I asked DALL-E to make this image, because I can’t find the great photo i took of streams converging on a beach.
This is one of the things I love about my daily RSS feed. The first thing I see today on my NetNewsReaders list is this blog post from my fiend Mark McKergow in Edinburgh who shares his framework of time, which he has articulated in the Uers Guide to the Future. I like this conception of time, because of the big hole in the which he calls “Ant Country”. Ant Country is that time when the context you are in is important. Mark describes it as the “least useful zone” for planning, becasue it is too far away to predict wat will happen there, but not far enough away that it provides the somewhat reassuring clarity of a vision or a destination. It’s where anything can happen, where life is going to self-organize around your efforts in unpredictable ways, knocking you off course or delivering the resources you need right when you least expect them. “Planning” is rarely helpful here – think about the five year plans we all made in 2019 – but you can and should be prepared for this zone.
Here’s the framework:
User’s Guide to the Future Framework, originally published in McKergow and Bailey, Host, 2014.
I am working with a couple of clients right now looking at their future and it strikes me that there is always an oscillation between that far future and the immediate here and now, and many people can’t actually distinguish between the two, or worse set, they see them as closely connected. Here it is useful to distinguish once again between ordered systems and unordered systems, which helps us distinguish between knowable future and unknowable ones. In his article, Mark talks about ascending Everest, and also uses the metaphor of taxi drivers getting passengers to knowable destiations. These are “knowables” even if the route from here to there is yet to be discovered.
In many ways the near future zones and the far future zones are equally easy to identify. What is right in front of you is yours to do, and you can see what you’re doing when you take a step forward. For the far future it is easy to identify where you want to go, whether that is a knowable and fixed place like a peak or an address, or a hoped for dynamic state, like a generally productive and meaningful work culture, one which might look very different from where we are today. The more knowable and fixed the future state is, the more you can concentrate on backcasting, using experts perhaps who can advise you how to get there (like a map or a cabbie with The Knowledge), or who can help you deal with the technical challenges (like a Sherpa). Linear planning can be very helpful in these cases, as the act of moving into that future is a process of discovering knowable information. Much of that information might already be available, and if it isn’t there are probably people around who can help you find it in a good and accurate way. That doesn’t take the influence of context out of the Ant Country stage, but staying true to the line you have marked through that country will give you a strong sense of direction and a robust plan to get where you are going. One must be careful to pay attention to the vagaries of Ant Country, but in general fidelity to a well put together plan is what you need.
But in the case where you are trying to shift a culture or engage in other highly emergent kinds of work, two things come into play that will help you through Ant Country. The first is knowing that your present state does indeed matter. A lot. Even though you might still be making adjustments and evaluating your immediate need, the history of the system you are in and then nature of the current state actually liit what is possible if you intend to make a move from a current place (overwork, poor morale, a sense of purposelessness) to a more desired state (ease, support and connection, meaningful work). Identifying that far off horizon is important because it orients you in a direction of travel. Instead of worrying about what needs to be in place before getting over the horizon, essentially everything from here to there is ant country. What I typically advise then is to look for patterns in our surrent state of being that provide us with information about what is more possible. That could ean looking for examples or patterns where small hints of our desired future are present. If what you want already exists somewhere in the system, it might be easier to try to grow more of that than to start fresh. This is what we call “affordances.” And it also means looking at the reason why these things never seem to take off, because that gives us some sense of things that we might try in the here and now and the near future. When we are heading in a direction with an unknowable future state, playing with emergence is the goal.
This means that we need to drive directly into Ant Country. We can start doing some things and then open ourselves up to the influences of context and the swirls of randomness that alter our course. Ant Country suddenly becomes the source of creativity and outside knowledge that helps break us out of the patterns that have hindered us and starts giving us options for new ways to get to the better place we have been aiming at. Instead of our plans, especially when we are trying to discover new things and break old habits, we need to get good at participatory leadership and iterative Adaptive Action…what? so what? now what?…probe, sense, respond…observe, orient, decide, act…all the little heuristics that help guide us in this zone are about making sense of the present moment and holding on to the desired future. And then comes the Deep Breath Moment.
Mark’s piece talks about the Deep Breath Moment:
This dynamic steering and adjustment is fine… until, sometimes, a more fundamental adjustment is called for. I call this a ‘deep breath moment’. It’s the time when the far future is re-examined, hopes and aspirations are revised, and a new direction is set.
I’ve experienced this several times in my life and work. What surprises me is that it can creep up without being noticed and appear suddenly, a realisation that something needs to change. Other times it can be a dawning realisation, something that starts as a quiet idea, keeps coming back and seems to get louder and louder until it’s inescapable. But when you do a re-set, a revision of hopes and set a new direction, the effect can be dramatic. Often previously stuck things start to move quite quickly – like pushing on the (push) door when you’ve been fruitlessly pulling and getting nowhere. Things fall into place in different ways. New connections get made. New possibilities arrive. And what was a frustrating stuckness becomes once again a moving and flowing process.
The first thing to say is that this is not a sign of bad planning. On the contrary; it’s a sign that the User’s Guide to the Future is being used well. One of the wonders of viewing the world as emergent is to acknowledge that the unexpected will sometimes happen, and that’s just how it is. The key thing is not to totally prevent the unexpected (which would be futile) but to respond to it well and to use it constructively.
In complex work, I recognize this deep breath moment as one of two things happening. First, it may be that I have found myself in a productive channel flowing towards that desired future. That is a sweet place to be in, but it means, like all affordances, that other options are now closed off to me. I am clearly committed to this path. Deep breath. “We all choose our regrets” as Christopher Hitchens was reported to have once said. Even in the service of the good and right thing that you wanted, possibilities are now forever gone. I find this an important moment of threshold crossing: especially the older I get. It’s poignant. I want my kids to grow up and be strong, but that means there will be that one moment when I picked them up and held them in my arms for the last time. Sigh.
The other deep breath moment I have experienced is the one where I have reached a dead end and I have to move out of the deep channel I am in and make the trek up and over a ridge to a better valley. In our lives perhaps we experience that with relationships that don’t work out businesses that fail, ideas that never take off. We put a ton of time and energy into them and they are over. Sometimes we double down, engaging in sunk cost redemption until someone takes a hold of us in the wilderness of Ant Country and says: “buddy, you’re done. Use your lats amount of energy to get up here and we’ll carry on.”
Working with clients, there is always a temptation to reassure them that the path from here to there is knowable, if we just study things are little more and make a good choice. But remember, the moment of a decision is a madness. Entering Ant Country is inevitable, and it’s going to require a deep breath, some keen awareness of where you are and where you have come from and some solid personal practice to stay in it.
My Epiphone Emperor Joe Pass guitar upon which I am learning…leadership? Read on!
It’s a cliche as old as time, one I have been guilty of using occasionally too. Leadership is like jazz, where the members of an ensemble support each other in improvisation. We listen carefully, respond to what each other is doing, offer creative responses and make something amazing together.
Yes. Leadership is way more about improvisation than, say, following a step to step guide to assembling IKEA furniture.
But there is another set of metaphors from jazz that I have never seen talked about, perhaps because it needs you to understand a little about music theory, but that is leadership as jazz harmony.
My pandemic project was, after forty years, marrying my love of jazz with my love of guitar playing. My musical life hasn’t been the same. It has felt like starting over again. I have been learning jazz guitar with a teacher and with online tools now since late 2020. I’m focusing on learning how to play jazz standards, mostly solo, which means learning how to make chord melodies while also trying to do interesting things with improvised lines, over chords. I had to learn the fretboard in new ways, had to learn new techniques for voicing chords and playing lines from scales to which I had never given much thought: the harmonic minor, the altered scale, the Lydian dominant. I am getting to the point where I am learning to say things with jazz, but I feel like a baby. One reason for that is that there is SO MUCH TO LEARN from technique to theory to language to repertoire.
Of course with all new endeavours you have to learn a bit of theory to understand how it all works. While I know basic music theory, I have also had to take a deep dive into jazz theory because at its core, jazz is a structured, logical music that provides a harmonic and rhythmic container for improvisation and all the tools one needs comes from the specific ways jazz theory works. When you are playing on guitar, especially comping the lush and colourful jazz chords that accompany other players, your goal is to be as sparse as possible while still implying the harmony so that the melodic lines that the soloists are producing make sense. To the untrained and cynical ear, jazz sounds like “the wrong notes” but in the hands of skilled guitarists, jazz harmony has a number of different characteristics that are interesting.
First of all, in good jazz guitar playing, we try to make arrangements where the chords change only one or two notes at a time, and most often to notes that are just nearby. This is called “voice leading” and has been a feature of Western music since harmony was invented. In fact it probably was the origin of harmony, as two independent voices singing together will produce different notes. Sometimes these notes will sound pleasing and consonant and sometimes they will clash and sound dissonant. However, the point of voice leading is to guide the ear gently from one chord to another through the changes. As long as I have have loved music I have loved voice leading. I spent hours just voicing chords on piano as a kid without knowing what I was doing. But when you play a chord and change one note you discover that you are somewhere else entirely. Your next move from there is constrained by where you are now, and there are patterns of logic and harmonic tradition that are yours to follow or break as you wish.
Because guitar is a weird instrument – six strings played with four or five fingers with the same note appearing in different places all over the neck – jazz guitarists are very fond of stripping chords down to only two notes, to play their essence. In jazz we call these “guide tones” and they are the 3rd and the 7th notes of the chord scale. For example if I’m playing in the key of C and I need a C major 7 chord, I need only to play an E and a B (C-D-E-F-G-A-B) to imply the chord. Guide tones, along with the context of the chord – what comes before and after it – gives you enough information to work with to create a solo that sounds good. Guide tones are connected to voice leading. Playing a standard jazz chord progression like a Dm7 – G7 – Cmaj7 (the well-known “ii-V-I”) with guide tones produces smooth voice leading: Notes go like this: F-C, B-F, E-B. You can see that in each chord change, only one note changes, but when it does it produces a very different sound. We get led by one notes that wants to stay stable (the third) and one that wants to go somewhere else (the seventh). Together these two notes contains the essence of tension and release.
Jazz harmony is all about tension and release. In most of the music I have ever played on guitar, chords are just blocks of information. I might have a chord progression that goes C-Am-F-G (I-vi-IV-V) which is very common in pop and folk music and while certain chords want to go to other certain chords, the most tension is with the G chord, the five chord, which wants to go back to a C. End a song on a five chord, and your audience will be left in suspension. Go listen to the end of The Beatles “For No One” and you’ll see what I mean. You get left there. What happens next? This is the most basic tension and release. When most of us are learning guitar, we learn 7th chords and understand that these always lead us back to the tonic. D7 goes to G. A7 goes to D. C7 goes to F.
In jazz working with tension and release is a high art and there are many, MANY, more things you can do with chords to make jazz lines flow from one chord to the other, but the essence is that a little bit of suspense makes for a satisfying resolution. So we take those guide tones and start adding notes to them, and this is where jazz theory gets really arcane. You can add a sharp 11 or a flat 13 or a sharp or flat 9 to give you some tension and dissonance. Or you can add a 9, 6 (or 13) to give some lush colour to a more stable chord. You can play different scales over different chords. You can keep suspense and tension alive for a long time, or just imply it and bring it home. In Western music tension and release is such an important aspect of the musical experience that it is essential to understand for both composition and improvisation. Music with no tension of release is just a drone. Everything else in music is textured around moments of discomfort and anticipation and moments of relief and stability.
So if you want to see all this in its glory have a watch of this old Ed Bickert recording with his trio. Ultimately all of these tools are helpful in aid of creating a container inside which you make coherent choices for expressing yourself. And THAT is why jazz harmony is like leadership.
Extending the metaphor
I’m writing a lot on containers right now, so my attention is guided toward how containers – contexts for meaningful action – are structured and how we create them. In complex situations, leadership is about creating these contexts for action and interaction, and there are many lessons from the world of jazz harmony that apply here. Here are a few, in case you haven’talrady sussed them.
Theory matters. It really does. In jazz, there are reasons why something sounds “jazzy” and reasons why it doesn’t, and the same is true in working with containers and people. There are things you can do as a leader that will have better chances of certain outcomes than other things. Learning theory, especially working in complexity – like why managing to targets is less effective than managing to a direction of travel – will help you create experiences for people that get better results over time. If you want your tem to be more creative, there are things you can do that will help. If you all want to learn some new things together, knowing what they are and how learning works makes a big difference to how effective you will all be.
Small changes make a big difference. Voice leading in jazz has taught me that changing one small thing can have a powerful effect of taking you somewhere else. We think of “change” in organizations as a big planned thing, but in reality the constant change that arises from interactions between people creates all kinds of new situations. Leadership is about working with existing stability – for better or worse – and making small adjustments to see what can be done to take you closer to your preferred direction of travel. And making small changes means that, as you are improvising, you don’t over commit to an idea that has no future. Instead you are trying to open up new pathways to explore – called affordances in complexity – that are coherent with what is already happening, but might offer a better way to be.
Start with where you are. In jazz if you are playing in the key of B flat major, you should not play a line from the D major scale unless you really really really know what you are doing. One of the biggest lessons I have learned from complexity theory over the years is that the current state matters so much that any attempt to just show up and create something new in a workshop or a retreat with no regard to context is almost guaranteed to be a failure. In complexity, change happens along affordances in the current context, and fruitful change-making and leadership understands that. That is not to say that you cannot create completely new things out of the blue, but there are all kinds of reasons why this entails a massive energy cost to individuals, not the least of which relates to just how much tension and release people can take.
Tension and release helps us move from one place to another. Our work lives are full of moments of tension snd suspense followed by moments of release and stability. Cognitively, we can only stay in this so long and we all have different tolerances. Just like your endurance for listening to a free jazz piece that seems to have no release of stability at all – I love Cecil Taylor but your mileage may vary – folks at work will have a hard time staying in a state of constant tension, or indeed, constant stability. And even though good leaders give their teams and organizations a sense of stability over time, ignoring the changing context of one’s work can render a team irrelevant or ineffective, and in some cases, an entire company can find itself no longer in business. So as a leader, it’s a developed practice to dance with the paradoxes of challenge and rest, creativity and stability, outside thinking and standardization. Human beings live this journey and it is what helps us grow and evolve and form and break our identities and try new things and generally give meaning to our lives. That is a high art of leadership: to create what I’ve heard Jennifer Garvey Berger call “life-giving contexts.”
So there you go. The next time you meet someone who just cavalierly throws around the “leadership = jazz” metaphor, go a bit deeper. And I encourage you to really listen to great music to hear all these things at play. Knowing a bit about how music works helps us to understand why it matters to you, why you like what you like and why and how you are moved by it. Just like everything.
The chapel at the Statenberg Manor, when we finished cleaning it out in 2013, and after it has been restored.
The global Art of Hosting community is an eclectic group of people from all over the world who share an inquiry about how to bring more participatory processes to a massive variety of challenges they face with their communities and organizations. There is no formal organization, but the community is a network loosely connected through a website, animated through Zoom calls, an active Facebook group and face-to-face gatherings of practitioners who occasionally meet to forge connections and share practices. One such important gathering happens next week.
As an approach to dialogue and leadership, the Art of Hosting itself is very simple: it is a framework that connects the practices of self-hosting and presence, hosting others, fostering participation, and enabling co-creation. This simple framework has formed the basis of an inquiry and practice that has evolved over the past 25 years or so in many places all over the world. To hold together the essence of this approach, a group of experienced practitioners evolved to steward the Art of Hosting and ensure that there was some consistency in how we talk about the practice and how we connect practitioners so that the global community can thrive, share learnings and be a resource to each other. SInce about 2008 I have been one of those stewards, responding to an invitation from my friend Toke Møller to do so after a stewards gathering in Nova Scotia.
As my friends and colleagues begin to gather in Slovenia for a larger global gathering next week, I took a few minutes to write about some key lessons I have taken from my work as a steward of this practice over the past couple of decades. This letter reflects on lessons from a similar gathering ten years ago at the Statenberg Manor, where the present gathering will be held, and I share it here for posterity.
Hello, colleagues, friends and fellow practitioners.
I want to send my greetings from the traditional territory of the Squamish people off the west coast of Canada from the island of Nexwlelexw, also known as Bowen Island, nestled in the waters of Howe Sound. Since 2004 we have hosted dozens of Art of Hosting gatherings on our Island or in the nearby City of Vancouver, or, during the pandemic, online. We have built a deep community of practice in this part of the world and the Art of Hosting has found its way into many aspects of civil society, local government, Indigenous Nations, and community. we have a number of local stewards in this region who offer training and use these practices for good in the world.
I was at Statenberg in 2013 and I fondly remember visiting with friends, connecting with other practitioners and learning a little bit about how the Art of Hosting community was spreading its wings across the world. I co-hosted a smaller steward’s gathering in 2010 here on our Island, where we engaged with the same kinds of questions about stewardship, leadership and essence under the watchful gaze of a thousand-year-old Douglas fir tree and with the visit of a bear who reminded us of the powerful effect that a well-hosted conversation can have in a world full of uncertainty.
I reflected on the biggest lesson I took away ten years ago at the gathering of 2013. When we arrived on the site we saw that the chapel had close to a meter of dust and dirt and rubble covering the stone floor. it seems that for more than 250 years nobody had bothered to sweep it out, and our children, who got very bored at the important conversations their parents were having, began a competition to see who could remove the most wheelbarrows full of debris from that Chapel. Over the course of the week, they set up a scoreboard on a flip chart at the entrance to the chapel and every time somebody shovelled out another wheelbarrow of debris they put a point next to their name. I don’t remember the actual scores but I do remember that hundreds of wheelbarrows of debris got moved from the chapel and dumped elsewhere on the grounds. The chapel was so clean by the end of the week that the priest came up from Makole with a number of villagers and reconsecrated the chapel. In this space of five or six days, many small human beings and a few big ones came together to reclaim and restore a sacred space and leave a legacy in place as a gift of return to the community that had hosted us.
I will always remember that particular act as the defining moment of stewardship. leave what you have found better than when you found it and return it to those who gifted it to you in the first place, your descendants and those who are yet to come. when you visit the chapel in that space make sure that Franc tells you the story and the photos of what it looked like before, and reflect on your role as a steward of a practice that supports life-giving spaces and conversations to make our world a better place.
When people ask me what it is I’m stewarding within the Art of Hosting community, it’s very simple. it’s that I hold the memory that a global community of us discovered value in a framework that connects presence, participation, hosting and co-creation. we all have many different ways of doing that but the idea that these four approaches to life and facilitation and learning and leadership are connected and interdependent is the essence that forms the basis of the art we practice. it’s that simple ground upon which we meet and it’s that simple ground that provides us a context for conversations that will enliven you and challenge you, cause you to find new mates and reignite the love and friendship you share with old ones.
There are two key lessons I have taken from this practice over the past 20 years of stewardship. The first is a quote from my friend Thomas Arthur, who spoke these words at the beginning of a Shambhala Institute faculty retreat years ago. Speaking as an artist, he channelled the urgency of the times and said: “If you have a gift, give it now.” This is not the time for any of us to hoard or hold on to things that can benefit all of us so give your gifts with energy and unconditional love.
The second lesson I’ve learned Is one that served me well in my life at every stage of my work. and that is “Support is Life.” None of us exist without the support of others and we must do everything we can to support the people building the world we want to see.
So in closing, I wish you to have a beautiful gathering in that incredibly powerful place. I hope you will learn, I hope you will make deep, lasting friendships, I hope you will be challenged, and I hope you leave there with a strong sense of what your gifts are to give away and how you can support others to host a better world into being.
Thank you for gathering and being a part of this community of practice and practitioners. Have a great time.
I love Phil Cass. He’s one of my closest friends in the world of the Art of Hosting and is a long-time collaborator. I’ve been lucky to work with him on some BIG work over the years, including a national Food and Society Conference for the Kellogg Foundation and a two-year scenario planning process for a national effort to change the conversation on palliative care in the United States. These days I am on faculty with his Physicians’ Leadership Academy in Columbus, Ohio, where I get to teach complexity to a couple of dozen incredible physicians every year. Plus, he has great taste in bourbon and music!
This is a really nice reflection on his years as CEO of the Columbus Medical Association, where he spent 16 years implementing participatory practices within the organization and in the community as the CMA spearheaded a massive effort to create affordable health care across Franklin County. He has led major state mental health organizations and is one of those guys that is built for senior leadership. OPur colleague Mary Alice Arthur sat him down to chat about what this form of leadership is like from the CEO’s office
implementing participatory practices has its challenges, and Phil’s story will cover ground that many leaders will find familiar around letting go of control, being afraid of vulnerability, delivering on mandates and worrying about seeming flakey. But he has lived the path, and it comes down to a few simple things to do regularly. Have a listen to the whole thing.
The three-domain version of Cynefin, originally published on Dave Snowden’s blog.
I’m trying to organize my thoughts on containers, complexity and constraints that span a couple of decades of work and grounded theory. In this post, I want to lay out how I see these phenomena in the context of anthro-complexity, largely articulated by Dave Snowden, with implications for complex facilitation, or what we in the Art of Hosting community call “hosting.”
I’ll lay out some theory first that I’m working on, link it to facilitation and then share a case study of a recent meeting I hosted to demonstrate how this plays out. You can let me know if you think there is a good basis for a paper here, and please feel free to ask questions and to poke and prod at these ideas.
Some definitions
- “Constraints”: Constraints in complex systems limit the behaviours of system components but also enable certain patterns or paths to emerge.
- “Containers”: In the context of complexity, a container is often considered as an environment or space (conceptual, physical, or social) that influences the interactions and dynamics of system components.
- “Enabling constraints” and “Governing constraints” are part of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework. Enabling constraints allow certain patterns to emerge and adapt in a complex system while governing constraints are applied to assure specific outcomes in more ordered systems.
- “Emergence”: Refers to the idea that new properties, behaviours, or patterns can arise from the interactions among system components, which aren’t predictable from the properties of individual components.
- “Chaos”: In complexity science, chaos refers to a state of a system where it’s difficult to predict the system’s behaviour even in the short term.
Some basic theory
Constraints form the foundation of what we call “containers” in dialogue and facilitation practice. A container is a stable environment in which actions and thought processes occur. In a complex situation, enabling constraints yield containers which exhibit dynamic stability, such as a dissipative structure, where the emergence of thoughts and actions takes place. The container shapes these thoughts and actions.
Containers that endure over time solidify into stable contexts and ultimately evolve into cultures.
Much of the existing literature on containers merely identifies this phenomenon without comprehending how these containers come into being and therefore, how they can be disrupted, stabilized or managed. However, the literature on constraints and complexity science provides useful insights for understanding and working with containers.
When operating in the realm of complexity, you need at least one effective constraint in place. Without any effective constraints, you’re dealing with chaos – an unbounded, essentially random state. Seen through the lens of Cynefin, Chaos is a state that is approached either from the liminal space of Complexity or from the catastrophic failure of highly ordered systems.
With the establishment of a manageable constraint, you can start creating a stable container with affordances to pursue a preferred outcome or direction. The more stable the container, the more predictable the outcome. When we cross through the liminal space between Complex and Ordered states, we move into governing constraints, and we employ constraints to ensure a specific outcome. Maintaining governing constraints requires power, resources, and control to suppress the emergence typically characteristic of living systems. Even ordered containers can be vulnerable to the emergence and unexpected events. Thus, they are often strictly bound, and the agents within the system are heavily constrained. The connections in these systems are controlled, managed, and monitored for any deviations. In situations where certainty is crucial, maintaining a governing container can be costly, but the benefits are significant, leading to safety, order, and control – key aspects of an ordered system.
Using anthro-complexity to understand containers in complexity
Containers can materialize in a multitude of ways. It may be beneficial to interpret containers through the prism of the three principal Cynefin domains: Chaos, Complexity, and Order.
In an ordered system, or an ordered container, the container can be pre-designed, often drawing upon good or best practices and demonstrating robust stability that actively resists change. Such containers may take physical forms, like buildings, pots, cars, and furnaces. However, they can also be social containers where interactions among individuals must be rigorously regulated and controlled. These could pertain to situations necessitating safety or for regulatory purposes, such as in accounting or law.
In Chaos, facilitation, such as it is, is all about applying constraints – sometimes draconian constraints – in an effort to create some stability or safety and buy some time to find options for action. In this domain, the container can be experienced as being strapped to a stretcher, ordered to remain in place, or, in trauma responses, held in a way that enables self-regulation.
The development of containers within the complex domain progresses through a process of probing, sensing, and responding. In the complex domain, containers, often experienced as a combination of phenomena rather than strictly physical tangible objects, are shaped by the constraints at play. They emerge as phenomena due to these constraints. Constraints at play can stimulate the emergence of this type of container, fostering patterns of behaviour and establishing a felt sense of stability. Within this stability, connections, exchanges, attractors, and boundaries will seem to have a more or less consistent presence over time. and give rise to the feeling or experience of being “in a container.”
When working with patterns in a container we can map or examine the container’s constraints that enable certain patterns to emerge over others. Until a constraint stabilizes in a complex system, it serves merely as a catalyst, as described by Dave Snowden, stimulating a specific pattern of behaviour. If this pattern of behaviour is coherent with a “preferred direction of travel”, it will aid in establishing the felt sense of a container in a complex system that contributes towards useful dialogue, activity and other beneficial activities.
If however, the stability of the container produces emergent patterns of behaviour that are not desired, we can attempt to change the container by shifting constraints in order to stimulate different interactions. While the facilitator plays a particular role in this situation, but the shift in the nature of a container can come from anywhere.
Complex facilitation, therefore, is the craft of catalyzing the emergence of patterns within a container which aligns beneficially with the preferred direction of travel shared by a group or a leader. In this craft, one employs constraints as catalysts and closely observe the nature of the emerging container through the system’s pattern stability. If unproductive patterns emerge, one can attempt to disrupt the container by modifying a constraint. If useful patterns appear, one can aim to stabilize that container to ensure continuity. Thus, the facilitator’s role primarily involves monitoring the situation, assessing the quality of the container, and occasionally using their influence to help stabilize and manage the emerging container in the service of the preferred direction. This is largely achieved by “creating space” for the group to engage in beneficial activities.
In a complex situation, the ideal is generally to utilize enabling constraints to facilitate emergence rather than governing constraints to control it. This requires awareness of the inclination to control interactions, possibly to reduce unhelpful conflict or balance power disparities. It should be obvious that the practice of doing this is fraught with ethical traps (more on this in later posts), and so undertaking this work without considering the values that underlie the ethical use of situational power is perilous. Rather than controlling interpersonal interactions, the focus should be on adjusting the conditions and constraints of the entire container to enable the emergence of different behavioural patterns.
A case study
Recently, I facilitated a meeting with a small group from an organization confronting an existential question. Should the organization continue in its current form, should it be wrapped up, or was there something in between?
Through interviews with board members and staff prior to the meeting, it was evident that the current situation was untenable. The organization had weathered turbulent times, with new board members and supporters who endorsed the founder’s vision. This vision, however, had been pared down significantly, resulting in an unclear purpose and direction for the organization.
On the day of the meeting, two critical conversations needed to occur. First, because many were new to the organization, we needed to discuss the organization’s current state and its projects, with a particular focus on the founder’s intentions. The second conversation had to address the next steps for the organization, providing clarity on a potential partnership that would determine their level of commitment.
I prepared an agenda featuring different ways to facilitate these conversations. The most facilitator-intensive way was to host a scenario-based process, where a small group of eight people would consider three different scenarios based on my interviews with almost all the attendees. The aim was to answer practical questions about implementation and examine implications for the organization, its projects, and its partners.
We began the meeting informally, with a light breakfast and casual conversations. After settling in, I introduced the meeting’s intentions. My decision was to guide us through a check-in part of the meeting, hear from the founder, then take a break and assess where we stood.
Building a relational container was a critical move since the group had never been together before. A well-designed check-in, with a question that elicited stories, was a good way to begin and allowed everyone to understand why they were part of this meeting and this work.
After the check-in, which took about an hour, the group had a more profound understanding of each other. It was clear to us the range of skills, talents, and interests present in the room.
The second part of the meeting involved the founder’s future intentions. It became apparent during the pre-meeting interviews that he had a significant influence on the organization’s course. His connections, desires, and investments were the organization’s driving force. As such, it was crucial to accommodate his interests, needs, and commitments.
Perhaps entrained on the pattern of the check-in, the meeting evolved into a rich storytelling session, where the founder recounted his career and the organization’s lifespan. This story-sharing segment was especially beneficial for new board members with questions about their roles and the organization’s work. This was a helpful direction for the day and kept the work and the inquiry open.
Once the founder finished his tale, a conversation unfolded, touching on the core mission and purpose of the organization and bringing forth existential questions about its future. Again this “natural” flow was likely partially entrained by the pre-meeting interviews, which gave participants a chance to think openly about the existential questions facing the organization.
After lunch, the group reconvened and began discussing different questions about the projects in which the organization was involved. It was evident that everyone had varying levels of information about these projects, which resulted in different levels of participation in addressing the organization’s existential issues. This is not a bad thing at all, as diverse experience meant that naive expertise – the ability to ask “dumb” questions – had a role in pushing the group to consider proposals that were outside of what was possible or desirable. In so doing, boundaries for the organization’s future work came into view.
This was an important moment because a well-defined boundary elicits authentic and informed commitment. Toward the end of the meeting, we discussed practical steps aligned with people’s commitments. It became clear that the next steps were focused on the sustainability of an essential project of the organization, not the organization itself.
The final discussion involved everyone indicating their level of commitment and role over the next 18 months and committing to spend some time formulating a plan and organizing work with simple project management tools.
In sum, this case illustrates how a facilitator can work with constraints to help an emergent container evolve for group work. The essence lies in understanding the connections, exchanges, attractors, and boundaries within the group and using these elements to guide the conversation constructively. The facilitator must negotiate the boundaries and the flow of power, work with strong attractors, and manage the dynamics of exchanges to achieve the desired outcomes.
Constraints at play
It should be noted that it is impossible to fully map all of the constraints that are working together to create a container, nor is it always clear which kind of constraint something is. An exchange can become an attractor, and a connection can become a boundary. The important thing is to carry an easily portable framework into a dynamic situation in order to better see and respond to emerging and changing constraints,
While there are many ways to analyze the constraints at play in the container of this meeting, In my own work, I use Snowden’s typology of Connecting Constraints (Connections and Exchanges) and Containing Constraints (Attractors and Boundaries) and here are examples of my observations and reflections. Dave uses “connecting and containing” as a spectrum. In my practice, these four types of constraints serve as heuristics to help guide my observation and decision-making while facilitating complex situations.
Connections:
- Each board member shared a strong connection with the founder and had different connections with everyone else. The depth of their connection to the organization’s work varied greatly. For some, it constituted a significant portion of their focus, while others had little knowledge of the projects. For the founder, the organization’s work was all-encompassing.
- Board members brought various connections with the stakeholders and the organization’s implementers to the meeting. These connections became crucial when participants realized they could leverage their networks to explore alternative ways to sustain the organization’s work.
Exchanges:
- A critical exchange involved the transfer of information and power between the founder and the board. Over the years, this exchange had turned toxic. The board, in both its and the founder’s view, was focused on the wrong objective: the organization’s sustainability rather than its work.
- After a wave of resignations during the pandemic, a new board was assembled. This board consisted of people the founder knew and trusted to prioritize the organization’s work, helping avoid the toxic relationships that had developed previously.
- During the meeting, the exchanges were mostly linked to the founder’s vision and his commitment to the organization. The remaining participants related their commitments to his. This scenario can be described as a “broadcast flow” of exchanges: from one central person to many, with weak exchanges among the many. However, as we delved into the scenario planning exercise, stronger exchanges developed between participants. Still, the organization was not ready for people to work independently of the founder.
- It became clear during the meeting that more power was being transferred from the founder to the board, along with greater responsibility for outcomes. By the meeting’s end, the participants had a strong sense of personal commitment to the work at hand, which was absent at the meeting’s beginning.
Attractors:
- The founder was the key attractor around which the container emerged. From pre-meeting interviews with the staff and founder, it was evident that the founder’s thoughts and intentions would significantly influence the organization’s future. Sometimes a powerful attractor can distort the container’s work, making it impossible to explore possibilities or escape entrenched responses to the founder’s vision. We acknowledged the founder’s influence and occasionally disrupted this pattern using a lightly facilitated circle process, allowing other ideas and questions to surface and clarity to arise.
- The room’s physical setup emphasized the two key attractors: the founder at one end of a long table and me at the other. The founder, being the closest to the work, naturally dominated past meetings. My role was to provide a counterbalance, interrupting when necessary to check the group’s clarity and occasionally asking naive questions.
- Another strong attractor was the dual focus on the organization’s sustainability and the work’s sustainability. The board’s past focus on the organization’s sustainability had led to numerous conflicts and a toxic environment as the founder and board clashed over differing intentions. The crucial task for this meeting was to shift the focus onto the organization’s work and the potential for its sustainability without the core organizational structure.
Boundaries:
- There were clear boundaries at play in the meeting. We had a six-hour time limit. We had a small group around a long table with the option to use breakout rooms if needed. As a facilitator, my responsibility was to enforce time boundaries, especially around the meeting’s end. With an event scheduled for the evening, I had to shift the group’s attention from open, free-flowing conversation to more concrete matters during the meeting’s final hour.
- Initially, I requested the founder to give a “state of the union” type address based on several board members’ pre-interview requests. They needed to understand what they were contributing to. Setting some boundaries or enabling constraints around the work was essential to creating an invitation barrier, which Peter Block suggests, is key to eliciting authentic commitment to the work at hand. Clear statements from the founder about his willingness and unwillingness provided a framework for the board members to develop a plan that was both focused on the organization’s current needs and compatible with their commitments. It remains to be seen whether one or two of the members present will commit to continuing. However, the clarity evoked should aid their decision-making process.
I hope this gives a good overview of my current thinking and process around working with constraints, containers and complexity. I am continuing to unpack the ideas in this post in more detail and put them into both practical and theoretical contexts. Responses, questions and curiosities are welcome.