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.
Here is a powerful and honest piece of writing about living with long haul Covid. I’m curious how many of my friends and readers have also had these experiences. So far, touch wood, I haven’t had the illness yet. But even typing “yet“ worries me a little. I do however think that there is something collective in the symptoms that Maria Farrell describes in this essay. It is as if the virus doesn’t only infect us individually but also our collective consciousness and will too:
“There’s no steady state. Covid is coming for all of us and each time it’s a roll of the dice. I’ve had it twice now. The first time knocked me out for about six months, and the second time did sharply alien and unpleasant things to my brain. I’m so scared that collectively all our brains are getting fucked, and we won’t be able to sustain concentration in the immersive and demanding story-webs I believe are necessary to keep imagining our large and interlinked society into existence. I worry people like me will succumb to premature dementias as a result of the brain damage we’ve incurred, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And there are so many of us. And all of it just as our institutions are self-destructing and we need amplified and deep-form subjectivity to solve planetary-level hard problems.”
–Maria Farrell.
In this sense I don’t think it matters if we’ve contracted Covid once or twice or not at all. The virus has changed the way we live and has created a timeline we can never retreat from.
I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally.
Óscar Romero, The Violence of Love: The Pastoral Wisdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero, compiled and translated by James R. Brockman (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 200.
Canada is not irredeemable as an idea. As a country founded on nation-to-nation treaty relationships in which existing Indigenous governance exists alongside common law, it is indeed possible to create a place in the world in that transforms a colonial legacy into a relational future. Canada founded on a vision that was exclusionary at the outset, and yet, the bones are there for it to be a place that is structurally inclusive and equitable.
I don’t apologize for my idealism about what we are led to by the north star of a far off post-colonial world. It guides my view and decisions about justice and about responsibilities that we have as settlers in Canada. Canada is poised to be a leader in so many ways but it must address the deep structural roots of its violence in greed and exploitation, a root that is the basis of every colonial country in this hemisphere. We need to reconcile first with the reality that the country was founded on broken agreements, stolen lands and genocide. Beginning there illuminates the places where structural violence still finds it’s source.
These territories on which the idea of “Canada” has been founded are beautiful, rich, life giving places which colonization sees as resources to be exploited, stolen, depleted and sold with no regard for the legacy of those actions on the natural environments or the people for whom these places are deepest home. Our work, if we are to redeem Canada, s to heed to Romero’s call and dig deep into our mess to find a source of peace for the common good that flows from justice, equity and restoration of reciprocal relationships between the land and peoples that have paid the price for the benefits many are celebrating today.
Since 2004, the Art of Hosting has been offered every autumn on Bowen Island, British Columbia, where I live. I was a participant in the first one and since then have been on the hosting team every year. We love hosting people here, as the island itself is such an incredible place to be and to sink into relationship with one another as we learn and explore participatory leadership and facilitation. What I especially love about this offering is the people that we work withe on our teams and the questions we get to be in together.
In the past all of our retreats have been residential, and as we ease out of COVID restrictions we have decided that we want to offer an Art of Hosting in this region, but we’re not yet ready to make it residential. And so we are proud to announce that from September 26-28, 2022 to be held in Vancouver. You can register here.
Our team this year will consist of me, Caitlin Frost, Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier and Kris Archie. All four of us have stewarded the Art of Hosting in this region for many years working with Indigenous communities, non-profits, governments, philanthropy, and businesses in a huge variety of settings. We bring a deep set of experiences with the Art of Hosting,using the four fold practice in incredibly diverse contexts, working with participatory methods and leadership development with equity and decolonization lenses and putting the tools and practices to use in contexts ranging from personal work to system change around social services, mainstream philanthropy, and governance.
These three partners are some of my closest collaborators in this work and I think it is fair to say that we are all mutually inspired by each other. I am excited to see the growing list of people coming to join us for this event. The learning and creativity in the room will be amazing.
We would love to have you join us. Click the link to learn more about the program and please come and join us in Vancouver in the fall.
Is it my imagination or was 2021 and 2022 WAY harder on us all than we know? I’m in a place of finally releasing – after being able to let go of my dad and all the arrangements we were holding around his funeral – and I’m slowly feeling the release of tensions, emotions, thoughts, attachments and feelings that I have been carrying for god knows how long.
This past winter especially, during the months of ever lengthening light, has been hard. I started to turn a corner in April, but the weather in the west coast was cold and dark and dreary for almost the whole spring, and so my mood followed, interior looking, cozy, quiet, reflective. It has taken a trip to the quiet humidity of an early southern Ontario summer to finally out some distance between my self and my mood. I’m in the midst of healing from a wound I don’t know I have. Putting my feet back under me so I can be more helpful.
I’ve not been at my best these past few months, not sure anyone has. Our brittle collective psyche seems cracked and damaged, held together by small hopes and small wins. I’ve found a few things that are helping me – a regular rhythm of practice in the morning and evening, eating very good food and not much of it, learning just a little bit more jazz every day. I’m taking joy in things like supporting my TSS Rovers FC and putting the wind in the sails of young professionals who are growing in their practices of hosting and harvesting.
But I still have this feeling of “waiting for something” that I’m trying hard to shake. I see friends and colleagues “getting back to normal” but I’m different. I am still quite careful in closed spaces, limiting my travel, wearing a mask in most places. I’m still living with the pandemic, which is worse now in terms of infections than it ever has been. I can feel the bifurcation of those still practicing public health practices and those who aren’t. I haven’t had COVID and I don’t want to have it. And so I keep close to home mostly and support colleagues from afar.
And when I lift my eyes I see that there are things that really worry me in the world. The creeping fascism that is a reactionary response to the big cracks now appearing in our economic system and our civic life not to mention our climate and environment. The hyper inequality that surrounds us. The displacement and the changes wrought on community and society. The intensification of colonization, misogyny, racism, homo- and transphobia that is taking deeper root in the legislative codes that govern people I care deeply about.
I find joy in music, in my spiritual practice, in the voices of those I can mentor, vicariously through their successes.
So what am I seeing? I know I’m not alone in seeing all this. What is similar and different where you are sitting?