The famous wave at Nazare, Portugal on a light day. The wave is generated from the complex motion of water travelling up a very deep underwater canyon nearly to shore where it rises and meets strong currents coming in many directions. It produces some of the biggest waves in the world. Not easy to surf.
It’s not my title. It’s the title of a book/treatise by Mark Downham, who publishes very long treatises on issues of philosophy, organization, and complexity. This one looks at hosting containers as seen against ideas embedded in Classical Chinese philosophy and it’s going to occupy a big piece of my attention over the next little while.
This has been a spring of considering some of the deeper philosophical issues that meet in the intersection of complexity, hosting, and leadership. I’ve been beavering away a digesting a number of very, very long posts principally by Downham and Snowden in order to clarify my own thinking and practice as a process host, and a teacher of participatory process. It has been a case of getting very clear about the why and where the practice of hosting and holding containers in complexity lies, what is implied by those words and concepts, and why the deep inquiry into the theory brought by these thinkers this spring helps to challenge and sharpen my practice, and help us grow as a field.
It’s not easy. The texts I’ve been reading and engaging with have my mind spinning in several ways and I have been writing bits and pieces here and there to think out loud about them. For me a big benefit of this period of reflection has been to continue to refine the material we are teaching in Complexity Inside and Out, which is a body of work that represents Caitlin’s and my developing practice on working with complexity as and where we find it in our work and lives. That work has been an extension of the work we teach in the Art of Hosting workshops we run. It goes much deeper into practices of working with complexity and introduces people to the work of Snowden, Kurtz, and Eoyang as well as our own work. It is intended to introduce practitioners to complexity tools for working with change in the contexts in which they find themselves, including how to support a personal capacity to host and lead well in complex situations. It grew out of work that we did ten years ago and more when we offered Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics with Tim Merry and Tuesday Rivera, in which each of us extended our own inquiries that started in the Art of Hosting community and took us out to other bodies of work and practice to look at change, complexity, power and personal practice.
So my restless mind and spirit of curiosity has been aroused and shaken and challenged by this rather mammoth collection of works that has appeared this spring. For background I’m going to gather the texts here.
First Downham. These are dense, unexpected texts that draw together strands from fields that are familiar to me and those that are completely outside of my experience. I told Mark he would be a great player of the Glass Bead Game:
- The Architecture of Held Space: The mountain that holds — and the host who learns to hold like one. Here Downham uses many of my writings on the Art of Hosting to discuss the idea of container, so it is getting most of my attention at the moment.
- The Geometry of the Vanishing Container: Breath and Form, Faerie and Field: Pneumatology, Gestalt, and the Liminal Topology of Emergence in the Work of Harrison Owen and Patricia Shaw. which looks at issues of hosting and container work and is one of the few pieces I’ve ever read that sees Harrison Owen’s deep commitment to liturgy in its many forms and guises.
- Cynefin Dynamics and the Choreography of Organizational Change. A commentary on my favourite paper on Cynefin written by Cynthia Kurtz and Dave Snowden in the early days
Snowden’s posts:
- Stacy Unresolved
- Leadership in the Estuary
- The whole series on estuarine thinking, beginning with part one
- Trialectics, or thinking in threes. Alos the start of a series which is inspiring me to think through some ways of talking about containers and de-binarizing some of the dualities we talk about in the art of hosting.
- Foreclosing the territory. A three part series on theories of change that is deeply important in describing the implications of anthro-complexity in change work
None of this is easy reading and these texts have been consuming my thinking over the past few months. I think they are important to my practice, and to the practice of the Art of Hosting community for these reasons, amongst others:
- They offer important claims about epistemic justice, power and subsequent practices of sense-making that help me thinking about positionally of the host, what is visible and what is invisible.
- They offer important reflections on what it means to “design” processes and what it means to host them.
- The offer oblique insights on the notion of theory and practice of working with dialogic containers, especially in complex spaces.
- They challenge the universality of methods, approaches, and tools and invite a more rigorous and context-focused consideration of what to do and how one might do it.
- They surprise me constantly and have offered illumination to some blind spots in my own understanding, generated some aha’s in my own practice, inspired some sharpness in my own thinking, and placed me in a position where I can say more clearly what it is that I do and why that matters.
- They invite us to a reflection on what has built up over time as “ways of doing things” that we take for granted, and invite us back to a renewed view of our works, its sources and the places that it might grow and evolve.
My blog is, as Mark Downham named it, is a field book of notes on practice and theory that I have assembled over the past 20 years. Taken in its totality it represents a journey of a practitioner formed in and adjacent to meaningful communities of practice, bodies of work, teachers and teachings. It is and always will be a place of half-formed thoughts and questions, offered to others as a way to connect and grow a field of practice that honours voice, agency, and community in the pursuit of a better world. It is, as Mark Woods named his blog back in the 1990s using a quote from Stendahl, “the fitful tracing of a portal.” And so I will continue musing out loud here and hope others will join the inquiry.
This inquiry is not everyone’s cup of tea. It is a theory-heavy string, and that theory is positioned in a narrow field of inquiry. It challenges and at times does not pull punches. These blog posts that Downham and Snowden have produced this spring are the deepest and most sophisticated responses to the Art of Hosting body of work I have ever seen in the 20+ plus years I have been around the community. They deserve a serious response, which I have promised to both people. This response though will come in a messy way, informed by practice, thinking, new ideas and conversation. I welcome partners in this. It’s a lot of work but I think this is a serious and important inquiry for those of us who identify, and are identified, as stewards of this work and who are willing to jump in. Just getting the questions right is going to be the first step!
I’m still delightfully jet lagged from the France trip meaning, early nights and early mornings, which suits me fine. It gives me time to read and reflect and to walk, this morning taking time to make a detailed eBird list of the species around me (about 25 this morning, many new flycatchers on the scene), and sit by the sea and catch up with neighbours and their dogs.
I was walking a bit this morning with Augusto Cugnotti’s post in my mind, “The Container is Borrowed” in which he reflects on a mammoth essay by Mark Downham called “The Geometry of the Vanishing Container.”
Downham’s essay imagines a kind of conservation between Harrison Owen and Patricia Shaw, who is a much more interesting person to read. I have not read much of Shaw’s work, to my shame. She was a collaborator with Ralph Stacy and her book on Changing Conversations in Organizations is an important work, and I’ve made a note to take Augusto’s advice and read it.
At any rate, the Coles Notes version here is that I’m looking at this through my own interest in what a “container” is. Increasingly I think that the way I think about dialogic containers are not really captured in the way folks talk use the word. Harrison’s work, captured in Downham’s essay is that the container (especially the physical container) is prepared as a way to trying to create the conditions for emergence. That was his abiding interest and I think Downham names the liturgical and spiritual elements of that in a way I haven’t really seen others capture. When I’m setting up a room, I sometimes feel like a bower bird, and I won’t pretend that liturgy and ceremony is far from my mind. I get it.
It seems that Shaw’s work is primarily concerned with the idea that a consultant or a host or a facilitator can never really be outside of the field in which they are intervening. This seems elemental to me and I’ve made a point of saying that the Participation aspect of the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting is very much about this. You are a part of the field, as is the container and everything else.
Augusto is naming some of these ideas here and it makes me think about why both actual appeal to me.
I see containers as constraint regimes. They are structures that are catalyzed and emerge from constraints that create boundaries and affordances for meaning and action. They are emergent. They are a part of the field, and when we step into a field (a la Shaw) we create a constraint regime just through our presence. Harrison’s approach is that we create physical space and get out of the way of what happens next. But it seems obvious to me that what happens next is not devoid of power, conflict or all the avoidances and limitations that are rooted in the field as well. It is naive to use Open Space (our any other methods) and believe that somehow everyone has left history and identity at the door, including the host. They have not.
Somehow I might define my work as catalyzing action that moves in a “more like this, less like that” direction by working with constraints to change interactions. All change work is about changing constraints, and finding the ones that are most influential in a given context is what complexity work is about. It is not the work of the facilitator to do that. Complex facilitation is about changing interactions not about changing people. A facilitator is not neutral in this context but is in fact a deeply influential participant.
I’m not defending Harrison’s work per se, but learning Open Space taught me about the essential work of managing process and not getting involved in content. It was the first big move for me away from traditional “get involved in the content” facilitation. Shaw’s work – as I understand it from the papers I’ve read – is about acknowledging that there is no “outside.” This was clear to me as a person who had spent my whole career working in communities and organizations. These ideas flow from a number of streams. Lewin helpfully names fields. Snowden and Juarrero name constraints. Pualani Kanakaole names the importance of the deep layers of context that do the real work of hosting. Snowden and Kurtz name the importance of narrative. Isaacs names the container. All of it conspires and moves together to put a question to the practitioner:
“What are you doing?”
When I enter a field to make change now it is not without attention to the landscape of meaning and affordances that exist. I use narrative capture to do that so that the field itself can talk about its experiences, make sense of them, decide what to do. There is a container for this work, and it is lifted intentionally and deliberately and gently from the field, like pinching a bit of cloth on a table to form a little wrinkle. It is not the One Meeting That Rules Them All. Change work requires staying in intimate contact with the field, the larger context. When the dialogic container loses contact with the field, whatever happens there will fail to make the change. It becomes its own thing. Fun maybe, or frustrating, or a kind of utopia. But you will quickly hear people talk about returning to “the real world.” Understanding the current topography of change and resistance and make that visible with minimal intervention is critical. Keeping the work in contact with the field but intervening in smaller ways more often gives a better chance that affordances will be found for promising action. If you aren’t making change in the “real world,” change isn’t being made.
Containers exist because constraints exist. There is a connection. There is a flow. There is an inside and outside, there is an attractor. Even in the most subtle forms, these precipitate differences that become meaningful. What is happening inside this coffee shop is defined by who is on what side of the counter, which languages are being spoken, what the layout of tables and benches do. Who knows whom. The woman who made my espresso was once a kid on a team I coached. When she appears at her job at the community centre, I don’t order coffee from her. We both own shares in the same soccer team, one for which she also once played. The container emerges, is “borrowed” as Augusto says, from the field.
We cannot pretend otherwise. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t intervene to make change. It means we should be aware of our intervention and the role we play especially if we show up to the field with power and influence. And if we are making change, that work needs to be as deeply embedded in the field itself and not in the briefcases of consultants or the magic spells of method user guides. It’s about practice. I’m a practitioner.
Harrison’s most influential teaching on my life was not Open Space, actually. It was his slogan “Don’t trust the process, trust the people.” Follow that to its deepest implications and one might arrive at the kinds of questions about epistemic justice, colonization, domination, change-making, and democracy that matter. Those implications are ever-present in my work. I have no answers, but the question “What am I doing?” is a dear companion on the journey.
Posting a link to Corina Enache’s LinkedIn post, because I don’t think she has a blog.
This one on purpose, with a hat tip to David Graeber’s work, is important. I was ruminating on this post as I walked in the Dentelles Massif yesterday in Provence.
Here is a long quote:
Purpose-driven culture, under [Graeber’s] lens, is a moral vocabulary the organisation uses to manage its people not a gift of coherence, engagement and direction. It reframes compliance as meaning and it asks you not just to do the work but to feel good about it on terms someone else defined.
The tell is what happens when you don’t feel it, when the “purpose” doesn’t land for you, when the why feels thin or disconnected from your daily reality, that becomes your problem. A coaching conversation, a culture fit question. The purpose is never interrogated but you for sure will be.
Here is the alternative: stop writing purpose statements and start asking purpose questions. What do the people doing the work think this organisation is actually for? What would they protect if they could? What makes the work feel worth doing from where they sit, not from the executive floor? You might find your purpose statement survives that conversation and you might find it needs a complete rewrite.
Purpose that is handed down is a message and purpose that is built together is a belief.
This is the best argument for taking a narrative approach to planning work. Many organizations are approaching me these days to get folks clear on purpose and it largely comes from the planning committee or the leadership and a desire for coherence or — shudder — alignment. Of course good leaders can sense a moment when a group of people feels incoherent, when they seem to be at odds with one another or somehow drifting. That’s often when consultants get called.
Enache’s antidote is probably the wisest thing that one can do to begin the process of finding purpose. Purpose hasn’t disappeared. It just shows up at different scales and in different ways. If your organization pays well to keep people around but treats them badly, expect to have a lot of employees who are there for a pay check that funds their lives rather than whatever higher or loftier goals you have.
On the other hand be wary of using purpose to coerce people into working for you and putting up with poor job conditions or underpaid labour. I see this in non-profit and other settings where an appeal to a person’s sense of duty is sometimes used as a cudgel to get them to settle for a lower standards and pay.
Mary Parker Follett famously said that “purpose is the invisible leader.” This is true. But it is true in the sense that purpose is everywhere and unless you can surface it in some way any attempt to superimpose a purpose on what’s already there will set your people at odds with one another and with the strategic decision makers. They are already being led by purpose. Do you know what it is?
Starting with a narrative capture doesn’t always give the results leaders want. One organization I worked with did this as a prequel to some focuses planning and they learned a lot of uncomfortable truths about why their staff worked the way they did and especially, why their senior staff seemed so individually focussed. It had to do with how much control the executives held. There was nothing room for anyone else to contribute and so each person just didn’t their own thing. No amount of conversation could undo the structure of the field that had been laid down for many years.
For that organization the retreat became a pro forma offsite, with the leaders unwilling to have the conversations that needed to be had. But the narrative work we did offered a repository of questions and insights that they can back to over the years and helped them let go of the control they held so tightly. It let the organization evolve through successorship phase as a few left and a few felt the shift in an invitation to step deeper into stewarding the future of the organization.
The lesson is that purpose lives in the texture of the field, not in the aspirational statements people sometimes use to structure accountabilities. Surface and explore it and it becomes possible to work with it.
My buddy Tenneson, with whom I have been murmurating for a couple of decades, posted a quote today from Meg Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science that reminds me why I had walked a world of theory-informed practice for the past 30 years:
Organizations are living systems (not machines).
Living systems have a way of organizing themselves (Starlings as an example — don’t seem to have a boss or a planning committee).
If we learned more about how living systems organize themselves,
what would that teach us about organizing human endeavor?
It was basically that quote that first introduced me to the world of complexity and living systems and the implications of those metaphors and ways of organizing in human systems.
In 1995 I participated in my first Open Space and in 1996 I met Harrison Owen for the first time and heard him speak about how the phenomenon of self-organization could work in human gatherings. I was reading people like Kauffman (who Harrison knew and had been inspired by) and Gleick in tandem with Capra’s work first in The Turning Point which I read in university and then later reading the Tao of Physics.
I was – and remain – interested in complexity as reality, as shared by these scientists, and complexity as metaphor, which is what Meg was doing. That is, there are very real things that happen in the world that are complex and there are also ways we humans impose order on the world that rooted in the stories and images we tell about what order is and what it should be. A lot of times these are at odds. Sometimes we try to control emergent situations because we can’t handle the uncertainty and ambiguity and we bribe that control or efficiency or accountability will “solve the problem.” Other times we might turn away from the very real biophysical, or organizational constraints or indeed stable cultural patterns of a situation in favour of dreaming about different futures. Unrealistic “what ifs…” that take us away from possibility into dream land.
I am neither a scientist, nor a philosopher, but I instead identify as a practitioner, trying always to build coherence in my practice of working with people.
It was good to re-read Meg’s quote today because it is the unanswered question that inspires me. “If we learned more…” It’s an aspirational question that contains a hypothesis and an assumption. It implies that there is a new story emerging in the new inquires of biology and chemistry and physics that looks to emergence and self-organization that supports life. It invites us to expand our frames of reference about what organization means and what it could be. And it looks at a dehumanizing world structured around mechanistic metaphors of production and in it’s us to find how complexity offers us ways to bring more life to people, organizations, communities, ecosystems, societies and the world.
That question changed my practice forever and continues to send me adrift in the world with an abiding curiosity to always learn more. After thirty years I can say that I don’t have any answers to that question, because I keep learning. It is not a question to be answered. It is a question that offers a re-orientation, that guides the senses to different places and invites one to find new things there.
Dave Snowden concluded his six-part series on the Channel and the Estuary this week. He used gangster movies and TV Series to illustrate the different kinds of contexts in which people are sense-making. The series contrasted the categorical ambiguity and gradients represented by the ecology of a tidal estuary with the managed and ordered passageway through uncertainty represented by the marked channel. The metaphors are meaningful for coastal people, and anyone who has had to navigate these kinds of marine ecosystems. The point is that navigating in the estuary and in the channel requires different approaches to sense-making.
The whole series deserves to be read and thought through, as it is an important declaration of what “complexity thinking” really is and what it requires from the complexity practitioner. It is also a warning against the way in which we receive the world in a pre-channeled, dredged state, made easier for us; “facilitated” one might say, especially by the digitization of our experience, which has dredged and channelled the world and offered us pre-designed categories of experience.
Dave’s series contains an embedded tribute to those whose lot in life requires them to practice estuarine thinking in a world of pre-cut channels. It recognizes the loneliness that such people sometimes experience and the separateness they often feel. It is also a call to action for an approach to organizational life that treats complexity as a context in which we are required to deploy “estuarine thinking.” These are lost capacities – exiled capacities, if you like – and we lose something essential if they disappear.
I have been wrestling with this series from the perspective of a person who hosts conversations in organizations and communities. Dave’s work has deeply shaped the way I view and practice facilitation over the past 15 years or so. It has left me in a liminal space of practice. I try to locate myself adjacent to those in the ‘facilitation’ world, those who are dialogic practitioners, and folks who are exploring the implications that complexity has for their practice. I say adjacent because I am aware that although I use the language of facilitation, dialogue, and hosting, I find that much of the practice in these fields fails to confront the complexity of human groups and systems. We all have work to do to build our practice around Dave’s invitation, not just in these posts but in his work in general as it relates to complex facilitation.
The thing about complexity is that once you see it you can’t unsee it, and Dave’s refection on the gangsters and business mavens from Guinness, Peaky Blinders and The Godfather had me noticing similar patterns in the stories I was encountering. Last weekend, we attended a screening of the 1961 version of the film West Side Story, which is unbelievably contemporary in many ways, not the least of which is that it explores what happens when people are born into a world of tight constraints not of their making. I have never seen the film or the musical, so this was all new to me. There is A LOT I can say about this film, and perhaps it deserves a whole other post to explore some of the themes, but one scene stood out to me in particular, and I think anyone who engages in facilitation (or community development or consulting or organizing) might find it beneficial to watch this and reflect.
The two gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, are locked in a struggle against each other, divided by ethnicity, neighbourhood, history, and class. Tony, the former leader of the Jets, falls in love with Maria, the younger sister of the Sharks’ leader. Their love crosses the boundaries of gangs, race, history, and tradition. Both gangs sing about the constraints of their worlds: childhood trauma, exclusion, racism, homesickness, loyalty, and the struggle to belong. At a critical point in the film, both gangs agree to meet at a dance in what they consider ‘neutral’ territory.
The dance is run by a social worker called Glad Hand, played beautiful by John Astin. Glad Hand, armed with his clipboard and his whistle, has some activities planned for the dance, and he naively tries to mix up the crowd of teenagers, probably so that they might have a different kind of experience of getting to know one another. His design for the evening is almost totally ignorant of the contexts that make it impossible for this dance to have any kind of success. It is a well-intentioned effort that goes terribly wrong. You can see the painfully earnest effort on Astin’s face, convinced that he is bringing a hopeful and helpful evening to this group of poor immigrant youth.
In the key scene, Glad Hand organizes the teenagers into a circle dance. the idea is that the girls walk one way and the boys walk the other and when he blows the whistle you have to dance with who ever you are standing in front of. He says “form a circle. Boys will be on the outside, girls will be on the inside.” Action, one of the Jets who has the best, most cynical quips in the films asks “And where will you be?” Glad Hand chuckles nervously with an awkward smile and ignores the question.
It takes a few moments for anyone to move into the circle. There is no trust between the teens and Glad Hand and everybody is HYPER aware of the dynamics in the room which Glad Hand has just gleefully ignored in favour of his plans and his clipboard. He has tried to create “safe” space and the gangs understand this as “neutral” space, which is a very different thing. “Neutral” requires that you keep your guard up and restrain your instincts. While Glad Hand is committed to civility, the gangs are actually committed to an uneasy peace in a social field that is filled with tension.
As the circle dance begins Glad Hand is clearly waiting for his chance to impose a predetermined outcome, where the Sharks girls will end up with the Jets boys and vice versa. It’s transparent and manipulative. The kids in the dance are looking anxiously around themselves, scanning the room and knowing exactly where they are in every moment. Glad Hand blows his whistle when the circles are lined up perfectly for his agenda. Immediately everyone catches on to what is happening. They stop, look around and break the exercise and go back into their couples and groups, and the dance disintegrates into a ritualized gang war, with the two sides doing their own thing more divided than ever. As the circle breaks down you can see the police officer running to Glad Hand and clearly reprimanding him for the situation he has created. This is the last we see of the social worker.
This is deeply familiar to me, and perhaps you too. For many of us the facilitation journey starts with tools and methods. A devotion to these creates a situation in which the context and pre-existing constraints are pushed into the background. When a group rebels against what I am doing. my experience has been that it is almost always the result of my own ignorance to what is happening in the group. These are hard lessons to learn, but important. It’s why I wrote the series on theory, to recognize that the dialogic containers in which we are working are embedded in multiple constraint regimes and landscapes of context which exert a more powerful influence on the present moment than a facilitated method.
Dave’s recent series pushes us to understand the capacity needed not only to enter into the ambiguous and uncertain space of complex situations, but to navigate once we are there. It calls me to a practice of constant self-reflection, knowing that in any situations it is impossible to map the next step, and recognizing that the channel markers I encounter are often the ones I have put down before, to protect myself, to avoid the messiness I can’t handle, to steer the group into a place where I am most comfortable or hopeful. Channels are not bad in and of themselves. But one cannot lose sight of the estuary in which the channel is dredged.
Relentless self-awareness is critical to leading in the estuary. Being aware of where we are in relation to what is happening, and knowing how to respond to the steadily changing context is the capacity. It is not often what people are contracting you for; so often the client wants certainty and structure and guidance. What is needed in complexity instead is a kind of learning scaffolding that for developing the capacity that people have for being in the estuary. Dredging a channel does not mean that we are no longer navigating in the salt marsh. On the contrary, it may well rob us of the ability to be able to do so.