Soon we will know if we are alone. A beautiful “Occasional Paper” from Doug Muir published at Crooked Timber about where we are in relation to the search for life on other planets. I love this description of the current moment:
What that means is that now, right now, we’re in a very special time. It’s a time when we’re actively looking for life out there — The Search is underway — but the question is still open.
For all of human history until the 1990s we couldn’t do anything but speculate. And at some point in the future — I suspect around 2100, but it could be 2150 or 2200 or 1500, whatever — we’ll know, or anyway we’ll be pretty sure we know. Right now is the only time in history when we’re able to actually Look, but we haven’t yet Found. This brief period is epistemologically unique. We are living through the short-lived Age Of The Search. And when it’s over, one way or another, it will be over forever.
I’ve been reading through Jen Briselli’s work both as an inspiration and a fresh take on much that I already know about what we both seem to love about complexity. One of the pieces that I’d recommend to others is this one on Stases Theory, a classical rhetorical technique for working with difference. Jen explores how difference works in complexity and offers these thoughts before moving in to a method and then a grounding in many streams of thinking from communication theory to complexity.
…disagreements are less like rungs on a ladder to be climbed stasis by stasis, and more like landscapes of unresolved questions and conflicting perspectives, overlapping and interconnected.
Crucially, when people are operating at different stases it isn’t always marked by overt disagreement or interpersonal conflict. Often, we don’t even realize we’re making sense of an issue differently, working at different stases, until we’re prompted to consider it. So, the question really isn’t “Where are we in the sequence?” as much as “Where is the crux of meaning making for each of us right now?”
Sometimes we don’t need to agree on the facts first, as long as we can still coordinate action around shared policies. Other times, coherence and collaboration absolutely depend on established facts and shared definitions before implications can be explored or decisions can be made. Knowing the difference isn’t just a matter for rhetoricians and laywers, but also one of collective diagnosis for teams trying to make complex decisions and take action together. It helps groups locate the friction so they can orient toward and navigate through it. In some ways, a stasis is less a blockage than a beacon — a signal where attention and understanding are most needed, and will provide the most leverage.
Oh the sports. I’ve been so busy lately, and travelling and working odd hours, that I haven’t had time to watch too many games. Nevertheless, I’ve jumped on the Blue Jays bandwagon for this World Series and, like much of Canada, become entranced with these loveable underdogs who continue their quest to become the absolute archetype of what can be accomplished with friendship, commitment to one another, and support. If they win the World Series tonight, you will never shut me up about how the intangibles are as crucial to quality work as the tangibles are. You can’t shut me up about that anyway.
It seems like the opposite also proves the case with the other two teams I devote much of my winter’s attention too. Both Tottenham Hotspur and the Toronto Maple Leafs are mailing it in at the moment, suffering periods of perplexing performance. Spurs are at least inconsistent, with wins like last weekend’s 3-0 v Everton coming at the same time as they get bundled from the League Cup or drop points in an anemic game against Monaco in the Champions League. They are also suffering an injury crisis again. The fact that the Premier League is so weird this season means that we currently sit third on 17 points, but if we lose to Chelsea tomorrow and Brentford beat Palace, the 11th place team can overtake us in one afternoon.
As for the Leafs, “discombobulated” is the word of the moment. They must be happy that the Jays are doing so well, because the Toronto fan base is ruthless when their team is underperforming. Heads will not yet roll at the Scotiabank Arena, but they are being feverishly scratched.
I stumbled on Jen Briselli’s work the other day. She’s a fantastic writer and communicator, distilling the complexity work that we both know and love and making it approachable and understandable to others. She asks great questions, and is introducing me to approaches and tools that are new and interesting and great process and facilitation debriefs to reflect on her practice.
And her Letter to a Young Systems Thinker speaks to me, drawing from poets, and artists and filmmakers and scientists to provide a really lovely set of thoughtfully articulated practices that are excellent advice for all of us. To wit:
Bruising
Some parts of a system only speak on impact: when you touch it, bump into it, crash through it. You can’t learn everything from a map. You can still trip over the rocks at your feet.
Deep knowing emerges when action and reflection collide, when ideas get tested against lived complexity, and when our models fall apart just enough to let something else poke through.
Consider this a form of gnosis: the type of knowing that arises not from detached observation, but from our own direct, lived experience. Unlike abstract knowledge (episteme) or belief (doxa), gnosis is intimate, situated, and relational.
The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot. — Werner Herzog
To know a system through gnosis is to enter the dialogue through participation and give credibility to intuition. It requires that we feel our way forward, and let our assumptions be reshaped in real time. This kind of knowing cannot be abstracted or outsourced. It is slow, iterative, and deeply personal. And it changes not just what we know, but how we identify the future outcomes we want to amplify.
Nice to meet you Jen.
Cedric Jamet and I together at the Art of Hosting Reimagining Education gathering a couple of weeks ago.
The other week we were sitting in the Queen’s University Biological Station in Elgin Ontario, opening our third annual Art of Hosting on Reimagining Education. Cedric Jamet was teaching about the chaordic path, the term we use for the leadership path that works with a dance of chaos and order. The chaordic space is the space of self-organization, where structure and form creates the conditions for otherwise chaotic spaces to produce direction, coherence, energy and engagement without top down control. It is a way of conceptualizing self-organization in groups, which is the kind of facilitation practice I specialize in.
The idea of self-organization, what it is, how it arises, what practices support it is been the single most important organizing question of my professional career. As Cedric put it in Elgin, this is what the world needs, to be hosted so that people can self-organize to improve their conditions, make beautiful and sustainable things and sustain good work with strong relationships. When we create the conditions that enable self-organization, we are creating places of “safe uncertainty” and relational connectivity. We create what I call “dialogic containers” which become places of meaning and sustainable connection. Strong dialogic containers can hold difference and conflict without rendering the relational field. They can provide spaces for meaning and depth and purpose. Sustained over time they can become “life-giving contexts.” As a facilitator and in my work leading and supporting leaders, everything we do points in this direction.
Over the past 20 years this inquiry has led me into two major areas of practice. I have studied and worked deeply with the Art of Hosting and the field of participatory process design and facilitation. Based around the “Four Fold Practice” – presence, participation, hosting contribution, and co-creation – the Art of Hosting is a simple framework for a practice that, as Cedric said, helps us enable self-organization. This is a well-established field of facilitation practice and I work with facilitation methods that are found in the fields of dialogic organizational development, collaborative change management, and anthro-complexity including those contained in the seminal collection of large groups methods, and small scale Liberating Structures, as well as the suite of methods from Participatory Narrative Inquiry.
The other area of practice I have explored is complexity, in an effort to understand the conditions by which self-organization arises. This has led me through the various threads of complexity in human and living systems initially through the work of Senge, Wheatley, Scharmer who came out of the system thinking world with new metaphors, models and understandings about how things worked. From there I dove deep into anthro-complexity, championed primarily by Dave Snowden who work on ontologies is a significant contribution to this field as it helps leaders, facilitators and process designers make good choices about the way they participate and intervene in different situations. I also read deeply and learned with other complexity-focused theorists and process designers like Cynthia Kurtz, whose work on story is especially important, and Glenda Eoyang, whose work on complexity and whose suite of methods and approaches called Human Systems Dynamics is accessible, simple, and extremely effective for the most part in seeing and working with complexity.
The two most significant academic works I’ve published reflected these two streams as I have written about and explored the ideas of dialogic containers as the key structures which enable self-organization and meaning-making. In Hosting and Holding Containers, I talk about the concept of a dialogic container and use the four-fold practice to describe how to work with these phenomena. In “Hosting Dialogic Containers: a key to working in complexity” I talk about containers from a more complexity-informed perspective and discuss the role of constraints in designing and hosting containers. A subsequent paper, published only in Japanese is actually closer to my current thinking on the constraints framework that I use.
This morning I am sitting in an Open Space meeting while all around this place a small team of folks are busy engaging in conversations that are necessary for creating their future. These people are interested in pedagogy and learning design, and I was struck by the fact that Open Space was a new experience for almost every single one of them. But I can hear the snippets of conversation and see the energy and attention in the work that is happening, and I continue to be astonished at how powerful self-organization is, given the right kind of container for it. We have an urgent question that is a deep attractor. We have connections and exchanges that are already strong in the team and made stronger by the visioning conversations we had yesterday. And we have important boundaries, including a threshold that was crossed with a new Director, a beautiful space that is full or opportunity and a timeline for the work that is both bounded and generous. There is urgency but not emergency, still room for excitement creativity and energy.
I have done many hundreds of Open Space events, large and small, and each one has delighted me as I watch groups of people self-organize and take responsibility for the issues that matter to them. I remained astonished by the powerful and generative nature of a life-giving dialogic container that emerges from a few enabling constraints thoughtfully applied and held. And I remain grateful for the immense body of work that underlies this approach to human organizations and communities and all those friends and teachers who guided and taught me along the way.
We’re getting soaked with a prime October Pineapple Express, an atmospheric river that is delivering wind and rain from down near Hawaii all the way to our coast, filling the streams, dusting the mountains with snow and welcoming the salmon home. I absolutely love this weather and this morning I’m sitting in my favourite cafe, window wide open and the full force of the rain falling on the pier and the sea. Ahhh.
Complexity delivers mind-blowing things all the time. In addition to, well, everything, the evolution of the universe has created both more entropy and more forms of order. When Margaret Wheatley wrote “Leadership and the New Science” she implored us to move on from the Newtonian model of the universe – linear, knowable, predictable – to embrace the quantum physics and living systems approaches that were the philosophical legacy of the 20th century. Using these big frames of how scientists understand reality as stories and metaphors for the systems that operate all around us is an all consuming cultural project as we seek to make sense of realities. In this video from Quanta Magazine, Robert Hazan and Michael Wong discuss their theory of information as they try to explain how evolution seeks to fill every possibility space that it creates. There are multiple stories that flow from this work including the idea that functional information is what powers evolution and increases the number of ways things can be organized, and that in turn increases resourcefulness and possibility. This flows from diversity and capacity and from life working to fill every affordance it encounters. I picture a vine probing every crack in a wall and finding new pathways to get a foothold, new creatures to evolve, new ways to combine the basic building blocks of the universe, even as it all happens with a stability of constrained possibility. Anyway, watch the video.
The most complex things I have ever encountered are my own toddlers. If you have parented a toddler, Tim Urban has your back. He perfectly describes the utter mystification of parenting a two year old. Read it in the rain.
Have s good weekend. Go Blue Jays.
The above is a photo of a great campfire that happened on Saturday night in the forest by a lake in Eastern Ontario. You had to be there. But if you want to do an interesting exercise, take a moment before reading on and make a list of things that you should do to create a great campfire experience.
I’m working away writing a book on dialogic containers and reflecting on the remarkable phenomenon of stability in the midst of change. I remember years ago Dave Snowden sharing a pithy description of the the difference between robust and resilient structures. Using the examples of a sea wall and a salt marsh, he says, essentially, that a robust system is one that survives by not being changed and a resilient system is one that survives by being changed. That description has always stuck with me and as I look at the nature of dialogic containers, ephemeral spaces which produce meaning between people, it’s interesting to me to think about what contributes to their relative stability in the face of change.
This was brought home to me again today while listening to a talk by Gil Fronsdel on the Buddhist practice of “Right View,” (he calls is “Wholesome View”) the first discipline of the Noble Eightfold Path. Fronsdel uses the example of standing in a rive to discuss what mental and spiritual stability looks like, even as a current flow all around you, carry the river over a waterfall. The way to address your fear of floating over a waterfall is to stand up and take a stable stance:
I’ve been in somewhat shallow rivers, maybe that the river was up to my mid?thigh, and I could lay down flat on the surface of the river, and it had a nice current that carried me beautifully down the river.And it was kind of fun and nice to be floating along. It feels really nice until you realize that the river is going right over a waterfall, a big waterfall. So then it’s not so nice anymore.
And so… you turn around, try to swim upstream, but…the river is pulling you down the stream faster than you can swim up. The waterfall is coming, you can hear the roar. And so all you have to do, though, is stand up in the river. Because it’s shallow… it’s just courage, it’s only up to your mid?thigh. And if you stand there, then the current of the river continues. It flows right by you. But you’re still.
You’re not separated from the current, but now you’re free of the current because you have the stability, the strength of standing there, and you’re far from any danger of going over the waterfall. It’s relatively easy now to walk to the shore or walk up river. And so we get swept away sometimes by our thoughts, swept away by our emotions, swept away by the world and concerns that are going on. And we don’t realize how much we’re being carried along, swept away by the current of this momentum of thoughts, momentum of desires, momentum of aversion. We don’t even see the waterfalls that’s going to take us over sometimes. But what mindfulness teaches us is that we could always have the ability to stand up in the current and kind of wake up and kind of be stable and strong.
In dialogue, containers offer a kind of stability to hold emotions and thoughts. Human beings thrive when there is a container in which we can fully participate, be fully human, and be. And they require us to have that overview of process and context, to see that we are in something that is meaningful, or not, and to notice what is contributing to that state of affairs. From there, we might even be able to catch ourselves and offering a slight shift, a slight move, a slight contribution that might catalyze more or less stability. It is a subtle art.
The way a conversation unfolds around a table and deepens and becomes sticky – you don;t want to leave it – is a kind of stability. When it breaks it’s hard to get it back again, and nif you weren’t a part of it “you had to be there” to understand what it is like. Other forms of stability for dialogue are held through rigid physical or protocol constraints so that deliberative chambers like court rooms and legislatures are designed for rational, non-emotional discourse. When feelings erupt in those chambers, the integrity of container fails, and chaos ensues, because those who are responsible for this spaces have no way to cope with the events of the moment but to shut it all down (don’t perform a haka in the New Zealand Parliament!). That can be a form of liberation, but in the end some form of stable container needs to arise in order for human relationships and conversations to unfold. Places like Parliaments and court rooms are structured to assert a particular kind of power relationship, so the physical and procedural stability of those containers is designed to re-establish that state of affairs “once every one has calmed down” and the dour business at hand can be considered again in the desired modality of the system, in these cases, predicated on notions of reason and civility.
But even in highly structured and constrained places, dialogic containers are emergent. You cannot force meaningful dialogue. You can only set some initial conditions and monitor what unfolds. Even though a room may have robust physical restrictions, adjustments to the constraints of the container can still offer a chance at something meaningful happening. I bristle from the idea that a dialogue facilitator’s role is “to create and hold the container.” I prefer instead to think of that role as one of using constraints to increase the probability that a a dialogic container will emerge. The way I have learned to practice facilitation is to be a witness to the capacity of a group to self-organize and manage itself with minimal intervention from a “facilitator.” Instead we work hard to design initial conditions, and pay attention to threshold practices like beginnings and endings to invite human beings into a place in which meaningful work gets done.
For my whole career I’ve been consumed with the mystery of the emergence and stability of dialogic containers, how something so ephemeral can create deeply meaningful experiences, and how we might find the ways to work with containers – through constraints of connection, exchange, attractors and boundaries – to increase the chances for powerful dialogue and meaning making. Everywhere I look, there are examples and lessons to be learned about this.
So, back to that campfire that is pictured above. If you took the time to make the list, think about whether that list will guarantee a great campfire every single time, from the get go. If not, what do you think you will have to do to make that more likely to happen? The answer to that question might be a good way to think about your approach to facilitation.