Author: Tenneson Woolf

The following is a post from buddy Chris Corrigan. It is part of a longer piece, here, that clarifies the relationship between The Art of Hosting and complexity.

One of the things I like in these words is that Chris points to a level of change that is beneath the surface. It is less about a training program, though that too is important. It is more about a change of being, the kind that takes place well after a program, if people maintain their curiosity and commitment to experiment and share learnings.

For me, the pursuit of mastery in the practice of hosting conversations is the way I respond to the complexity that we are facing in the world.  When faced with uncertainty and emergent problems, it is imperative that we engage in collective intelligence and create the conditions for good sense making and decision making.  Working with complexity is a high art, and is in rare supply these days.  Over the past year I have been in many situations where the fear of an uncertain future has caused people to reduce their work to the simplest and easiest problems to solve. Money gets spent, resources get deployed and another year passes, and at best we shift the needle on something in a way that we can never understand and at worst, we erode the collective capacity we have to act resourcefully in complex environments.  And that, I am certain, will be what is written on the gravestone of humanity, should it come to that.  I have no doubt that the statement will be accompanied by a pie chart analysing the downfall.

That is my biggest frame of understanding why these practices are important: complexity matters and we need more complexity workers.

What if complexity were just complexity? Multiple relations in multiple networks of people in multiple timelines that don’t always line up conveniently. As human beings, we try to look for simplifications in our plans. Often, we project our desire for a kind of simplicity onto situations that will never be as simple as we like. It’s a bit like saying rocket science is as simple as a match and some fuel. That may be true at some level, but isn’t particularly useful.

I like this image of Coots, a photo that I took several years ago while in Southern Utah. One of the reasons is that these images of nature, of living systems, remind me, or inspire me, to understand self-organizing systems. It was my friend Margaret Wheatley who spoke a premise so often when I first met her in the early 90s. “Organizations are living systems. Living systems have the capacity to self-organize. What if we were to try to organize human endeavor in the way that life organizes itself.”

This focus on self-organization has much to do with complexity. My friend Kathleen Masters and I are exploring creating a workshop together. We want to give more attention to understanding complexity in complex human systems. At this point we are gathering resources.

One of those resources is from Dave Snowden, the same person that has offered so much on the Cynefin model. Kathleen reminded me recently of a distinction Snowden makes between robust systems and resilient systems. In short, it is that robust systems put a lot of energy into preventing failure. Resilient systems put a lot of energy into making it “safe to fail.”

It seems admirable on the surface, this “preventing failure” approach, doesn’t it. I don’t mind the descriptor of robust. It has typically connoted a kind of diligence, rapt attention, and preparedness. Pretty cool. The contrast in resilient systems is an acknowledgement of the essential experimental nature of complex systems, in which redundant, simultaneous experiments are happening all of the time. And many of them fail. Preventing failure restricts choices and constrains learning. Safe-to-fail expands choices and requires learning.

Snowden offers more on early detection and adaptation, which I think are helpful. But the kicker here to me is that our mindset must shift from an obsession of “get it right” to “adapt, learn, adapt, learn.” The latter welcomes, provides freedom and encouragement, to learn through failures. The former punishes it, which sadly, is common practice in  in management fields.

 

 

I am a fan of the simple. I have made this clear many times before.

Simple, however, has nuance. At one level, “simple” is the essence. It is both attractive and important. The energetic heartbeat of a concept. The core purpose held by a group of people. From essence, clarity can cascade into clarity in so many other related places.

Simplicity is not reductionism. Let’s be clear with that. It is not convenience to then be imposed as single solution or absolute layer of meaning.

These days I’m revisiting some of my learnings on complexity over the last twenty years. One of those is the awareness that the history of western science over the last three centuries has been focussed on dissecting. Braking things into parts. Parts into subparts. Subparts into sub-subparts, and so on. It’s rather impressive.

The flawed premise, however, in this singular focus, has been that if we could get to the smallest unit of existence — an atom, a nucleus, a quark — we would then know the important governing principles for the whole, reassembled back together from its parts. At some level this feels true. Particularly for it’s fractal-like orientation. Simple conditions do create complex behavior (think of birds flocking). Yet, there is something seductively incorrect in this also.

Systems, in fact, take on properties of their own, that do not arise from the property of the part or of the individual. They arise from the engagement of the system. These properties have an emergent quality or a spontaneous self-organizing quality. Simplicity may be noticed in isolation. But it is different than the simplicity that comes from “parts” in relationship together.

When I revisit this kind of thinking on complex wholes, I’m reminded of a simple observation I had with my son many years ago, then three, who was of course learning to speak. Language acquisition remains a kind of miracle to me. At that stage of his life, our interaction often included me pointing at something and asking the question, “what is that?” He would respond. I would repeat the question with several different objects. One of those objects was an orange peel. I asked him what is was. “Peel-of-an-orange.” He said it like it was one word, not four words. He responded in a way that showed me he was seeing a kind of whole.

Just as it was for my son learning language, I feel that we as adult humans now are learning to see wholes. Relearning, I suppose. Not just individual chess pieces but the whole chess board, as chess masters do. To see the collective properties that are different from the properties of individual parts. It is a different kind of simple. It takes a different kind of instinct, that contradicts 300 years of habit, yet perhaps is as natural as a three year-old naming something new.