In the Art of Hosting world we have a few shared core teachings that show up in nearly all the learning workshops that happen. At some point we talk about complexity – we usually explore the Chaordic Path as a simple introduction into complexity – and we always touch on the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting.
Back in 2014 I was doing a project with the United Church of Canada looking at the different levels of their structure in British Columbia and imagining what they could also be. If there is one thing that Churches have consistently done from the beginning it is that they adopt new forms. At the moment the United Church, and many other mainline progressive Christian denominations, are going through a massive shift, probably the biggest one since the Reformation. And it’s affecting everything.
So as I was doing this consulting work I started meeting communities of people who were asking how could they live through these transitions. Not survive them necessarily, but go with the transformation that was happening. As a part of the work I was doing I started offering talks and workshops based in the Art of Hosting, but wrapped in the theology of the United Church, becasue it turns out that having a way to understand complexity and to host life community is both necessary in struggling churches AND is pretty much the basis of Christian practice.
Now for those who don’t know, the United Church of Canada is a progressive, liberal Protestant denomination committed to radical inclusion and social justice. I was raised in that Church and at one point had my heart set on becoming a minister in that Church. My own spiritual practice is grounded in contemplative Christianity and I am an active member of the Bowen Island United Church where I help lead worship and preach one Sunday a month so we can give our paid minister a break.
That is just context to help you understand the theology behind this talk.
This talk was a keynote for the Northern Presbytery of British Columbia annual meeting from 2014. That year the churches of northern BC were gathering in Prince George to be together and practice being a bigger community. They invited me to come and speak on the work I was doing around community building and I chose to share the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice and I relished the chance to share these ideas using stories and teachings from scripture.
So if you work with Churches or Christian religious communities and you are interested in the way the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice basically help us use the teachings of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel in practice to build community, click here and have a listen.
It’s been a fair few interesting weeks. A heavy work schedule with some important in person facilitations, combined with steady online work and teaching and an extended family health emergency is stretching our resources around here. So here’s a little news.
Social media rethink
On the social media front I’m still active on Twitter, and just waiting to see what happens there. But I have also opened a Mastodon account and I like it better. Twitter was created in an era where the speed and interaction and brevity of text messaging met blogging. Mastodon feels much more like blogging in that we all have accounts that hosted in different places and you can follow each other. it’s like Twitter meets blogging plus an RSS feed. Consider your friends’ Mastodon accounts as mini blogs rather than twitter accounts. At its best, Twitter is great for banter and conversation and has a feel of a transparent text conversation. But it’s under the control of a single unstable genius at the moment and demonstrating why we should not trust critical infrastructure to single individuals or companies. Musk is messing with Twitter as if someone got hold of the power grid and decided to create a whole new type of power generation by firing all the hydro dam technicians and trying to find nuclear scientists to keep the old system going and also get a new one up and running right away.
Twitter was robust. Robust things fail catastrophically. Musk is in danger of taking the compancecy dive into chaos from which return is neight guaranteed nor cheap.
So just stay here by subscribing to this blog’s RSS feed or subscribing by email over there on the right sidebar, or add me at Mastodon @chriscorrigan@mastdn.ca. I’m still on Facebook and LinkedIn but I don’t interact much in those places.
What I’m doing besides work
I might start sharing some different content here, and probably will do so as well at Mastodon too, so in addition to posts here on complexity and facilitation and working with groups, you might start seeing some stuff relating to other passions I am interested in. That includes building Canada’s first ever supporter owned semi-pro soccer team, TSS Rovers, who won a men’s championship in our fourth season and are on our way to play pro-teams in Canada’s national championship for the Voyageur’s Cup. If you are in Canada you can buy a share here and be a part of history. Our teams play in the third level of men’s soccer in Canada and the highest level of women’s soccer.
You may know I am a long time amateur musician and I sing and play liturgical music, folks songs, Irish music and popular music and I have started expanding my guitar chops by studying and learning jazz guitar over the past few years. That has married two passions – jazz and guitar – that I have kept separate for most of my life because the thought of getting them together was overwhelming. But I’m having the time of my life playing this music. Enjoy what I am enjoying. Here’s a Canadian guitarist I am studying, Reg Schwager and legendary bassist Don Thompson playing Everything Happens To Me.
So those are a couple of things that might seem to pop up here out of the blue.
Some cool stuff to share
Finally, I continue to read and earn about my professional craft and lately I have come across some hight quality recourses that I HAVE to share with you all:
- A snapshot of REOS’s scenario planning methodology recently used in Australia and Aotearoa to address future wildfire issues. With thanks to my mate Geoff Brown, a member of that team. It’s so good I’ve added it to the Facilitation Resources page.
- A toolkit for starting up communities of practice from my friend Nancy White, who is just the best there is at this stuff.
- A reader-focussed report assessment tool from Fresh Spectrum that will help you keep your audience in mind so that the reports you are writing get used. This is a great harvesting tool.
- A nice six step process for strategic planning from my Aussie Art of Hosting mates at the Jeder Institute.
- A for you theory-heads, a paper by Albert Linderman on Sense-making Methodologies and Ethnography published at the Spryng.io website. I’ve started in on some of Dervin’s work on this. It’s heavy going in a good way.
So there you go. What have you been up to?
Dave Snowden has a new post up this week in which he gives us a situational snapshot about a big chunk of his body of work he has been developing for a number of years now. I love these posts because every so often Dave publishes them to consolidate teaching he has done and methods he has been working on in practice. They have the energy of “okay…I think I’ve got something here. Check it out.”
I alos love these posts becasue they always offer me something to dive further into and ways to improve my own practice.
So first go and read his post, “Estuarine mapping first edition.“
The metaphor of an estuary is powerful in many ways and round where I live, I get to hang out in estuaries. These are geographic features which are critical habitats and essential incubators for life in near-shore marine coastal ecosystems. The Estuary pictured above is at the end of Mannion Bay below where I live. At one end Killarney Creek flows through a lagoon and over a weir into a tidal estuary that experience 4.5 meter tidal ranges. Sometimes the water flows upstream into the lagoon, making the water there brackish and changing the kinds of life that lives and thrives there. At other times of the water rushing down the river pushes fresh water far out into the bay, delivering debris and food to the marine creatures that only live in the salt water of the bay. As Dave points out in his post “In an estuary (but not a delta) the water flows in and flows out. There are things you can do only at the turn of the tide. There may be granite cliffs which you only have to check every decade or so, sandbanks that are checked daily and so on.” And so the context determines what is possible, and the context changes, so cadence and rhythm and timing are important.
A couple of things stand out for me in Dave’s post, and I want to explore these in my practice in the next ittle while. First Dave has been talking about his typology of constraints for quite a while now, and that’s been massively influential in my own work. Dave’s typology currently is:
- Rigid or fixed, like a sea wall or dyke
- Elastic or Flexible
- Tethers – like a climbing rope they snap into place when you need them
- Permeable – some things can get through
- Phase shift – like Roe v Wade, there is a process in the system which can produce a sudden significant change
- Dark constraints – a reference to dark matter, we can see an effect but not what is creating the said effect
These are helpful and they help me think HOW to change the constraints in a system. When I introduce people to constraints I talk about first of all connecting and containing constraints (a distinction I also learned from Dave). I then break these down a bit further using material I learned from Dave and Glenda Eoyang in their works on containers, work I developed into a book chapter and a paper (original in English, updated in Japanese ) a number years ago. Connecting constraints influence the actions of agents as they relate to each other. and then we explore different kinds of constraints. Connecting constraints are connections and exchanges between agents in a system. Containing constraints are the attractors and boundaries in a system. And human systems have a special kind of constraint called identity that other complex system don’t have and that makes the field of anthro-complexity a distinct branch.
I teach these in a kind of scaffolded way (thanks Ann Pendelton and Dave for yet ANOTHER useful metaphor) by first having people look for patterns and then ask what constraints are keeping those patterns in place. Helpful patterns can be stabilized by tightening constraints, and unhelpful patterns can be broken by loosening constraints. We then start to find connections, exchanges, attractors, boundaries and identities and look for ways to shift them.
The problem with a simple scheme like that is that makes it seem like constraints are obvious and easy to spot and work with. So the scaffolding I use invites people to look for them specifically, but as Dave points out in the post, “The purpose of a typology is to see things from different perspectives not to allocate things to types – always a difficult thing to get across.” So what I’m taking from Dave’s work here is to move people quickly from the idea that “there are five kids of constraints” into a much more subtle and less easily defined and delineated set of constraints, because sometimes a connection is an attractor and a boundary is indistinguishable from an exchange and is also an identity, etc. You see the problem. We use a form to help people find these five, but in strategic work, we abandon that form after the first iteration of working with constraints. Complexity workers need to be good at finding subtle, context-specific constraints and TYPES of constraints. Dave’s post opens up possibilities for finding lots of different ways to name, think about and work with these things.
So I’m excited by the post and the links and thinking and it’s timely as we have a third iteration of the Complexity from the Inside Out course starting this week (do register if interested) and so I’ll have a chance to drop some of this thinking into my own practice imminently.
This weekend is Thanksgiving in Canada, and with that in mind, I want to once again lift my hands and gratitude to Dave for being so generous and uncompromising in his thinking and mentorship. I’ve learned an immense amount from him and continue to do so.
In our Complexity from the Inside Out program, we do a session on evaluation, looking at some of the implications that complexity has for traditional models of monitoring and evaluation. This is especially an issue in the non-profit world where organizations find themselves managing complexity while being subject to requirements from funders that treat their operations as if they were ordered and predictable.
It is common for participants in these sessions to ask the question “Complexity is all good, but how do we actually deal with the funding bodies that want us to measure everything and create targets?”
Well, this report from a series of conversation convened by the UN Development Program offers a helpful starting point for having these conversations with funders. Here are some of their framing questions:
- How can we measure in ways that enable and incentivize learning and adaptation?
- For whom and why do we measure (recognizing that measurement is often an extractive activity done to satisfy a donor rather than something with the primary objective of learning and empowering local change agents)?
- What should we measure when we are just starting out (e.g. at the intervention design stage) given we may not know what solutions or success will look like? What is the role of baselines and how do we change measures as we learn and adapt?
In my experience, having these conversations early on is critical so that a grantee working on a complex project and their funders can create an evaluation approach that is coherent with the work they are doing. In this article you will find many good conversations starters and framing ideas to help start this co-creation without alienating anyone in the conversation. It pays to meet people where they are at, and that includes funders and folks that are wedded to ordered approaches to evaluating change work despite the reality that those approaches might not work, or even be harmful, to a complex project.
Fall in the north is a time for teaching for me!. I have a few different courses and workshops on offer this fall, including our third cohort of Complexity from the Inside Out, which is a program Caitlin and I have put together from 20+ years of collective experience with dialogue and personal leadership tools in service of working with complexity.
I invite you to join us (and an amazing group of co-learners) for our fall cohort of this highly engaging, practice focussed program. Together we will explore and learn effective and meaningful ways to better understand and work with complexity at many scales and in different contexts. We know that complex challenges need to be engaged in multiple ways including practices and approaches focussed on the complexity of our inner human systems (mind and mindset, emotions, reactions, conditioned patterns, neurobiology and mystery); the space of engagement between us (in dialogue, collaboration and sensemaking in our teams, organizations, communities); and in our work to influence the larger systemic changes that are so needed with the many complex challenges of our times.
The Complexity Inside & Out Program includes:
- 8 engaging online learning and practice sessions.
- Including an Open Space session with your colleagues.
- 2 small group “learning pods” discussion sessions.
- Applied practice exercises
- Online classroom with recordings, resources, discussion space and more.
- Connection and co-learning with amazing colleagues from around the world
In the course we cover a number of tools and practices from various bodies of work including:
- Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework and his work on anthro-complexity
- Tools from Glenda Eoyang’s Human System Dynamics
- Participatory Narrative Inquiry and sense-making practices from Cynthia Kurtz’s work.
- Personal practice for working with limiting beliefs, the reactivity loop and internal narrative.
- Developmental and complexity focused evaluation
What we offer in this course is a framework that helps to links these areas of practice so that your work with complex challenges can develop coherence with both personal development and work in the world outside of yourself.
We focus on inquires that participants bring to the session too, and in the past two cohorts we have explored activism, equity and justice, various topics in community and organizational development, applications in education systems and the non-profit world. We have had some great cohorts full of folks who are working in all kinds of different contexts. The variety and diversity is a huge bonus, and this cohort is shaping up to be similar.
If you have no experience of complexity work, you will get a deep introduction to this field. For more experienced practitioners, we aim to support you hitting the next level in your practice. You are likely to learn a few new things and develop your own map of a coherence for complexity work that includes the personal as well as the systemic.
There are spaces left and we give a good team discount which allows you to come with your colleagues. Times will work well for folks in North and South America, Central and Western Europe and Africa. We are considering offering a cohort in the new year that will work for Australasia too, so if you are in that region, let us know.