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.
A group’s capability is related to its internal differences. Work with those and all kinds of capabilities can be revealed.
I work with lots of organizations in transition, and always have done. Specifically organizations who leadership is leaving, often representing a transition from a founder to the next generation. These situations are fraught with new and unexpected emotions, states, and situations. The folks that remain find themselves relying on stuff that was invisible before the transition but which is missed now. It is a time when movement forward needs to be slow and deliberate.
Today I read a lovely and heart-filled post from Jasmine Williams at the Interaction Institute for Social Change describing this moment. It's a moment of aporia – "being at a loss" – and a moment which demands that a group and individuals be in a different way. Jasmine writes about the practices she is relying on in these moments including ,
**What's for us will find us
**This is one of those affirmations, mantras, that I keep on a sticky note attached to my computer. It’s a grounding reminder to myself that we will move through this in the way we were supposed to. Whether you believe in fate or some grand design or not, I believe there’s wisdom to be found in returning to a foundational trust in the winding path that leads to the abundant future (however different that future may be from current expectations).
A side benefit of rooting in this reminder is that it’s allowed me to hold on more gently and leave space for the emergent, unexpected, and confronting. How freeing it can be to release the tight hold on an outcome when you trust it will be the right one, reached at the right time, by the right people!
There is an art to this kind of waiting-to-be-found. It requires sensitivity and awareness. It requires quieting and emptying so that one is available to be found. And it also requires slow movement and lots of scanning for possibilities. If what is needed hasn't revealed itself yet, it's a sign to slow down. It will come. I love that these virtual friends are being so transparent with what they are practicing.
Dave Snowden publishes a post today thick with some interesting brain research and some musing about how we might structure organizations along the lines of what we know about how brains work:
What would be different is an organisational design practice that treats cognitive profile distribution as an analogue substrate to maintain, not individual variation to manage toward a norm. It would assess tools, processes, and frameworks for their effect on that substrate — asking, in Clark’s terms, whether each is scaffolding or substituting, rather than measuring only their effect on output. It would recognise that anything enforcing cognitive convergence at scale- process environments, competency frameworks, uniform AI policy- is making a trade on behalf of the collective that the collective has not been asked to consent to, and may not be able to reverse.