Just over a month ago, I tagged an article in The Guardian which had picked up on the work of Italian anthropologist Vito Teti on the social value of nostalgia. That sent me burrowing, but the only one of his books which I could find translated from la bella lingua (to quote Lucia, and if you don’t get that reference, then make a note to read E. F. Benson’s Mapp & Lucia novels or watch the BBC adaptation) was Stones into Bread which is about all the small things that make a village in Calabria its identity. It is, to quote the blurb, “about migrating and about remaining, about yearning to leave if you’ve stayed and yearning to make the trek back if you’ve gone, about how both those who travel and those who never stray from home change.” As it happened, I had also been sent a book, in a similar vein, by a friend of mine, Rob Sheffield, Pieces of Us , which is a story of the people and community of Greenhill in Swansea, once vibrant. Both came to mind this morning, which is the twentieth anniversary of my Father’s death. He died in Ysbyty Gwynedd a few minutes before I arrived to take over from my sister by his bedside. My mother could not, as she was briefly at home before she was admitted to the same hospital to die in the early hours of St David’s Day a few days later. To lose both parents within ten days of each other was never going to be easy, and the memory is a little less painful twenty years on. That was also the period in which the politics of IBM made my life untenable. I would eventually take early retirement as part of an agreed settlement a month later. I still remember a friend in IBM telling me not to take the viciousness of that process personally; I had just been “road kill’.
I was lucky enough to have loving parents and a stable home growing up in North Wales; otherwise, I might not have survived to set up Cognitive Edge. , identifying (through my mother with Cardiff in the south). My father, a vet, spent much of his spare time in his garden. I’d help him create the substrate for that when we moved into a new build on clay soil. He and I dug (with pickaxes, spades and shovels, no mechanical assistance) through that clay to a depth of ten feet and then dug in the truckloads of manure, dumped at the gate by his farmer friends before breaking down the clay and refilling the massive trenches. I was in my early teenage years, and honestly, I resented but did not question the necessity of the task, although I still remember the smell. The other memory from those days is that everything that went into the car’s boot (trunk for my American readers) ended up smelling of Lysol. My involvement in the garden was limited to the heavy work, adding flagstones and wall construction. My all-time favourite picture of him, using a wheelbarrow as a deck chair, opens this post. The banner picture is of me, taken by Iwan Jenkins on day 63 of my 67-day walk around and through Wales; this a bleak moorland section between Glyndyfrdwy and Milltir Gerrig. Dad’s place was his garden; mine was, and still is, the mountains of Cymru and the Celtic kingdom of Rheged; for the ten days leading up to my 70th birthday, I will be ticking off some more stages of my second full Wainwright round starting with four days at the Wasdale Head Inn before moving onto a holiday cottage in Cockermouth. All Fools Day, my actual Birthday, I will also have to drive the five hours to Heathrow Airport, which is how things have panned out. But if the weather is good, I will be somewhere around Ambleside to minimise the drive overall. I belong in the mountains, not the all-too-gentle agricultural landscape of Wiltshire; I once yearned to leave, and now I yearn to return.
This post is not just one of my memories of my Father; I didn’t want the twentieth anniversary to go unmarked. It is also about the sense of belonging that is associated with places in your past. When I read Stones into Bread, my mind immediately jumped to the Welsh word hiraeth. The idea of yearning to leave and then yearning to return better summarises it, and it is often translated as a nostalgic longing for a place which probably never really existed. It, like Cynefin, is a word of movement and change, not a static one, and it recognises the power of narrative, both collective and personal, to weave us into histories that define our identity. Understanding where we are is not just factual, although that is important; it is also about how our memories have reconstructed those many pasts to create positive and negative identities in the way we perceive ourselves and our communities today. The notorious (at least in Wales) Report of a Commission of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales stated, “The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people. It is not easy to over-estimate its evil effects.” The Commissioners were a group of young English Lawyers who spoke no English and only paid attention to the reports of witnesses from the Established Anglican Church of Wales, ignoring, in the main, those from the dominant non-conformist and Welsh-speaking majority with their network of Sunday Schools. The Commissioners were asked to address “the means afforded to the labouring classes of acquiring a knowledge of the English language,” which gave rise to the Welsh Not and was used throughout Central Europe as an exemplar for linguistic subjugation.
In understanding society, we need, to quote Alasdair McIntyre, to understand “the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources”. That applies as much to an organisation as it does to civil society and is one of the reasons we created a narrative offering around the idea of a Sacred Storybook for organisations, which not only captures those dramatic resources but also makes a tangible part of onboarding new employees and leaders. We are just putting one of those together for one of the major car manufacturers, and it also gives an effective way of mapping culture and change over time. Cynthia and I wrote about the criticality of these stories for any form of learning in our Bramble Bushes in a Thicket article. The essence of estuarine mapping at a collective and individual level includes understanding the substrate of memory and culture that stories provide. When I update the method on St David’s Day, I will deal with some new options for using narratives as a base-level input to the framework and as a novel form of conflict resolution and measuring differences in perception and micro-changes in that perception as change initiatives start to unfold and/or unravel. We are woven into our memories, but they do not necessarily bind us, and that is what I want to address in what will be a linked series of posts on understanding and using micro-narratives in organisations. Understanding the substrate and getting it right is something my father understood about gardens, but that understanding is often missing in organisational change. You will need manure and a lot of spade work at some stage, and the earlier you get around to doing that, the lower the cost downstream. And go with the Italian and the Welsh, not English …
It’s just over six weeks since I attended the Cynefin retreat on Ethics and Leadership, and it’s almost taken me that long to recover from the cognitive overload during those three days. So, why was it a cognitive overload? Well for me, it was because of three things.
Firstly, the structure of the event is a triopticon. You can find more information here, but essentially, it is about deep listening to expert perspectives on the topic (in this case, ethics and leadership) and then shuffling off into small groups of random strangers to relate what you heard and understood for some collective sense-making. Deep listening is hard, you must be present in order to respond to what is said as opposed to just verbalising your earlier thoughts. It’s also hard listening to people who are sharing their thoughts on what they heard when, deep down, you are wondering whether you are responding to the same presentation. But that is the beauty and the challenge of the triopticon and why it is the first thing to cause cognitive overload.
That brings me to the second thing causing cognitive overload—random strangers. The retreat was attended by an eclectic mix of people – the academics, the practitioners, the boffins, the newbies and the curious. Perhaps, like me, you find yourself surrounded largely by friends, colleagues and acquaintances who hold similar views to you, perhaps are culturally similar, or you’ve just known them so long you can blank out their irritating or divergent qualities. At the retreat, however, when we weren’t deep listening, we were fumbling around for shared experiences to bridge the chasm of the unknown and to find some anchor points during the three days. Well, at least I was.
Stepping into the unknown and talking to a random stranger takes a lot of effort. It’s a high energy interaction until the energy fields begin to resonate – or not, which, in this case, you just bounce off into someone else’s energy field and start again. It can be draining. And this is not a reflection on the good people who attended; it’s just a fact that meeting new people is energy intensive, even if you’re an extrovert, so I’m told.
Then there’s the third thing. Self-awareness. Totally exhausting. Here we are interacting with complete strangers, in a whirlwind of ideas, opinions and understandings, trying to arrive at some sort of preliminary endpoint, and I am carrying on detailed, often distracting conversations with myself.
What am I talking about to myself? It ranges from ‘stop being so judgemental…’, ‘this is so boring…’, ‘how much longer…’, ‘I never thought of that…’, ‘I wonder if I could apply that…’, ‘wow, my kindred spirit…’. These mere snippets of the discussions I was having with myself, led me to consider how much my world views filter (or perhaps obscure) my access to new information. If I didn’t actively wrangle myself back into deep listening mode, I found myself prematurely discarding a variety of information available to me. Note, I said prematurely discard – I still discarded heaps but I gave it a ‘fair suck of the sav’ before I got rid of it. I, and many others I know, work in a variety of ways to push, prod and provoke systems change but recognise any change is largely dependent on relationships. Being at the retreat intensified the conditions most of us operate in on a daily basis. For me, it provided an opportunity to reflect on theories and concepts of anthro-complexity in a microcosm. I was able to note my own behaviour when placed into an unfamiliar environment, exploring a concept I do not regard myself an expert in and how I bounced around looking for connections on the right energy gradient for something to take home. In the end, I concluded that sense-making to arrive at a shared purpose in an unknown environment is highly relational and highly energetic. We constantly make choices about how much effort we will put into relationships and understanding other views and our tendency is to move towards those that will be less energy intensive, unless it is a bit sparkly or novel and little investment of extra energy is required to decide on whether to pursue or release. That is an important realisation when attempting to shift complex systems.
About The Author: Amara Bains
Amara Bains brings over 25 years of experience in senior management in Australian and international organisations across a variety of sectors including humanitarian aid, international development, mental health and community development. She has led teams to develop and implement programs in disaster management, health, community and organisational development. In those roles and as a consultant, Amara has conducted strategic reviews and planning with organisations to address complex challenges bringing an evolving understanding of complex adaptive systems and anthro-complexity to these challenges. Currently, Amara works at the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth conceptualising approaches to practical applications of methods for complex adaptive systems change and its evaluation. In addition, Amara monitors digital technology trends and their (potential) influence, especially with respect to children and young people and their inheritance.
Banner image credit: Photo by Hudson Hintze on Unsplash
I’ve just submitted my PhD! Cue a giant sigh of relief.
I’ve been with The Cynefin Co, on the Health Programme team, since April 2021. Alongside this, I have been on a four-year journey of a cotutelle PhD in Exercise, Nutrition, and Health Sciences between the University of Bristol and the University of Cape Town, titled:
“The role of social network analysis in scaling-up and sustaining community-based health programmes in low- and middle-income countries.”
In (very) brief, I conducted a five study exploration of how to use social network analysis, the measurement and visualisation of relationships between actors in a network, to strengthen community-based health promotion programmes using a South African case study (abstract at the end). All the relevant reports and publications will follow after my viva but for now I’d like to reflect on how The Cynefin Co influenced where my research started to where it ended up.
For the first two years, the aim of this PhD was to explore “what works”. My plan was to determine exactly what social network structures of health programmes lead to their scale-up and sustainability – I’m sorry, I was young and naïve then! It became very clear that not only would it be difficult to measure the social networks of a complex, widely spread community programme which had no way of objectively and simply being labelled a success, but applying any findings to another context would likely not be very valuable.
It was around this time that I joined The Cynefin Co. It was working here that I really learnt about complex adaptive systems and the value of mapping what is currently happening in order to make small decisions that move to an improved future. The work of The Cynefin Co and Dave Snowden validated my feelings that the PhD trajectory I was on, that of trying to create acontextual end-goals of community programme networks, was not worth the time and energy I would have expended on it. It was too late down the line to include The Cynefin Co tools like SenseMaker®, and Estuarine Mapping didn’t exist in the public domain then, but I knew I could use these ways of thinking about, and valuing, complexity in my PhD work.
The Cynefin Co alone didn’t change my PhD focus (that of now taking a step back and exploring the feasibility of SNA in community programme settings). The participants of my research themselves reflected a need for capturing the complexity of their network, being open to unexpected and expected changes, and using real-time data to make small actions towards strengthened relationships (very Vector Theory of Change). I did not use the tools offered but The Cynefin Co helped to give language to what was already being expressed by those on the ground. In the end, I came out with a PhD that provides more questions than answers to community health programmes – and I’m far happier for it.
I suppose my take-away message would be for those who are interested but you/your company are not ready to engage in SenseMaker, Estuarine Mapping, entangled trios etc. Know that you don’t have to use these tools to engage in complexity thinking. The Cynefin Co. is not a gatekeeper to sense-making, it’s a supporter. Challenge yourself and those around you to think about narratives and vector theory of change. Start opening conversations and thought experiments about how it might apply to the work you are doing. Normalise complexity thinking, because the world is so often complex and powerful ideas can come out of it if we listen to it.
….of course, if you would like to engage in our support and tools, let us know!
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PhD abstract:
Background: Non-communicable diseases [NCDs] are an ever-increasing burden globally with low- and middle-income countries [LMICs] disproportionately affected. Community-based programmes [CBPs], which aim to improve the wellbeing of specified populations in a contextually relevant way, have been identified by the World Health Organization as a cost-effective prevention and management strategy of NCDs. However, evidence for scaling-up and sustaining CBPs remains limited. A potential tool to scale-up CBPs could be social network analysis [SNA] which considers real-world complexity by quantifying and visualising relationships between stakeholders. Objective: To explore the role of SNA in scaling-up and sustaining CBPs in LMICs. Methods: Mixed-methods, five sequential studies: 1) Scoping review of SNA in scaling-up and sustaining CBPs in LMICs; 2) Feasibility study of SNA within the case study programme, WoW!, 3) Full SNA of WoW!, 4) Interviews with WoW! stakeholders exploring context and mechanism factors that might be present in the scale-up and sustainability of WoW!, and 5) Interviews exploring the perceptions of WoW! stakeholders of the process and value of SNA. Results: Study 1 identified only three studies that conducted SNA, supporting this research. Study 2 identified practical challenges of collecting SNA data within complex settings, informing approaches for Study 3 which revealed a centralised network, unclear role differentiation, and low rural representation. Study 4 interviewees provided contextual understanding of the SNA findings, with Study 5 participants indicating that while some aspects of SNA were useful, i.e., visual outputs, most analyses did not provide actionable information. They proposed the use of a “live mapping” tool providing the visual benefits of SNA while taking into account the data collection capabilities and information needed to measure and act in complex community networks. Conclusion: This research contributes to the development of a pragmatic and feasible SNA tool in improving the scale-up and sustainability of complex CBPs, particularly in LMICs.
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Banner image from Unsplash
I am recently back from “the road”, and as others might have found, you learn a lot in those circumstances. Especially when the road includes almost daily workshops, sessions, meetings, and seminars with your boss…who happens to be Dave Snowden…who happens to be working out some key things right now. So before everything slips back into the rhythm of the every day, this post is a way for me to share with you some of what I have been learning, exploring, and thinking about through this trip. What follows is the first of two dispatches from the road. This one focuses on new elements related to estuarine mapping. It is a precursor to full posts on the method that will be coming later from Dave Snowden. It is populated by pictures of native fauna I encountered (although the photos are not mine) to reinforce the ties to such a unique place.
Kaipara Moana is the largest estuary in New Zealand. Located near Auckland, its catchment area covers what appeared to me to be about half of the island (when shown in the pub). The Ministry for the Environment, who are Cynefin Centre members, is part of the Kaipara Moana Remediation (PMR) programme and wanted to share their complexity tools with the programme team. This is how Dave and I ended up discussing applying estuarine mapping to an actual estuary – a frankly irresistible prospect.
Estuarine mapping is still an evolving method, and the incredibly geologically active New Zealand was an excellent place for me to encounter the method’s latest tremor. For those unfamiliar with it, at its most essential, it is a method for mapping the present, with an eye towards the future. We do that by breaking up different elements and influences that are present in the here and now so that we can take action (both direct and indirect) around a desired direction of movement. This is the evolutionary potential of the present. I have been one of its early practitioners and dedicated followers and part of the team trying to iron out some of the inevitable tangles in new methods. During this trip, its latest development addressed three of those tangles, leaving me more excited about its future than ever.
Dave has discussed extensively exploring and using different typologies for the various elements that go into constructing an estuarine map elsewhere on this blog. Ever since the beginning, the purpose of such typologies was clear: they are meant to stimulate people into looking through different perspectives and potentially spotting different things. They were never intended to be exhaustive, essential, or prescriptive. Yet their introduction in practice remained an open question for practitioners: Which types do I introduce? When? How?
The question of introducing types was addressed in New Zealand by landing on a much more streamlined typology as the standard starting point. Constraints (which in complexity are not things that limit us, but anything that alters the possibility space in which we operate) contain or connect. The latter (connections) also serve as the introduction to considering constraints as other than restrictions. Constructors transform through passage (like a ritual you go through) or contagion (like an idea that spreads and changes things in its passing).
In schematic form:
And that’s it! Simple, elegant, and if your audience gets stuck, different types can be thrown out for stimulation. And ritual can be so simple, yet meaningful – in New Zealand, I got used to starting every session with a karakia, a prayer, and every personal introduction not with my role, but with looking back towards my roots. Actions like that stake out a different sort of space – they designate it as different, special, and allow potentially new kinds of connections to happen, especially when they are perceived as meaningful. In that case, they transformed us all.
The importance of introducing new words in creating micro-anomalies that force people to think differently instead of sliding into habituated patterns has also been discussed elsewhere. One such new word is now part of Estuarine Mapping – actants can be mapped alongside the other elements that go into the map. The strange word is being used to put distance between this term and human beings immediately coming to mind. Actors are human beings, but actants are anything that acts in the system. Actants might be people, they might not. Actants can include anything: from a person, to a schedule, to a building, to a narrative. If it acts within the system, it’s an actant. Mapping anything that acts in the system is another vital addition because it helps us sidestep the agency problem. It is critical to understand agency if you want to influence a system. People tend to equate it to autonomy or power, but this makes its role in the system easy to miss when it isn’t overt. Actants indirectly let us map agency at a much subtler level.
The final significant addition to the Estuarine Framework is effects. If the reader is familiar with the typology of constraints, you might remember that one of the types is “Dark Constraints”. Dark constraints, like dark matter, are invisible. We only know they are there because of their effects on other things. They might, for example, be cultural practices that are so deeply rooted as to be invisible, or they might be wholly unknown constraints. People are often fascinated by this type and are keen to identify it in their contexts.
However, the trouble with dark constraints is that if you can readily identify them, they’re not really dark. And if you think you have identified them and are safe, trouble is not far away. “Effects” puts into practice one of the principles of complexity: obliquity. It approaches the problem sideways, sidestepping constraints themselves and goes into mapping effects that we note in our environment. Some of those will result from constraints (including dark ones), but starting at the other end increases our chances of spotting something we may have missed in the effort to directly and specifically identify constraints.
My time in New Zealand is not over. In the next instalment, I’ll discuss the thick present and emergent identities, among other things. Look out for Dave’s upcoming post on the revamped estuarine process. We hope to see you at the next stop on the road.
Banner picture: Image by Dave Snowden, taken round about the Red Rocks, Wellington
Takahē standing in the grass, public domain
Toutouwai in the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary, image by Tony Wills, shared under CC BY-SA 3.0
Tīeke on Tiritiri Matangi Island, image by Duncan Wright, shared under CC BY-SA 3.0
With thanks to Rhiannon Davies for the proof-reading and editing advice and to Dave Snowden for pre-reading
The Cynefin Retreat on ‘Learning in Complex Adaptive Systems’ was idyllically located in the Welsh countryside. A group of big, interwoven, fairy-tale-like looking trees in front of the impressive (and unpronounceable) Coed-y-Mwstwr hotel seemed to welcome us, participants. For the next three days, we would apply Dave Snowden’s Triopticon process to explore and discuss what lifelong learning, un-learning and re-learning mean in the context of complex adaptive systems.
The Triopticon Process
Unfolding in three phases, the Triopticon process resembles ‘part conference, part symposium, and part laboratory’. Participants’ roles are named after animals. Three Eagles, our keynote speakers, offered divergent expert perspectives on learning in formal and informal contexts. After each Eagle’s talk, we participants came together in Raven trios to reflect on the keynote speaker’s input. In the final stage, we integrated what we had collected throughout the process in larger Beaver groups to build something new. During this formation phase, Magpies would swoop in and out of our groups to drop or grab shiny ideas and ensure the process was open to constant exchange. Our Owl, Annika Varjonen, completed this busy scene, and her illustrations are scattered throughout this post. As if seated high up on the crown of a tree, she watched and listened carefully to visualise our learning journey in illustrations.
Entering the realm of nature and adopting those roles of eagles, ravens, beavers, magpies and owls, initiates a first step out of our familiar environment and patterns of thinking. This is just what the Triopticon process intends to do: trigger us to think outside the box and inspire our imagination. All we needed to do was to let go of expectations. Let go of the idea of rigid guiding questions to help lead us through discussions or those colourful little sticky notes to neatly line up our reflections we so love. I have to confess I felt a bit lost at the beginning as the process left me wondering: Where is this discussion going? Will our group ever come up with the right reflections? What is our goal after all? At some point during the second day of the Retreat, I gave in, trusted the process, and allowed myself to drift into the unknown. And suddenly things started to fall into place. The process carefully set the stage for an open space where ideas could form, deconstruct, and re-group in a surprising, playful, and creative way. It was as if each Eagle had planted a seed. Throughout the process, these seeds would grow and intertwine like those big trees in the garden. It is a beautiful showcase for how learning in complex systems should be: a co-creative endeavour and discovery process, moving from divergence to convergence to create something new.
Learning is more than Education
Education needs to get students out of the classroom, engage emotions and recognise that lived experience constitutes viable and valuable knowledge. Jane Booth, our first Eagle, spoke on the topic of ‘Co-creating Disruption: Education for a Future’. It felt like a call to action when Jane shared her vision of how education should inspire us to be better humans who contribute long-term to a healthy and vibrant society. Rather than merely preparing us to be better professionals, and successfully maximising profit, education should endow us with intelligent kindness and empathy. Education and society interact and shape one another. This interconnectivity, a property of complex adaptive systems, leads us into a loop: what kind of society are we creating through education and what kind of education does our society produce? It also leads to the question of how we measure the value of knowledge and skills. There was anger in Jane’s voice when she reflected on how metrics reduce knowledge to whatever is deemed ‘market fit’, thereby recreating the current system. While metrics can help us measure progress, doesn’t a metric stop being a good metric once it becomes the sole focus and a goal in itself?
Being measured creates pressure that hinders play and creativity in a learning process. Our second Eagle, Lene Rachel Andersen, reminded us in her talk ‘Bildung & Complexity’ that the zone of optimal learning is this sweet spot where we play and where the new stuff is really interesting and just challenging enough; just out of our reach. Lene extended the concept of education beyond building knowledge. She introduces the term ‘Bildung’ which encompasses the idea that education should also shape our values and spirits. It allows us to survive but also to thrive, as individuals and societies. She takes this notion of Bildung further with the Bildung Rose. This model portrays six domains of society: Production, Technology, Science, Ethics, Narrative, and Aesthetics. Lene argues that with growing technical and digital progress we need to find the right balance, rather than allow one domain to dominate. We need to build connections between these domains and embrace cross-disciplinary approaches. In a complex system, society is more than the sum of its parts; it’s what happens between those parts.
Why is it that organisations and schools ended up functioning in the hierarchical and rigid structures we often encounter today? Caryn Vanstone, our third Eagle, took us back in time to understand the historical context and mental models by which institutions were formed like fortresses, built to defend against alteration. We attribute machine-like characteristics to organisations like efficiency, control or predictability. However, Caryn notes, this addiction to stability reduces our capacity to act and meaningfully engage with reality. A false impression of safety in a complex system through over-simplification doesn’t actually increase safety – only our risk. Life in its essence is movement and alteration, and we need to meet it where it is, crazy and complex. Furthermore, this addiction to stability inhibits deep change. And this is the moment where Caryn throws in the word love: true alteration is only possible from a state of love. If we want to step outside of what we have defined as ‘normal’, we need leaders who create change from a beginner’s mindset and ignite the inner fire that attracts other people to step in and take action. Acting from a place of uncertainty and daring to do things differently needs an environment of love, trust and courage.
Organizational Learning to Create Incremental Change
With all the input we had harvested from the Eagles’ and Ravens’ discussions, our Beaver group gathered around the question: How can we rethink adult and workplace learning? The rapid change in the world of work brought about by digitalisation and the potential of AI affects the skills we need to develop and challenges the purpose of organisational learning and the way we set up learning environments. How we learn might be much more important than what we learn. Learning how to learn is an essential future skill. It is the ability to navigate through the not-knowing, to explore different possibilities and to continuously adapt and evolve in response to the ever-changing conditions inherent to complex systems.
The purpose of organisational learning environments should be to curate a space for inquiry and incremental change. They should create conditions that inspire us to play, approach questions like beginners and challenge us to step outside the comfort zone while keeping us ‘safe’. As we move beyond established patterns of thinking or acting, the architecture behind organisational learning environments should be designed like a container that holds the disturbance that emerges when change happens. In setting up learning structures that foster an iterative approach of exploring, inspecting and adapting, we create the possibility to pause and reflect on our progress and its implications. Isn’t this what complex adaptive systems require us to do – engage in a constant balancing act of weighing opportunities with refocusing on what supports us and where we want to direct our energy towards?
All three Eagles pointed out the need to be engaged as integrated human beings. Learning environments should speak to the mind, heart, and soul. Society and education interact and shape one another, and so do an organisation and its learning culture. Just like trees that stretch out in many directions through their branches and leaves to find the light, and are invisibly connected underground through an immense mycelial network, so should we as learners reach out across disciplines to integrate different perspectives, connect with one another, feed one another, and interweave ideas. This is what allows us to ignite the spark of new creation and what speaks to the innate human quality to be creative.
About the author:
Catherine Khazarian is an independent consultant and coach for agile processes and organizational learning. She works with organizations, the public sector and academic institutions to design co-creative work and learning environments that foster inquiry and turning knowledge into action.
Image credit:
Created for the retreat by Annika Varjonen
Society… as in any living organism, is the co-operative consensus of multitudes of cells, each living in exchange with others. (Dewey, J., 1931. Individualism Old and New. London: George Allen and Unwin).
It’s a truism to say that education is complex. We accept it and we talk about preparing our learners to be “future-proof”, “agile” and “adaptable”, but then when we ping straight back into acting mechanistically, led by notions of optimisation, specifications, objectives and outcomes.
In complex contexts, being entangled means that we are all interdependent in the system, including any interventions we might make to change it. We don’t act on the system from outside. ‘Like a bramble bush in a thicket’ (Alicia Juarrero), small changes can make big differences, but in unpredictable ways. There is no simple linear cause-and-effect. Unanticipated aspects emerge as the different parts shift and the system self-organises.
Surely knowing this would alter how we approached our schools, universities and education systems? You’d think so.
Before I arrived at last month’s Cynefin Retreat, I certainly knew this in theory. I’ve been exploring complex adaptive systems in education for the last 10 years. But I now know that I didn’t fully appreciate it in practice.
NOTE: Retreat delegates are all active participants, not just observers.
All too often, our arrival at a professional gathering is accompanied by a comfortable switch from “active” to “passive” mode, as we ease lazily into absorbing the content thrust our way by a variety of “thought-leaders” in the field. Another crowd on their perpetual circuit, peddling solutionism, leading thoughts this way and that!
No such guilty pleasures here in the beautiful Vale of Glamorgan. As soon as we arrived, we were launched down the mines of the Welsh rural context at St Fagans National Museum of History – deepening our sense of place before we were tempted to retreat to the clean safety of decontextualised “academic” debates. We looked at education and learning through the lens of the local – tribal, political, industrial – such as, the “Welsh Not” and Welsh mine workers’ institutes of the late 19th century.
Welcome to the Triopticon
After a chance to get to know each other over dinner and drinks that night, we started Day 2 ready to enter the Triopticon! Imagining some kind of Greek tragedy or Foucauldian version of the Hunger Games, I wasn’t quite sure what I was letting myself in for. But under the guidance of Beth Smith, Anna Panagiotou and the rest of the fantastic Cynefin team, it soon became clear.
First, Beth clarified our direction. Together, we would explore three different perspectives on education and learn from our Eagles (more on that in a moment!). Then, drawing on these and our own collective expertise, we would identify a few specific projects that could be the ‘next right thing’ in their particular contexts.
This was putting into practice Dave Snowden’s now famous ‘Frozen 2’ strategy that identifies and harnesses the evolutionary potential of the present, rather than fixating on an ideal future state that we are trying to engineer into being.
Over the next two and a half days, we worked hard in various formations – trios and flocks of Ravens, colonies of Beavers, being provoked and challenged by a few wiley Coyotes. We shared our experiences and perspectives on learning and education as professionals from a variety of sectors, but also more personal, as learners ourselves, as parents and as citizens.
We finished on the morning of Day 4, tired but satisfied that we had developed project plans, based not on the outcomes we wanted, but on an understanding of the landscape of what changes were possible.
If you are interested in the specific flow of the Triopticon, you can read more about the method here.
The medium is the message!
As I reflected on the process, it was very clear that the most prominent aspect of the experience wasn’t any one person, idea or outcome. It was the structure of the method itself.
So often in education, we get obsessed with structure. And for good reason. We are carrying precious cargo and we want assurances that it’s going to get there in one piece (where ‘there’ is another conversation for another day!). However, we fixate on precisely the wrong kind of structure. From a toxic legacy of Aristotelian logic, Cartesian separation, Newtonian cause-and-effect and Thatcherite neo-liberalism and New Public Management, our educational institutions cling to the increasingly untenable myth of certainty that management by spreadsheets provides.
The irony is that opponents of such a top-down structure often validate it by rejecting the structure out of hand (as though there were no alternatives). The pendulum swings to the opposite extreme, emphasising learner-centred education and self-directed learning.
In the Triopticon, I experienced a generative structure that didn’t oppose individual agency, in fact, it created the necessary conditions for it to emerge, alongside other attributes that we need much more of in education: collective inquiry and epistemic justice.
By way of a few examples, the menagerie of wilderness creatures gave us roles that engrossed us as they transformed us. You could call them something functional but that would be way less fun (and probably less effective)! This was a very concrete experience of a constructor – a key aspect of the latest developments in Estuarine Mapping. It made certain things possible, and other things impossible. As Ravens, we were only allowed to share reflections amongst Ravens, which meant that space was created for everyone to share their own perspectives. No one Raven could dominate.
It also stopped us from deferring to the Eagles – Jane Booth, Caryn Vanstone and Lene Rachel Andersen – and putting them up on a perch as the “experts”. They, themselves, were also collaborators, called upon to reflect on each others’ presentations.
As the lead facilitator, Beth could easily have been set up as the authority, controlling proceedings according to her whim and interpreting people’s responses through her own lens.
Similarly, Dave could have easily been handed the epistemic authority by the many admiring participants. But he was kept in a box marked ‘Trickster’ (as a Coyote)!
Everyone was unconsciously contained and connected by a variety of constraints (p14 in the EU Field Guide has a really useful typology), such as time boxes, deadlines, rituals and roles/responsibilities. All of them are carefully designed to facilitate the decomposition and recombination of ideas – and sometimes confusion (aporia)!
A particular favourite of mine was a phase called Ritual Dissent. After we had transformed from Raven into Beavers to build project plans, each plan was interrogated through enforced and vehement (but not personally abusive!) criticism by other Beaver groups. This was a kind of ‘pre-mortem’ to identify potential weaknesses in the projects early and iterate quickly to build in more resilience into the structures. No beaver wants a dam that breaks at the first sign of stress! It was another amazing example of collective intelligence being harnessed intentionally to recognise and embrace the inherent complexity of the issues and contexts being addressed.
Lastly, throughout the retreat, there was an ongoing opportunity for us all to share thoughts and provocations that stuck with us as micro-narratives in the Sensemaker app. This was yet another way to see the emergent patterns of stories and perspectives being shared in real-time, allowing the Cynefin team to reflect and adapt the process as needed.
Buzzing with possibilities
I am writing this on the train home, completely exhausted but buzzing with possibilities! So alive to the many adjacent possibilities that exist.
This Cynefin retreat (and, specifically, the Triopticon) had not only been about educating in complexity. It was an education in complexity. It was a learning experience with more integrity and fidelity than I’ve ever seen to the fact that we (and the issues being addressed) are complex adaptive systems.
Let’s keep acting like it, in full acknowledgement and wonder at the stunning complexity of what we face.
About The Author
Tim Logan is an education consultant, co-lead of the IB Festival of Hope, producer/host of the Future Learning Design podcast and team member at NoTosh.
Some readers will know that I started my commercial career in the personnel department of an international survey company. I’d come off a difficult period of the best part of a year without a job, the experience of which never really leaves you. The department was then run by a retired army major with an assistant and a secretary. The major was about to retire for a second time, his assistant was about to get his job and I was the new number two, in the many senses of that phrase. That type of structure was pretty typical of business at the time. Ex-Military people understood bureaucracy and compliance, so they were a safe pair of hands, but they also understood command and the development of leadership. The Personnel Department was very small and it supported the business function. Career development, salary decisions and so on were made in the business and our role was co-ordination and acting as a backstop on compliance. We knew our place …
Now these days the size of that function in an equivalent organisation would probably run into double figures. It would be staffed by people trained in the area since University and would be called something very different. They would not have the wider experience of my ex-major and their lives would have been spent within what has become a modern profession. It will also have a lot more authority and because it isn’t under commercial pressure, in the manner of an operation unit, can get away with more. Some of my worst and best experiences in modern organisations have come from the HR or OD functions who have also been influenced by the near-exponential growth of the change industry, or in its more extreme form, the transformation miasma. To be honest I’m not sure the changes are for the better and a small is beautiful strategy may have attractions to those who fund the function.
That leads to the point of this post
I’ve had a few conversations of late with people at various levels of management in the HR/OD functions and they face considerable challenges. Not the so-called crisis of meaning that represents the attempt by a wing of metamuggledom to gaslight us into their new religions; more a crisis of relevance. What is their role going forward? The transformation business is past its peak and the debris of its passing is becoming more evident every day. HR/OD can no longer take their existence for granted. I once suggested that they had the CEO trapped in a Stockholm Syndrome relationship and while that was a provocation at the time it has a large element of truth in it.
Out of one of those conversations I came up with three big questions that any HR/OD function should be asking themselves and on reflection, I decided to share them in expanded form (content and numbers) here:
Now that isn’t exhaustive but it’s a start and I could ask very similar questions of the finance department along with the IT function.
The banner picture is cropped from an original of a steamy sunrise over Roaring Mountain. Original public domain image from Flickr and sourced from RawPixel. The opening portrait is of Jean Terford David, 1813. By Thomas Sully (American, 1783–1872) in the Cleveland Museum of Art. The portrait subject was an American officer who served as a paymaster during the War of 1812
Both pictures are significant for the context of the post if you think about it, especially the multiple ambiguities of the banner picture
I really can’t remember a time in my life which didn’t feature science fiction or fantasy in some form. Thinking back it probably stems from going to the Disney Movie of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea which was released in the year of my birth but still around in children’s cinema when I was very young. Cinema was special in those days as we didn’t have a television until 1965 when the BBC serialised Wars of the Roses which finally persuaded my mother to rent a television and shift us from a diet of Radio. I Never resented that by the way as Children’s Hour on the Home Service (now Radio 4) probably stimulated my imagination more than the special effects of modern television. From that point on I didn’t have to sneak around to friends’ houses to watch Doctor Who and I’m around to say that I have never missed a single episode of that classic, which took some effort before the arrival of VHS. I never really got into Comic Books though and I am not sure they would have gotten through a material censorship system which banned Biggles, James Bond and anything by Enid Blyton. The banning was on grounds of politics, by the way, not prurience. There are links here to some elite US schools that are educating their children without technology to give them an advantage by developing human sense-making skills in an age where meaning is in effect being curated by algorithms.
One of the scariest ideas in modern sci-fi can be found in Neil Stephenson’s 2019 book Fall, or, Dodge in Hell. Now I am a great fan of his work, especially the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon which can be admired for their writing as well as their ideas. Fall, like Seveneves is more in the brilliant ideas, but rather rushed writing, style. Now most of Fall is about digital uploading into the cloud and the creation of Hell (shades of Iain M Banks much better Surface Detail there) and to be honest I found tedious, but once I have started a book I really can’t abandon it. The interesting idea, which is the basis for this blog post comes in the early chapters where he posits a world where only the rich can afford to have their information feed curated, everyone else is in effect a mark for anyone seeking to take control of how they see the world. In effect, only an elite can have any knowledge of what is true and what is false.
The trigger for this was the GOP attack ad after Biden declared his candidacy for President, using deep fake images. I was pulled into this via Linkedin on a post by Gary Marcus and also by Grey Swan Guild. I’ve criticised the latter for their approach to sensemaking/sense-making and knowledge management but I’m fully on board with them here. In the first of these posts, Michael Lissak (an old friend) said: “No different than the anti-Goldwater ad in 1964” which is sort of true in terms of content but there are three substantial differences: (i) speed and cost of creation, (ii) realism of the material & (iii) the ability of social media to target individuals with the material. The Stephenson novel makes these points brilliantly. The description of the town that fake news says has been wiped out, and the refusal of people to believe the truth in the face of evidence is terrifying.
Another point here is that there is an existential issue here and we would now allow people to build a nuclear plant in their back garden without regulation, but there is nothing to handle advanced forms of machine learning and there seems a strong anarchist drive. I was on the Jim Rutt show recently and while both of us had signed the petition to cry a halt, his motivation was to allow space for open source competition to Microsoft to emerge, mine was very different. The ideology of removing all controls to allow things to magically work out is deeply disturbing.
Realistically determining what is true in a virtual world is almost certainly a lost option. Hence our growing focus on curating input rather than output. I’m not really ready to say much about that at the moment as it’s still in R&D/early stage development. But we are open to discussion under NDAs. This is a significant switch in thinking and relates to our earlier Ponte project for the EU.
The other thing this has given me an idea for is a series on science fiction/fantasy and its implications so I’ve created a new category for that.
The opening picture is a scan of a cover of the April-May 1939 issue of Marvel Science Stories that has been retouched and is used under the terms of a Creative Commons licence. It was obtained from rawpixel
The banner picture shows a small part of my science fiction/fantasy collection which is organised by author name on shelves I built to optimise the number of books I could have out. It’s a little hazy because it is part of a ‘book corridor’ where to accommodate the collection, I put a row of bookshelves facing those on the wall to create a 70cm space shown to the right. I have two of those in my study and could, if necessary build one more but I would prefer to move to a smaller house, but with a large external building to convert to a library, study and meeting space; but that is a pipe dream for the moment.
For those with a book problem – throwing them away is NOT a solution, you can also knock down partition walls and replace them with a double-sided bookcase. Ditto structural walls but then you need an RSJ and it’s not a DIY job. I’ve done that several times in three different houses. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that ….
A week ago I put up what I thought would be a provocative post on LinkedIn on the subject of psychometric tests. It’s a subject I have addressed before. Once with a slight tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Tom Lehrer’s Poisoning Pigeons in the Park provided a role model in how to treat the cult end of this particular market. On an earlier occasion, I linked much modern HR practice to panel beating, then there was ‘Prevarication by platitude’, not to mention the dangers of taking therapeutic sideways into organisational design and the need to shift from a focus on individual qualities to a more collective understanding. Then there was a quick reference to Huxley’s Brave New World, a link to a lovely little satire on Myers-Briggs, another link to The Skeptics Web Site and a more elaborate post on Identity back in 2006 which I need to return to at some stage. On a more positive side, I’ve used the original seven Belbin types for a few decades, but I don’t like the modern version. There is more on this subject, but those are I think the main posts.
To be positive about some of this; anything which gets people to look at themselves from different perspectives and/or triggers some form of reflection, can’t do any harm and may do good. The problem is when you invest your particular set of categories lithesome form of scientific objectivity. Now there is a scale here from things like the Enneagram and Myers-Briggs with have been identified as pseudoscience on the basis that they are “so vague and malleable that anything relevant can be shoehorned to fit the theory” to material with significant peer-reviewed support – although that can also be questioned. I’ve also used the I Ching, astrology and the Harry Potter Sorting House test (the official one of course) to achieve the same result. But the mass classification of staff is another matter altogether.
But even at the scientific end, there are issues. PRISM for example quotes one study with MRI scanning of lover/stranger reactions as authority for a context-free framework and also states that it “is based on the simple fact that all behaviour is created in the brain and that the brain’s main role is to ensure that the species – animal or human – survives” which is questionable on so many levels. What is interesting is that they all, in the main, focus on the individual and on behaviour which is always an emergent property that may then act as a modulator. Social interactions matter (see the banner picture) and those interactions, including stories, as well as the body itself are all part of a complex, if messily coherent, set of interactions over time. There are lots of ways of doing this which don’t require us to put people into little boxes. I started to list some of those in my recent series on leadership.
So to that LinkedIn post which I expected to provoke a few attacks. To my surprise, it didn’t apart from a couple of people in the business of promoting their own tests. I’ve linked in the open sentence and I recommend reading through the responses. Part of my reason for writing this blog is to ensure it isn’t lost. Here it is, with an HTML qualifier:
<provocation> Have you noticed how sections of the psychology profession produce multiple ‘scientifically validated’ psychometric tests all of which claim to be objective, life changing and transformational? They start with a hypothesis or two which came from their reading and/or observation, construct a questionnaire which makes those hypotheses self-evident to respondents, run it over a few hundred companies, publish a paper in a complicit and compliant journal (peer reviewed by people deeply immersed in the same practices), and then build a business based on pretty graphics some wonderful platitudes and a certified practitioner scheme for those who enjoy collecting new varieties of snake oil for their consultancy practice.
At a very simple level they can’t all be right, but they all use the same approach – so may be that is flawed? More seriously they are ‘measuring’ emergent properties and assuming those properties have causality; worse they are assuming context free use of said models. Attempts to replicate the classic experiments in the field have largely failed (one test of is it really a science) and these are they guys who in an earlier age legitimised lobotomies. </provocation>.
Yes I know there is a lot of good stuff and we draw on and use that, but there is something seriously wrong at the commercial end. Probably one of the more important points I made here is that they can’t all be right, but they all claim to be. Now I’m prepared to agree that most of the respectable ones have the ability to help us to see aspects of what might emerge as truth over time, but none of them has the universality or predictive powers they claim. Phrenology is not dead, it has just discovered a new body to animate like the Brollachan in Alan Gardner’s The Moon of Gomrath; we need to seek the Mothan on the old straight track at moonrise.
American Phrenological Journal is in the public domain and obtained from Wikimedia. The banner picture is cropped from an original by Arthur Poulin on Unsplash
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