Over the last few years, we have used the retreat format, which runs using our hybrid between a traditional conference and an unconference, namely the triopticon, to engage our community in developing methods, tools and concepts early in the cycle. For example, we ran events on three continents to look at design thinking from a CAS perspective, translating into an approach that complements and extends the traditional double diamond. That, along with other inputs, is driving some exciting new developments in SenseMaker®. To be enigmatic, look out for the caterpillar and, less enigmatically, a new brainstorming and discovery tool around Hexi, both in a test or moving into the test.
It’s no secret that over the last two decades, we have used AI but sought not to be used by it. Our work on the Singapore Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning project focused on training data sets that could create anticipatory triggers, for example, to engage human decision-makers in paying attention to anomalies or the possibility of recurrent patterns. It’s fair to say that we are cynical (in the best meaning of that word) about many of the claims around LLMs and argued years ago that the main danger was not that AI would exceed humans’ intelligence but that we might meet them halfway by dumbing down our capabilities. In a series of posts just over a year ago, I focused on humans’ abductive quality compared with machines’ inductive capability. It’s also the case that human sensory capability extends beyond text and tokens in ways we don’t fully understand. We do not fully understand how humans use that data, individually and socially. But we do know it is very different from the way AI works.
Now that a priori position is gaining experimental support, studies have shown rapid cognitive decline in humans who use (not necessarily overuse) LLMs and the like. I have a whole library of them; at some stage, I will summarise them here on the blog, but in the meantime, they are not difficult to find. So, this is becoming a significant issue, and some of the driving political forces make it even more critical. I recently had to explain some of my concerns to a group of nine-year-olds, which may interest readers. It got a lot of favourable comments on LinkedIn after it was posted, and they were very bright and talented nine-year-olds, so I needed to be on my toes.
We have been working as part of a broader team in Astra Zeneca’s AI and awareness program, which has just won the Innovation in Learning Award from the Learning and Performance Institute. The criteria for the award is to make “a unique and innovative contribution to the delivery of learning”. The programme was directed by a very old friend, Bonnie Cheuk. They also won the Learning Team of the Year award, a double success. Our contribution was led by Beth Smith and involved multiple uses of SenseMaker®, including the journaling or genba capability.
We are also working with the World Ethical Foundation to provide an auditing and monitoring tool for using AI in an organisation. The first pilot is with the African AI Cooundil (in response to the Paris AI Action Summit), which will allow African voices to be heard concerning responsible AI development on the continent and beyond.
Several years of experience have been gained in those and other client programmes, and we are now looking to create more generic capabilities for organisations and the consultants in our network. That includes
The first two are ready now; the second will be introduced at the coming retreat and further developed into a fall event (probably a retreat format within a conference event) in North America. A development club is being set up in April for those interested.
Our first retreat of 2025
In choosing the title Body, Mind & the World, we decided to focus on the human side before moving on to AI. The “human” in anthro-complexity is not a disembodied mind; it is not a mechanical body nor an island Entire of itself. Complex humans are mind-body-world beings; all rolled into one. So starting the programme with an understanding of that interconnectivity before moving on to AI in particular is important
We have some inspiring speakers/experts to provide input, but the retreat format is highly interactive, with people working in small groups over the period. Attendance is a chance to get in at the start of the overall programme, which will run for a year or more but with actionable and usable tools from day one.
Over the last month, we’ve received much feedback from people keen to attend the event but are finding it difficult to justify the cost to finance directors or their partners. These are small, intimate events, both catered and residential (although there is also a day rate). So, we devised an offer to help overcome that constraint.
So you get between £2.5k and £7k of services, with proven, tangible benefits, which will more or less cover the full cost of the retreat. Also, if you bring three people, you only pay for two. We get your engagement in a key project and feedback from using these services. Everyone wins, the art of a real deal.
The location is unique, in the Nant Ffracon Valley, surrounded by mountains, and we will have a chance to explore them. Our location is a Buddhist retreat centre, which we have used for years. It provides a great environment with high-speed internet! The nearest airport is Manchester, and we will pick people up from Bangor Station, so it’s not difficult to get to. The location will also take bookings if you want to combine the retreat with some walking – we will be there afterwards to combine with my 71st birthday so you can have a local guide! There is also a chance to have a meal and drink in the pub where the first successful Everest expedition trained,
To book the retreat, go to this link. If you want to talk about it, get in touch, and we can hold the offer open if you need to sort out procurement.
So, if you want your organisation to get the types of insight that won AstraZeneca those prizes, this is your chance to get in on a new service early and be part of the starting event for the broad programme as it evolves.
This text was written to help one delegate justify attendance.
In a world increasingly digitised and mediated by technology, we need to understand the role of human decision-making. With growing evidence that AI can reduce human cognitive capability, we must ask if this is good or bad. Several elite schools (many attended by technology leaders) are deliberately not using technology in the classroom to give their children an advantage.
We know that human and machine learning are radically different. Also, human consciousness is not co-located with the brain but is distributed into the body and our social and physical environments. Aesthetics and abstraction have played a critical part in human evolution, and we don’t yet fully understand all the sensory data we can assemble before we take action. A 19th Century quote from Lincoln makes the point well:
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew.
― Abraham Lincoln. December 1, 1862
Sometimes, we are unsure that ‘retreat’ is the right word to describe the overall process. In effect, we arrange a ritualised dance between three bodies of knowledge throughout the retreat, and the whole process ends with a series of pragmatic projects for action and research that all participants can pick up on and return to their organisations.
Many of the questions we will ask are (or should be) on senior management’s agenda in government and industry. They include:
The retreat format allows everyone to speak at least once and listen many times before proceeding to the action phases. Participants also have the opportunity to experience and learn how to manage a unique approach to transdisciplinary work and conflict resolution within organisations.
The banner image is my work and shows the view west along the Glyders, with the iconic Tryfan in the foreground. The retreat is located in this valley. The opening picture is cropped from an original used under the terms of an Unsplash+ License, which requires a membership fee, unlike the main Unsplash libraries.
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
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.
The Cynefin Co are delighted to announce that Dave Snowden and Beth Smith will be in Australia this July and August 2022 for a series of events and workshops, hosted in partnership with the Cynefin Center Australia and Complexability.
Overall, the trip is built around a theme of community engagement in sharing lived experiences and how that insight is taken into account in design at various levels (e.g. service, product and governance design). This includes specific events or threads around:
This trip also coincides with the recent release of our new hexi kits, as well as exciting new developments in our methods, SenseMaker software and associated offerings, and we are excited to engage with our communities in Australia and New Zealand in person. A series of workshops, Masterclasses and meetups give you various opportunities to engage.
Key events include:
CYNEFIN CO RETREAT
Theme: Citizen Engagement and Democratic Innovation
August 18 – 20, Scenic Rim (2 hours from Brisbane – exact location TBC)
Our first in-person retreat in three years will focus on the theme of community engagement in innovation – the discovery of lived experiences and how that insight is taken into account in design at various levels.
Retreats are rich opportunities to share and co-create emergent knowledge and understanding through discussion and debate, stimulated by a diverse faculty providing provocative food for thought, including Dave Snowden. Participating faculty for this retreat will be announced shortly.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT SERIES
Aligned to the central theme of community and citizen engagement in the design and improvement of services and processes, a series of research symposiums, workshops and collaborative explorations are being confirmed, around the theme of building community engagement, resilience and collective sensemaking. These will incorporate multiple perspectives and approaches, and as the lead of our Citizens Engagement & Democratic Innovation programme, Beth Smith brings her expertise and insight to these events. Further details and public events will be announced soon!
CHANGE AND COMPLEXITY IN LEARNING CONFERENCE – UNISA
Dave Snowden is looking forward to his contribution as a keynote speaker and participant in the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning’s conference – “A new age of innovation: embracing change and complexity in education”. C3L focuses on the complex relationship between human and artificial cognition, how it changes society, knowledge processes, and teaching and learning.
MASTERCLASS SERIES
The Cynefin Co will be hosting a series of Masterclasses with Dave Snowden and other expert faculty, including the following, details and dates are currently being confirmed:
PRACTITIONER MEETUPS & WORKSHOPS
With innovative new developments that affect different fields and sectors, we are currently finalising a series of opportunities for 1-3 hour meetups with our local partners in various cities. These take in areas as diverse as Cynefin in Government, Agile and design, Aged and community care, our new Hexi kits and practitioner skills development, Details will be announced as these are confirmed, and we look forward to engaging and learning as a community!
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Final dates and details of all events are being confirmed and tickets will go on sale soon. We look forward to many rich collaborations, learning and connections!
This fall I had the pleasure of being a member of the faculty for a Cynefin retreat on aesthetics and semiotics. It was a deep dive at the intersection of beauty and meaning and was, for me, a rare opportunity to “sense-make” in community. Often I’m left to do my deep sense-making in solitude, creating short animations about ideas and research I find interesting or thought-provoking. Joining others in this playground of exploration yielded a rich harvest of possibilities. Many of the informal, self-organizing working groups that met for the final few days of the retreat surfaced ideas about the use and presence of art-making in our work and workplaces.
I spent these working sessions with a group convened around the sweeping label of “Artist in Residence”. Several tensions cycled repeatedly throughout our conversations. Many times we ebbed and flowed between talking about Art with a capital A — that is, as the product of a skilled and masterful Artist — and art-making, as a playfully engaging, participatory (and optional) exploration, free from expectations or outcomes. Many ideas from those sessions captured my imagination, among them the possibility that a resident artist might:
Conversations between Cognitive Edge’s Sonja Blignaut and I followed, catalyzing us to put this idea into action: This year at Cognitive Edge I’ll be the first Cynefin artist in residence! (no pressure). The idea of BEING an artist in residence is one I have pondered quite a bit in recent years, but traditional artist residencies have not seemed like a good fit for the kind of embedded, ethnographic, theory-informed sense-making I’m drawn to do in organizations. I couldn’t be more thrilled to have this space to play with a community of complexity-aware sensemakers, and am looking forward to seeing what emerges as we experiment with a variety of enabling constraints.
One of the conventional constraints I have requested we suspend during this exploration is around payment. As a result, we are approaching this collaboratively rather than transactionally. After several years of germination and one year of trying out a non-transactional approach to my livelihood, I probably need to clearly articulate why it is that I am drawn to work non-transactionally. I will tackle that shortly and post on the Patreon site I’ve created to make it easier for folks who value my work to support it.
In the meantime, I have put up Patreon page to make it easier for folks to support my work if they find value in it. Cognitive Edge has generously offered to (pro-actively) become one of my patrons. (Thank you Cog edge for that!). Most of what I have posted on Patreon to date is freely available whether or not folks become patrons, but I’ll be posting some extras for patrons shortly, for instance downloadable high resolution images of some of the illustrations from the recently published #cynefinbook: Cynefin – Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World
Final note: an important (to me) idea that surfaced in our working group on this topic at the retreat was that organizations are already full of artists, and that perhaps one of the aspirations of such an exploration is to carve out spaces in our work lives where it’s ok to bring our artistic, creative (and less formal or formed?) selves to work. If a space for creative experimentation existed right now in your workplace, how might today be different for you? Would you make use of such a space (whether physical or psychological) and if so, what might you try out in that space?
Sue Borchardt holds a Bachelors Degree in electrical engineering from University of Maryland, and a Masters in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. In her early professional life, she designed and prototyped user interfaces for the first generation of color radar displays, and later, query tools and visualizations for the Human Genome Database.
A fascination with the complexity of individual, group, and organizational change efforts motivates her to continue to learn about learning, bringing an ever-expanding set of lenses to her inquiry. Among these are neuroscience, biology, adult development, cognitive science, social psychology, and anthropology. Through her work and continued research, she has collected a treasure trove of theoretical models and frameworks from these domains (Cynefin among them!), as well as generative practices that inform her animations and her explorations with groups.
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The location of the Cynefin Retreat about Narrative in Organisations (Ireland, 18-21 March 2019) is specially chosen for its unique landscape and naturally rugged beauty. This is so as to facilitate learning, sense-making, the blending of art and science, and also to loosen constraints on the imagination with a view to releasing artistic creativity and ‘joining the dots’ of our previous experiences with insights gained at the Retreat.
Ireland is renowned for its storytelling and folklore. Long before there were books and literature, the filíochtaí (poets) and seanchaí’s (storytellers) of Ireland wandered the country and passed stories of history and folklore from town to town, and generation to generation.
Although we are in the age of information with so much of it at our fingertips via the internet, storytelling is still alive and well in Ireland with many storytelling festivals being hosted each year throughout the country, from Cape Clear in Cork to Tory Island in Donegal (and many nooks and crannies in between). Our storytelling heritage is carried on to this day by modern-day seanchaí’s who tell stories that have been passed down through the centuries…
One famous file (poet) from the 18th century was Antoine Ó Raifteiri (Raftery), whom many of us taught in Irish schools will remember for his poem ‘Mise Raifteirí an file’. Liam Clancy recites a beautiful rendition of one of Raifteiri’s poems ‘Mary Hynes’, which can be heard here. It is worth listening to with your eyes closed and your imagination ready to take flight…
A modern-day seanchaí is Eddie Lenihan, who tells stories about ‘The Other Crowd’, ’The Good People’ and ’The Wee Folk’, all descriptions used by Irish people to describe fairies. Eddie is a great storyteller and his ability to bring mythology and folklore to life are widely lauded. Eddie will give participants at the Cynefin Retreat much to ponder on as they go about their escapades and enquires during the week. Lets just say that they might have an appreciation for all that we cannot see, including ‘the other crowd’, following on from Eddie’s stories. Eddie researches the sources of his stories thoroughly and only tells ones he believes to be true…
It is fitting that we have Eddie join us for the Cynefin Retreat (centred around ‘Narrative in Organisations and Society’) in Inis Mór, which is renowned for its storytelling and music. No doubt our thoughts will be embroidered by the stories of the faculty, seanchaí, our Inis Mór surrounds, and stories shared by attendees themselves. In complexity speak, there is intrigue to discover what meaning will emerge over the week of the Retreat, and to see what that might look like…
As to what we will get out of it? The essence of a retreat is that it is an exploration from the perspective of multiple academic disciplines interacting with practice. So some of this depends on what people bring to the event. But we want to explore the nature of narrative as a constraint in organisations and society from the humanities and the sciences. A goal is to examine ways in which change can be stimulated; entrained patterns of needless difference reduced in their ability to dehumanise human interaction. How do people gain agency in their own forward narratives while respecting their past? At a very pragmatic level participants should come away with some new methods (and variations of old methods) that they can use in practice, at another level new ways of thinking about old and current problems. We’ll look (critically I suspect) at the role of AI in decision making and decision constraining. Lots and lots of possibilities. Be there! – Dave Snowden
“The Whistler Retreat is a game changer for me. It brings people together who have potential to make a real impact. You’re immersed in the retreat for 4 days. You’re with attendees for long enough to not just meet one or two attendees, but to do some serious mingling. Over the course of the week the diversity of professions and areas of interest are so widespread, you can’t but learn something new and become curious about an area you’ve not thought of before…
I found it really interesting. It’s a ‘joining of dots’ for want of a better description. People discussing concepts raised by faculty, and giving their own spin on it, giving good metaphors or examples in practice. It’s powerful stuff…” – Marion Kiely, 2018
Dave shares more about this Retreat in his blog –
Download the brochure, and register here!
As on previous retreats we do have a few limited places for people to take on roles in support of the retreat – at a discount. If you feel you have something to bring in that respect feel free to get in touch.
Opening picture is from https://pixabay.com/photos/dolmen-new-stone-age-grave-ireland-456997/ (free usage).
Header image: Photo by Peter Aschoff on Unsplash (free usage).
The pictures here are from the first ever Cynefin Retreat in Snowdonia last year; our fourth retreat, the third of 2018 will be in the same location in a few weeks time. Last year we put together some interesting people and just let things happen; this year we have been more structured. In Whistler earlier in the year we looked at the wider question of design and moved on in Tasmania to examine design in the context of resilience. In the final retreat of the year we continue the theme of design but this time with a wider focus on value. The forecast is for better weather than last year as well! So my plan for an (optional) dawn walk up Y Garn with head torches to see the sun rise over the Ogwen Valley will stand and even last year we managed two short walks between downpours!
The retreats are at the cutting edge of the intersection of theory with practice and we are developing them so that each year has a theme. This year that theme has been design both as a process but also in the context of resilience and sustainability in society. In the final retreat we will bring a lot of threads together and aim to launch some new initiatives and opportunities for participants and the wider network.
So, for October 14-18 2018 (yes it is that close see PS at end for apology) we have two areas to work on and one process:
There are still places and we have special rates for those who want to attend both events (or who have already attended a retreat) as well as bursaries for those in the NGO sector. We’ve also got some options based on sweat equity so if you want to come but feel you can’t afford it then please get in touch but do so now! We keep these events small to maximise interaction.
For this retreat the plan is to increase the time the participants spend working while also increasing the stimulation of ideas. In the previous retreats three speakers exchanged ideas and then the group took the subject up. That worked well and will repeat next year. But this time round we have three faculty members at the event, and three providing virtual input to stimulate the group. It’s a really impressive lineup and you wouldn’t get it at many a conference let alone one with small number dynamics for the participants. Also this time I’m going on faculty rather than facilitating.
So I’ll let the faculty speak for themselves (listed in alphabetical order):
Kate Raworth is an Economist and a Visiting Research Fellow, Tutor and Advisory Board member of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. She worked for the UN and Oxfam for 20 years. in 2017 she published Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist, which is a counter-proposal to mainstream economic thinking that formulates conditions for a sustainable economy. In this book she advocates reconsidering the foundations of economic science. Instead of focusing on the growth of the economy, she focuses on a model where there can be ensured that everyone on earth has access to their basic needs, such as adequate food and education, while not limiting opportunities for future generations by protecting our ecosystem
Richard Sandford is Professor of Heritage Evidence, Foresight and Policy at the University College London Institute for Sustainable Heritage. He works on future trajectories and threats to existing heritage and the nature of new forms of heritage engaging with engineers, artists, designers and technologists and will articulate the need for policy-makers and heritage managers to develop ways of working with new forms of data and evidence and establish authentically participatory approaches to working with communities, volunteers and wider publics. He has been working at the intersection of foresight, policy and research for the last fifteen years. In the UK Civil Service, where he worked with strategy and policy teams across government to develop their capacity to engage with social and technological risks and issues emerging over the long term. Before joining the civil service Richard was based in Singapore, where he designed and facilitated foresight workshops on the future of work, education and innovation across Asia, the US and Europe, for government agencies, NGOs, and private companies. .Richard leads the innovative Future Heritage research strand in UCL ISH, in partnership with Historic England, exploring the ways in which the role, practice and meaning of heritage may evolve into the next century, and developing practical tools to support heritage professionals to engage with the future in their work.
Mark Whitehead is a Professor of human geography whose research interests span urban studies, sustainability, and the impacts of the psychological sciences on public policy. Mark has authored and edited 10 books (Including Neuroliberalism), has written for The Guardian and Western Mail newspapers, and has blogged for the Psychology Today magazine. Mark holds an Award for Teaching Excellence from Aberystwyth University (2004), and in 2017 was named Lecturer of the Year by Aberystwyth University students. Mark has supervised twenty PhD students on topics including eco villages, renewable energy, urban governance, camouflage, mindfulness, climate change, drones, arctic geopolitics, eco-gentrification, sustainable citizenship, and water politics. He graduated with First Class Honours in 1997 and was awarded the James Fairgrieve and Gregynog Prizes for Geography. He commenced his PhD, exploring the emergence of sustainable urban development planning in the UK, in October 1997. He is also on the Editorial Board of the journal Environmental Values (a journal he was previously Managing Editor of).
Chris Bolton works for the Wales Audit Office where he runs the Good Practice Exchange and co-founded Good Practice Wales. The WAO stands out amongst audit institutions in that it goes beyond compliance checking and focusses on public service improvement through active knowledge exchange. Chris has used Cognitive Edge methods for over 10 years and has developed SenseMaker work in a wide variety of settings across Wales. This has included significant areas around employee engagement and has extended into things as diverse as improving food waste recycling and reducing antimicrobial resistance. During 2017 Chris was seconded part time to work with the Cynefin Centre, which included spending time with the Wales Centre for Behaviour Change at Bangor University. For an number years he was an Advisory Board Member with Academi, the all Wales Public Services Leadership body, which included facilitation roles at their annual Summer School.of the Welsh Audit Office. He was recently granted a Churchill Fellowship to study co-operatives in Basque County, New England and Nova Scotia. This will be one of the first events at which he will report on his findings.
Rachel Lilley is one of the authors of Neuroliberalism: Behavioural Government in the 21st Century. She has worked for over 20 years in social and environmental change as Director of a social enterprise, trainer, consultant and communications expert. In recent years she has worked in Ceredigion locally on community engagement and domestic energy efficiency. She has developed and delivered consultancy and training interventions for Welsh Government, WWF, Ceredigion County Council, Ogilvy Mather amongst others. Her work and research interests are supporting effective and human centred change through developing the psychological capacity of policy and other change makers and leaders. This includes utilising the capacity and understanding of mindfulness and behavioural insights to support effective decision making and project/policy design.
Ann Pendleton-Jullian is Professor in the Knowlton School. An architect, writer, and educator whose work explores the interchange between culture, environment, and technology. From a first short career in astrophysics, Professor Pendleton-Jullian has come to see the world through a lens of complexity framed by principles from ecology theory. This, in tandem with a belief that design has the power to take on the complex challenges associated with an emergent highly networked global culture has led her to work on architecture projects that range in scale and scope from things to systems of action – from a house for the astronomer Carl Sagan, to a seven village ecosystem for craft-based tourism in Guizhou province, China – and in domains outside of architecture including patient centered health, new innovation models for K-12 and higher ed, and human and economic development in marginalised populations. She was a tenured professor at MIT for fourteen years. She is also a core member of a cross-disciplinary network of global leaders established by the Secretary of Defense to examine questions of emerging interest. As a writer, she has most recently finished a manuscript Design Unbound, with co-author John Seely Brown, that presents a new tool set for designing within complex systems and on complex problems endemic to the 21st century. She is currently in a visiting position at Stanford University.
PS: Life sometimes gets complicated, yea complex or chaotic and I’ve spent far too much time in recent months dealing with lawyers, business issues and considerable game playing on what should be simple issues. The net result is that this post is a good month late for which apologies. But this is a major event and its worth finding a way to be there. Planning for 2019 is underway and we plan to announce a full programme by the end of the year.
In yesterday’s post I illustrated the difference between a resilient and a robust system by contrasting a salt marsh with a sea wall. The Sea Wall is highly efficient, it creates a clear boundary but when it breaks the result is catastrophic. It can only survive as it is. I can add sluice gates that allow partial release of pressure (with consequences) but ultimately the structure is ordered, firm and survives by being what it is. The salt marsh on the other hand is constantly mutating and changing. Different tides change its nature with complex eco-systems developing in the constantly shifting margins. Critically even when it is saturated it doesn’t release the contained water it continued to hold it. We always know that it is a salt marsh, but its nature and boundaries change.
Some time ago (memory fades) I defined a resilient system as one that survives with continuity of identity over time. More recently I had amended that to one that survives with coherence of identity of time but I’m happy with either. There are underpinning concepts there which also require unpicking but like all good definitions (or frameworks for that matter) the definition can be understood of itself, but closer examination reveals deeper meaning. Taleb’s use of anti-fragile to describe a system that thrives due to failure to be a type of resilient system. I think he is wrong to make a claim that he has discovered something beyond robustness and resilience. The examples he gives have long been described in the literature within the wider category of resilience and to my mind a further division is not helpful. Part of my problem with Taleb (whose work I find very useful) aside from an ego that rejects criticism (or interprets any question as criticism) is that he seems caught up in the publisher driven need to claim something unique for each book rather than contributing to the field as a whole. I have a draft post on a recent set of exchanges with the great man with the title of “The fragility of reacting” that I will get out in the next few weeks but for the moment I want to make the point that surviving through failure is not unique even within resilience so if you are translating from one set of ideas to the other then you need to be aware of this.
The key distinction for me is in the above description – if a failure of the constraint (and yes this is all about constraints) results in a catastrophe then the constraint (and the system which emerges from it) is robust and in general engineered to some specification or is the highly stable long term outcome of a process (granite rocks for example). Any system that can survive failure without catastrophe is resilient and in general organic. Nature tends to resilience and redundancy, to effectiveness at the cost of efficiency. The issue for us in human systems, in our interactions with the social and ecological systems with which we interact is that we are capable of design. How we do that design is the subject of the coming Tasmania Retreat. As a reminder if you have been on any of the basic Cynefin training programmes then we have a special deal for you to include Train the Trainer for this retreat only.
One of the things I have been doing over the last year is to reflect on the way I, and others who I work with, have developed methods for complex issues and problems over the years. That approach links to the core statement and lesson of the Childrens’ Party Story namely that we manage the emergence of beneficial coherence within attractors, within boundaries, we only manage what we can manage, namely the nature and existence of the various constraints, the probes (designed to catalyse attractors) and the allocation and reallocation of resource to said constraints and attractors. What follows from that is the ability to map what constraints exist, or should exist (For the Snowdonia retreat the lack of social and ecological constraints on economics will be a theme). So we don’t design the outcome (per back-casting and the like) instead we manage in the here and now with fast feedback loops. To do this we need various ways to describe what we can manage and the range of options available. Constraint mapping is a key technique here (taught on Train the Trainer but not on Foundations), but we also need to identify key concepts such as scaffolding, a vital output of the Whistler retreat. Indeed, a typology of scaffolding types is now a work in progress and will hopefully be completed this year. Scaffolding is a key part of any design process as it creates what should be a temporary structure to allow something more resilient to emerge. I’ll post on that later. But we also have to understand on a much wider basis just what we to play with in terms of change, the cadance of the feedback loops to understand the emergence properties of change and our ability to correct and recover.
I’ll make a firm statement now that I don’t expect to change but I am willing to. A robust system can be designed in terms of end goals, a resilient system has to be designed in terms of what we don’t want to happen (a negative motivation but a strong one) and a direction of travel that minimises the risk of catastrophic failure, but is designed to induce early failure from which we can learn. With exaptive processes such failure can also be designed for innovation,
So in the Tasmania retreat, not only will we look at designing for resilience, but we will also examine the very process of design itself. A real change to get in on the ground floor. By way of a taster my in-text illustration indicates one of the most resilient forms of human organisation; a crew is robust, most teams are fragile. Ironically a crew arises from hard constraint …..
The opening picture is from a post retreat walk in the Whistler area. I forgot to charge the battery on the Nikon 810 so its only an iPhone picture – and I’m really fed up as the lighting conditions were ideal for 37mp! A part of the retreats, and the reason we use the mountain and sea locations, is the opportunity for these type of experiences and the aesthetics of invention.
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