One of my favourite concepts from the complexity world is the fallacy of thinking that comes from the truth of retrospective coherence. The mistake is that, because we can look back in time to understand causes of our current condition, we can therefore see forward in time and affect the causes of a future condition. Complex systems are emergent, so we can never be sure what the future holds, regardless of how well we can trace how we got here. Despite the fact that it is illegal to sell an investment instrument without the warning that “past performance does not …
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“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” — TS Eliot Our Beyond the Basics team is about to host our last gathering of the current cycle of offers, back in North America. Over the past five Beyond the Basics offerings I have learned more than I feel like I’ve shared. I can feel that my practice has changed as a result of doing this work, and I’ve become interested in the way our team’s ideas and lessons from working …
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Dave is working on a theory of change, which I think is a good thing. In this latest post he has a nice summation of the way to move to action in complex situations (like cultures): So where we are looking at culture change (to take an example), we first map the narrative landscape to see what the current dispositional state is. That allows us to look at where we have the potential to change, and where change would be near impossible to achieve. In those problematic cases we look more to stimulating alternative attractors rather that attempting to deal …
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I’m prepping for a small gig with a non-profit moving to a shared leadership model, and also reading a bit more on Cynefin strategy, and so there are a lot of tabs open in my browser this afternoon. instead of saving them all to an Evernote folder, I thought I’d share the best ones with you.
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This week I have been a part of a series of meetings, gatherings and workshops around the release of a new book on Dialogic Organizational Development. I contributed a chapter to the book on hosting containers. Yesterday, the lead authors hosted a day long conference on the themes contained in the book and we delivered some workshops and hosted some dialogue on the emergence of this term and the implications for the field. Today we are at the Academy of Management conference being held in Vancouver where the lead authors, and some of the rest of us, are delivering …