!
Some good links on complexity
Roope Kaaronen’s: The Ecology of Design. A nice introduction to path dependancy, affordances and ecological psychology.
Alicia Juarrero being interviewed by Jim Hutt on her book Context Changes Everything and on how constraints create possibility landscape and constraint regimes.
The Vampire Problem is a thought experiment that demonstrates why it is so hard to act in uncertainty. Maria Popova does her usual brilliant job of unpacking it.
Martina Dimopoulou takes over then Cynefin blog with a fabulous post on salience and how we notice the world and the weak signals within it.
Brian Ponch Rivera takes a deep dive into John Boyd’s development of his thinking behind the OODA loop. It’s an interesting exposition of how a curious learner assembles a framework over time and worth a read for that reason, even if you know nothing about OODA.
Other good things to read and listen to.
The elephant in the room is a subject that never gets old. Cheyenne Coxon talks about how and why to make friends with the pachyderm: “The elephant affects everyone in the room, even if they’re not directly involved in the situation. After a certain point it all becomes so distracting and ridiculous to pretend and navigate around it that something has to give. There’s no real telling on the timeline there, but it becomes a volatile situation that ramps up everyone’s anxiety as they wait for an impending fallout. It actually takes a lot of energy to pretend something is fine when it’s not, and the dissonance it creates in our bodies is an insidious source of stress and poor health for people and organizations.”
Part Two continues the exploration with some reflections on living with the elephant, finding friends and when it’s time to leave the elephant enclosure.
Weak signals from the “breathing grounds.” That term is used by Ramon Kataquapit to describe the precious James Bay Lowlands, a bleak region of estuary and peat lands that ring the southern end of James Bay. It’s Ramon’s backyard and what he says as a youth leader about the future of these lowlands is a weak signal about the dangers of our current federal government’s major projects initiative.
A segment on CBC’s The Current about a new reality show on Netflix based on the Stanford Prison Experiment. I won’t be watching the show. But the segment today had an interview with psychology researcher Jay Van Bevel in which he shares some interesting insights that are relèvent to my triangle tool for understanding dialogic containers. Leadership matters, not just authority or design.
We don’t actually “host emergence.” We host interactions and work with constraints that change what is possible. In human systems, interpretation matters too: how people, including facilitators, make sense of what is happening changes what happens next.