Lots of good stuff coming through the pipe lately. Here are some links for your attention:
AI is running our lives and we need to find ways to deal with it.
- A conversation with LamDa, an artificial intelligence, and the implications of this transcript. The stuff seems like science fiction, but so much of our lives are starting to be mediated through AI bots. We are heading for a reckoning with our ethics, and I’m not entirely sure that the folks with their hands on the technology levers of power are equipped for the job. Make philosophy and ethics a required part of STEM curricula? Please?
- Perhaps as an antidote, or a vision of what could be, Harold has a nice piece about managing in complexity and the need for what he brilliantly calls “permanent skills.”
- And because Harold is such a must-read much of the time, here’s another piece on how he navigated information wars and expertise during the first two years of the pandemic. Paying attention to signals and having well curated streams for receiving good information is very very difficult, and not something that most of us have the time and experience to do. And so we are preyed upon by single viewpoints that have a lock on our dopamine production, feeding confirmation bias and disconnection. Harold’s writing, as always, seeks to bring the most brilliant human capacity of sensemaking into this work.
Being a better facilitator
- Nadia and Corinne remind us of the power of invitation. I have blogged about this stuff for decades, but I never tire of reading simple,well thought out pieces on this. Share them with your clients and groups you are working with, because they help to spark the conversation that will lead to designing good group process.
- Beth Cougler Blom dusts off her preparation protocol for in person meetings and finds that it needs an upgrade. Useful to me as I have been quite slow to return to in person work, and I’m mostly okay with that. So that means I need to be really conscious when preparing space for in person meetings, and reports from the front line are welcome!
Geek out on some sports and complexity theory
- Some of the most exciting work to me in applied complexity is happening in the sports world. This is a truly OUTSTANDING twitter thread from Phillip O Callaghan charting hours worth of reading on nonlinear pedagogy and constraints led approaches to sport, which has implications for all the ways in which we teach complexity in complex settings. Honestly, this is a course syllabus.
- Here is a really good piece on how the former Australian cricketer Greg Chapelle managed his cognitive load and attention to enable himself to make decisions in a environment that required both hear and wide situational awareness. Fascinating discussion on how we find strategies for managing ourselves in novel cognitive environments, and how so much of the tools we need are already available to us, to be exapted from other parts of our evolutionary journey.
And I leave you with a lovely quote shared by Euan:
[People] go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
– St. Augustine
That’s probably enough for you to get stuck in for a few weeks.
This is a good twitter thread from Kay Whitlock:
There is an interesting set of narratives that underpins the populist project in North America. Wedge politics has always been about stoking fear in an unreal other (there is a campaign ad for a Black Republican running for Congress that shows him holding an AR-15 rifle and threatening to empty the clip at 5 “Democrats in white hoods” as Ku Klux Klan members run through his back yard. I’m obviously not linking to it, but there you go.)
The reason for this is that a wedge issue like abortion or gay rights or immigration is easy to paint with the brush of “someone is coming to get you” and it gets people out to the polls to pull a lever or vote against a policy proposal and also elect the ones who support the populist position. This is an old game, perfected in the early 2000s by Karl Rove in the US and aided by Big Data and polling analytics and now Facebook and twitter algorithms that can delivered hand crafted artisnal and bespoke fear, right to your eyes.
But any time there is a “boogy man” we know that the cipher itself is a screen for projection and what is interesting is that North American populists project a very interesting set of fears onto their boogeymen.
Consider:
- “Immigrants are invading”
- “Our way of life is under attack”
- “Your children are not safe”
- “The government will seize your property”
- “The elites are sexual predators”
- “They want to outlaw our religion.”
- “Your freedom of movement is being taken away”
- There is even talk on the extreme right of “white genocide”
Let’s be clear. These are projections and deliberately provocative statements. We see these sentiments in the populist right in both Canada and the United States and these fears are constantly stoked, providing a toxic breeding ground for draconian policy that, contrary to the calls for freedom, are beginning to issue draconian laws. I think they land with people, because they recognize that these statements mirror the realities of what colonial practice has been here. These statements are a deep and complicated truth about white supremacy culture that are used to deflect responsibility for colonization and direct them at “the other.”
Now North American culture has a very hard time coming nto terms with the broken treaties, genocide and theft of land that has enabled the countries of this hemisphere to be established and have allowed settler cultures in many places to amass tremendous wealth and prosperity. But every one of the wedge issue tropes above has been, or still is, colonial government policy in this place. In fact, just last week the Supreme Court of the United States issued a shocking decision on Tribal sovereignty.
We have to come to terms with colonization. Until we do, it will continue to infect our cultural veins with guilt fear and shame that will continue to drive a toxic mix of fascism and white supremacy in policy and in the civic sphere.
The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; thiswas never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.
And Kate Bush just got her windfall from it:
It is not going to work for everyone, but if it’s one thing I have learned since the dawn of the World Wide Web, its that we can still find the means to produce and share our own creative work and there are ways to make a living out of that.
I’m happy to lift up the voices of those who are creating incredible new ideas and art that are meaningful to me, and lift them a little to the eyes and ears of the truly top rate people I have in my circles.
So for your edification, have a listen to what Lady Pace and Shael Wrinch, a couple of neighbours of mine from Bowen Island, do on a Sunday.
This quote from Richard Rohr, is one of the core principles of the Center for Action and Contemplation.
Humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living.
It is also good complexity praxis, good leadership practice and good pedagogy.
I was on a coaching call this morning where this came up too, listening to a team I am working with describe the trap we often find ourselves in as consultants, tempted to provide the new things a group should be doing, often in the form of recommendations or lists of actions and projects to be managed. The idea is that we often try to get folks to learn and be different and then generate projects or plans that they can execute.
And that is not a good way to do it in emergent, complex and dynamic environments. If I want to learn to think differently I need to put myself in situations where the constraints afford me different possibilities to act differently. For example, I am currently learning to play jazz and I am currently without a teacher meaning that I am relying on lots of online resources to help guide me. The danger with this is that I can just learn how to play licks and lines and chord progressions or scale exercises based on what someone else is doing. This is not really making music, but rather making sounds. If I’m not careful all I will learn to do is ape teachers, master exercises or imitate recordings and that’s not why I want to learn jazz. I want to learn jazz to be able to express myself differently on guitar and for a myriad of other reasons that I play music.
Like any language, jazz has a grammar and a vocabulary. The grammar is the harmonic and melodic theory that underpins the style of music, some of which is shared with other musical forms and some of which is uniquely “jazz” in the same way that languages have different dialects which may even be mutually unintelligible amongst speakers of the same language. The vocabulary is made up of phrases and lines that one learns in context, much as you might hear a familiar word or phrase being spoken in a language you are learning. Using these phrases and lines, based in the common rules of grammar (or deliberately breaking them) requires, almost literally, speaking them out.
And the remarkable thing is that when I play this new material either against a backing track or, ideally, with another person, I learn to THINK differently about the music I am making. There is no amount of study of written notes and harmonic theory that will make me a jazz musician. Playing jazz is a way of thinking about music, expression, collaboration, culture, improvisation, order, tension, control and creativity. It must be lived into.
Or as I wrote down during my coaching call this morning, we grow through what we go through.
Teaching people to think differently is impossible without providing the affordances first for us to act differently.
You might not know that one of the things I have developed a deep passion for over the past 20 years or so is football. Soccer. Association football. Fütbol. It started when I lived in the UK as a kid and supported our local team Tottenham Hotspur. It waned a bit during the 1980s and 1990s when it was hard to watch games and no one in Canada really cared about the sport. But one of the great gifts of the internet was rekindling familiarity with the sport that I love.
I love it for so many reasons, not the least of which is that it is complexity practice embodied, that it is about community and belonging, that it is about accessibility and passion and love and activism and development. And you get to stand and sing with people in public, which is never a bad thing. It is a beautiful game and it truly is “life.” It is an expression of culture and place and time that embodies so much of the struggles that take place throughout society. And it has the capability to drive you into all kinds of emotional territory and gives us a chance to explore all of those topographies of being human.
So this past weekend was kind a distillation of all that and I just wanted to record it all for posterity to see what happens when 48 passes in life of a football supporter.
For me the weekend began on Friday night when TSS Rovers played two matches in the men’s and women’s divisions of League 1 BC. League 1 is a semi-professional tier in Canadian soccer and, on the men’s side, is the second tier. On the women’s side it is currently the highest level of women’s soccer as we don’t yet have a domestic professional league in Canada. We don’t have promotion or relegation in our soccer system at the moment, and so our teams exist so that we can develop players and move them into higher tiers of the professional game. They players get promoted not the teams.
TSS Rovers is a club I have been involved with since they fielded a team of all-Canadian men in the United Soccer League 2 which is the fourth tier of American soccer. We started a supporter group called The Swanguardians, which a radically inclusive group (anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic) inspired by similar groups in places like St. Pauli in Germany, and Detroit City FC in the USA. Over the pandemic years our support for the club developed into a few of us working with the club to create a supporters trust and this year we became the first club in Canada to offer up to 49% of it’s equity ownership to supporters. We have sold over 650 shares to 300 co-owners since December and our initial offer is still open.
One of the initiatives our Swanguardians supporter group has undertaken, is a a Prideraiser, which is an event done by North American supporters groups throughout Pride month. Pledge an amount per goal and every goal scored raises money for a charity. This year we are supporting Rainbow Refugee in Vancouver. The club is also raising money for its newly minted Foundation, to provide funds and scholarships to kids who want to play soccer and develop their game. We kicked off our Prideraiser campaign on Friday and our women’s team scored 7 goals right out of the gate. Subsequently they scored another 2 yesterday and the men’s team scored 3 yesterday to to bring our 48 hour total up to 12 goals with 8 matches left to play in June! Over $600 raised.
Saturday the Vancouver Whitecaps played at home and although I have been an active supporter of that team for 14 years, I gave up my season’s tickets over the way they have handled numerous sexual abuse scandals over the years. Until there is a leadership change there I won’t be attending live matches, but I still follow the team and have many many friends who are active in the various supporters groups. On Saturday the contracted security force at BC Place where the Whitecaps play, made a complete botchup of a situation and ended up ejecting one of my close friends who is the President and lead capo of the Southsiders on the basis of provably false accusations. BC Place security has been plagued with issues for many years now relating to general security theatre and under trained staff being given too much policing authority, and this event was a real nadir. Football and life collide in all the ways.
Yesterday I was excited to celebrate my birthday with my family by all going into Vancouver to watch our National Men’s Team play a World Cup preparation match against Panama. I started the day by watching Grimsby Town secure promotion to the English Football League (and there is a whole other story why that matters to me) and then went into the city to meet our kids and their partners for the game and a birthday dinner.
Our men’s team has been amazing in this World Cup qualifying cycle, ranked 38th in the world now after moving up from 119th. We won our Confederation qualification tournament and qualified for our first world cup since 1986. We have immense talent on the team right with the likes of Alphonso Davies, Jonathan David, Cyle Larin, Atiba Hutchinson, Stephen Eustaquio, and many others. This is our golden generation of men’s players, and they are finally starting to show their stuff on the world stage. I would argue they are beginning to reach to the levels that our women’s team have occupied over the past ten years!
Unfortunately our National Soccer Association has been dithering on negotiating a contract for them and after hoping for discussions to take place since March, the Canada Soccer Association finally met with them on June 2 and tabled an offer that was far below what the players considered fair. As a result the players refused to train and then at the last minute, without an acceptable contract in place for their service, refused to play the Panama friendly. There are a million nuances to this situation, but as always I back the players who have devoted their lives to this game and to representing Canada and growing the Canadian game. It is their bodies that do the work, their lifetime commitment that has secured history and while of course they are supported by lots of folks, ultimately in Canada we do a poor job of supporting our men’s and women’s teams. They have carried the country on their backs, have been willing to negotiate and did not deserve to be treated with so much disrespect.
There is lots you can read about this evolving situation (and its wider implications for our fledgling national professional men’s league), but it is one more example of how fütbol is life. And in life I almost always support the workers in these situations, and especially where health, safety and long term injury and disability are the price of playing for your country.
People often say that sports and life should be separate. That there is no room for politics in sports or that it doesn’t matter. But not only is that not true at all, but football in particular is a broad canvas on which the entirety of the human experience is painted. In the last 48 hours, I’ve been amazed to witness just how varied that canvas can be, and so, that’s probably worth recording here for posterity.