I’m reading, writing and thinking a lot about containers these days. It has been a pervasive theme in my life, as I have constantly been obsessed with the concept, the ideas and the practices of building and holding containers for as long as I can remember. The spiritual practices I have cultivated in my life have always been related to containers. From the beginning of my facilitation career, the ideas that have most grabbed me are the ideas of hosting and holding space. I remember a couple of significant events in my thinking as I realized how important containers are …
A few months ago, I was immersed in teaching complexity within the framework of the Art of Participatory Leadership program (AoPL). Essentially, AoPL is the application of the Art of Hosting within leadership contexts, extending beyond traditional facilitation and hosting scenarios. With a strong emphasis on personal practice and the use of complexity tools, AoPL encourages a deeper exploration of the connections between the Four Fold Practice, complexity, and dialogic containers – topics I’d previously addressed in my chapter for the book ‘Dialogic Organizational Development‘. My recent revisit to these subjects has sparked fresh insights. In one of these sessions, …
Four things conspiring here today. So before you dive into this post, go play Horde of the Flies at Complexity Explorables. Play with the sliders. Find a way to lock all the dots in one super stable state. Find a way to ensure endless randomness. Find a way to have the dots self-organize such that patterns emerge, persist for a while, and then change. Play with trying to control the system. See if you can get desired results. Now, what’s going on here? There is a relationship between organization and self-organization. Systems self-organize within constraints. Without constraints, anything is possible, …
One of the hallmarks of a complex problem is the fact that we are confronted by paradox and polarity everywhere we turn. When a situation has a both/and in it, it is dynamic and unresolvable to one choice or the other. It needs to be managed, lived with, coaxed into a place where the positive aspects of both can coexist. These polarities exist everywhere in human systems. On my home island right now we are going through one of our periodic confrontations of the polarities that define our place. Fundamentally this polarity comes down to an age old struggle between …
That’s me, teaching something about living and dying systems from a decade ago. Years ago, I worked on a team with a client at a large US Foundation. We were planning a participatory process for a big stream of their work, and they were nervous. Large-scale participatory group methods were new to them, and lots of the leaders were nervous about losing control. That’s not uncommon, but the one thing that stuck with me was a line that came from our direct project lead. He said, “I don’t mind the highly participatory nature of the work, and I don’t worry …