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Have you been bitten by the complexity bug yet?

I think after several years of facilitating, leading or organizing, most folks get curious about how things work. Why did that meeting go that way? How did our organizational culture become so bad despite so many good people here? Why can’t we seem to make a dent in this substance misuse issue in our town?

In the arts of working with groups of humans, very few of us have any kind of formal training in how to do it. What formal training exists in credentialed institutions tends to avoid a deep focus on complexity and emergence in favour of teaching the skills and tools that can bring various degrees of order to a situation.

These will serve you well for sure. But there comes a time when you are expected to run something, solve something or lead something when you just can’t put your finger on it, and all your best efforts stall. That’s when the curiosity gets triggered, and “Why?” becomes an active part of your vocabulary.

I have often said that Caitlin and I offer our company’s services in very specific circumstances: to do highly participatory work in highly complex environments. While those are specific contexts for our work, they are not uncommon contexts for our work. For both of us it would be impossible to do this work without a good grounding in theory that underlies our practice. I credit people like Harrison Owen, Toke Moeller, Dee Hock, Dave Snowden, Glenda Eoyang, and many other thinkers and practitioners for grounding my work in complexity and co-creative participation. Caitlin’s work is grounded in Byron Katie, Pema Chödron, and new thinking in cognitive and neuroscience research. Together, we have built a body of work that helps us to work with complex situations to support leadership, nudge cultures towards more life-giving contexts, and strengthen people and communities to live with and thrive in uncertainty.

We call the work Complexity Inside and Out because it acknowledges that every diabolical situation we find ourselves in has a tangle of dynamics that include what’s happening inside of ourselves and what is happening around us. The bad news is that there are no clear root causes for these situations and no way to predict what will happen next with a high degree of certainty. Still, the good news is that there are many places where people can make a difference to move situations in a preferred direction of travel, which to me is typically towards life-giving, affirming, meaningful activities and results. That’s what we aim to do with this program: increase your resourcefulness to support your work with humans in complex environments.

We’ve offered this program three times now to an incredibly diverse group of people working in many different fields, from health care, education, business, sport, philanthropy, Indigenous communities, faith communities, justice, social and environmental action and many other sectors. We’ve dived together into issues of power and equity as complex phenomena, looked at how cultures form and, stabilize and change, thought about evaluation and knowledge, explored leadership, worked on ways to address our own thinking and behaviours that compromise our abilities to design lead and co-create in uncertain situations.

We’d love for you to join us in this extended discovery. We’re proud of our program, which delivers a lot of content, practice, and a chance to learn it individually and with a cohort of buddies with whom you can explore these ideas in more detail.

Have a look at our website to learn more. Drop me an email or a comment here if you have questions. Come on the journey.