Chris Corrigan

Mike Jackson takes apart three common metaphors that get folks off on the wrong foot when thinking about systems: the elephant, the iceberg and the lever: When I make the case for eradication of elephants, icebergs and leverage points from the discourse of systems thinking, I am often told that, while these metaphors are simplistic, they do offer beginners an easy route in. I take a contrary view – that it is cruel, disheartening and confusing for novices to be led in the wrong direction and…

Looking across Lake Simcoe this morning through the thunderstorms. I’m in Ontario these two weeks, having just run a short Art of Hosting two-day workshop for the Canadian Labour Congress and heading to Peterborough tomorrow to begin our Reimaginging Education Art of Hosting (still seats available!). And next month in Vancouver our bi-annual Art of Hosting will run November 17-19 (and still seats for that one too!). Each workshop is always different as we continue to explore this body of work,…

I don't love using Jeff Bezos as an example of anything virtuous, and the anecdote in this post may just be apocrophal, so let's treat it like that, but this is a useful quote: A group that gathers but doesn’t know how to fight without ‘un-gathering’ won’t remain a group for long. A group that can’t disagree and commit will disagree and dissolve. The point here is that "conflict preservation" is much more useful to a group than "conflict resolution" for most things. When clients ask me to help…

Last night I visited Meaford with my mom and her partners to hear The Irish Descendants, an iconic Newfoundland band. They are touring a new album of Stan Rogers covers, and between those pieces and the Irish Descendants’ own repertoire, I think I sang along with just about every tune they played. Afterwards we headed across the street to The Dam Pub. This whisky bar is one of my favourite pubs in the world. It has over 1000 whiskies in the collection, a supremely knowledgeable staff and a…

Crossing Otter Creek near Smiths Falls, Ontario on the VIA 643. I’m on the VIA train from Ottawa to Toronto. We’ve just passed through Smiths Falls, streaking past paper white birch trees, golden fields, blazing orange maple trees, marsh reeds turned red, scarlet sumac all under a clear blue sky. I’m listening to The Great Lakes Suite by Rheostatics, which features poetry read by Ann Carson, who today was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’ll meet my brother in Toronto and spend the next…

Gabriele Bammer and Jean Boulton identify a role and a set of capacities needed for research teams, and they call that role a “complexity entrepreneur.” This style of operating in a complex world requires engendering a milieu in which people regain confidence in working with intuition, making sense of subjective and evolving information, and are able to hone the skills of judgement. Traditional methods of mapping and modelling have their place in surfacing less visible systemic patterns in…

It’s Bandcamp Friday, the first Friday of every month, where 100% of sales on Bandcamp go to the artist. Today I pre-ordered the new album from Martyn Joseph (The Bruce Cockburn of Wales) “Revolved and Evolved” and picked up the new release from Bowen Island’s own Le Ren “Don’t Be Funny Without Me.” which is getting some good press and good play here in Canada. It’s a really good album and the quality of production is OUTSTANDING. Go buy something and make a musician happy that you supported…

Some good links on complexity Roope Kaaronen’s: The Ecology of Design. A nice introduction to path dependancy, affordances and ecological psychology. Alicia Juarrero being interviewed by Jim Hutt on her book Context Changes Everything and on how constraints create possibility landscape and constraint regimes. The Vampire Problem is a thought experiment that demonstrates why it is so hard to act in uncertainty. Maria Popova does her usual brilliant job of unpacking it. Martina Dimopoulou takes…

It is a quiet morning here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island. The equinox has come and gone and the mornings are darker and cooler. We have stopped changing the clocks in this part of the world, so the mornings will only ever grow darker by the clock until the solstice. I'll be walking in pitch black in a month or so. My partner is the walking champion of our household, taking her morning and afternoon walks everyday as a non-optional part of her morning. She is the one that walks around in every…

The Squamish welcome figure at Sw?aywi (Ambleside Beach) in West Vancouver Once a month I fill in to lead worship at our little Bowen Island United Church. I love the chance to do so, because I get to sit with a piece of scripture and reflect on it. Over the years here I’ve shared a few of my sermons and today, the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, I’m sharing last Sunday’s sermon. The reading was suggested by the Lectionary, without reference to the September 30. But the reading lined…

Kelly Foscroft-Poirier hosts a session during an Art of Hosting we did at Tseshaht back in 2019. I had a lovely call today with Sean Andrew, a colleague in the world of hosting, complexity and systems change work. At one point we were both sharing stories about what the Art of Hosting workshop meant to us as experienced practitioners. We both came to the Art of Hosting approach after years of facilitation and practice in other domains. For experienced practitioners, the Art of Hosting, as a…

One of the projects I’m engaged in is a rigorous exploration of my own theory-informed facilitation and hosting practice. I have been keeping extensive field notes of my work, in a hand written journal, that contains observations about myself and the group I’m working with in real time. It is an effort to refine my practice along the lines of the triangle I’ve been working on, to notice deeply the ways in which Structure, Interactions and Design coalesce into a container. It is also becoming a…

Snug Cove a few hours ago, looking over the Queen Charlotte Channel to the east wall of Atl’katsem/Howe Sound. It’s a bright, warm September, and the light in the sound is softened by water vapour, condensing over the cold water. Humpbacks and seals are eating and resting and the birds are active, eating seeds and insects, preparing for, or stopping over on, their long migrations southward. Orb weavers are busy building their evening webs. Just Bowen Island things unfolding. This morning I…

It sort of feels like summer is over although we are enjoying a warm stretch here in mid-September that has brought sun and warm temperatures and calm winds to the island. This is more typical of the summers I remember from half my life ago, before we experienced extreme heat and drought. There was always a dry patch between the middle of July and the middle of October with a bit of rain usually in August and more at the beginning of September. But in the past 20 years that pattern has changed.…

Corina Enache îs fast become one of my "must read" writers. Her perspective and reflective capacity as practitioner is inspiring. Her deep understanding of story and narrative and her wealth of experience gives her lots of material from which to generate beautiful essays. And her generous engagement with commentators and connections is exemplary. Her latest post is about "making rules you are willing to be bound by" and has a number of gems. I encourage you to read the full thing, because among…

Warning: Dense thoughts on complexity and emergence here. The other day I was discussing a metaphor that a friend raised about “emergence.” Her idea is that a car exhibits a kind of emergence in that it does something as a whole that none of its parts can do. And while that is true, that doesn’t make a car a complex adaptive system. The car’s motion is a knowable and predictable outcome. It is engineered to do that. Mechanics understand the optimal state of motion that the car is designed to…

Some good recent reads which didn’t make it into full blog posts: Peter Levine offers a close reading of Wendell Berry’s poem, September 2: “If his leaves are his writings, I do not think they will soon dissolve.” A beautiful Guardian article about slime moulds and the people who study them: “So confounding were they that Carl Linnaeus, who spent his life taxonomising life, lumped them into a genus called “chaos”.” “We are fixing up the record” says Jungurrayi Simms Otto in this short and…

The Hub is my favourite conservative podcast. It is a deep dive into Canadian politics and policy from a conservative position, advocating market liberalization, small government. It is not overly consumed by culture war nonsense, and has done some excellent deep dive reporting on climate change and solutions. That’s not to say that I agree with their perspective – in fact, I rarely do – but I never listen without learning something, especially when they talk to people who know what they are…

I was on a call with a colleague of mine and we were discussing a recent workshop she had given. She was teaching systems thinking theory and practice. Instead of offloading a bunch of content to people she designed a highly experiential and relational workshop that allowed the group to discover what they already know about working in systems. At one point, relating to some learning around working with teams, a person in the workshop asked the question “What do I do when my team isn’t meeting…

One of the joys of my life is singing with my a cappella Renaissance choir, Carmena Bowena. For the past six yers we have worked on a repertoire of mostly Renaissance sacred music and madrigals and spreading into slightly later southern European folk music from places like Spain, France, Corsica and Italy. We have sung contemporary arrangements of songs by Sting and Paul Simon and Gordon Lightfoot and modern settings of old liturgical texts like Ubi Caritas, Ave Maria and O Nata Lux and O…

I work with lots of organizations in transition, and always have done. Specifically organizations who leadership is leaving, often representing a transition from a founder to the next generation. These situations are fraught with new and unexpected emotions, states, and situations. The folks that remain find themselves relying on stuff that was invisible before the transition but which is missed now. It is a time when movement forward needs to be slow and deliberate. Today I read a lovely and…

Dave Snowden publishes a post today thick with some interesting brain research and some musing about how we might structure organizations along the lines of what we know about how brains work: What would be different is an organisational design practice that treats cognitive profile distribution as an analogue substrate to maintain, not individual variation to manage toward a norm. It would assess tools, processes, and frameworks for their effect on that substrate — asking, in Clark’s terms,…

I spent a few hours this morning reading about the Oxford Praxis Lab. I know of Rob Poynton who is the director of the Lab, and whose book, Everything’s An Offer was one of the seminal books I read 15-20 years ago as I was exploring improv and embodied exercises and the teaching and hosting practices that I was developing. Praxis Lab is an interesting place where a number of the questions I have recently been in seem to have a good home, where they are watered and fed and well cared for. Each…

Anne Lamott, from an old post on Labour Day (which she spells in the American way): I guess it is a plank of the Christian right to be anti-union now. But remember, there are still a lot of us in the Christian left, and we don’t feel that way. When I was growing up, everyone I knew was pro-union, just like everyone used public libraries and everyone in California was proud of the public education system and loved the state’s natural beauty. People would fight and rally and protest and donate to…

Back in 2001 I wrote a song about the end of summer here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island that contains the lines “The winds have turned southeast again/And the Sound is full of cloud.” Today is that day, right on time. Blustery winds in the channel in front of my house, a steady blow in the tree tops and a sprinkling of rain. What has been a fairly normal summer is turning to a fairly typical autumn. What happens next is anyone guess, as an unusually strong El Niño is predicted to arrive in the…

Since the spring I have been wrestling with an evolution in my practice. It was prompted by a series of exchanges with Dave Snowden in response to his strong exhortation that those of us who say we are working with complexity should truly reflect on our practice. At the heart of the challenge, as I took it on board, is the claim that a hosted container is a consequential intervention in a system, but it is not the system itself. And from a complexity perspective, that also means that as a host…

Wendell Berry has died. Patti Digh's was the first obituary I saw this morning. And so here is her brilliance, as she offers a characteristic take on his work and legacy: Most of us are not good at staying. We are trained for leaving—for the bigger market, the better opportunity, the next thing, the bright lights. Berry’s work is a patient argument that this training has cost us something we can barely name anymore: the knowledge that comes only from affection, and the affection that comes only…

Our annual community festival, Bowfest is happening today. AS I write from home, a kilometre and a half from the festival field I can hear the band Queer as Funk getting everyone dancing. It turned out to be a beatiful day – blustery and cool but bright sunshine and clear skies. It looked like rain was in the forecast but we dodged it. My friend Pauline Le Bel and I spent the day at our little table chatting with people about our initiative to fund the carving and installation of a Squamish…

barbara findlay has died. Don Schafer posts a lovely reflection of his conversations with her over the years. I was taken by this paragraph: barbara once described herself as “entirely pessimistic and actively hopeful.” I liked the phrase when she said it, although I’m not sure I understood then how much it described her. She worried deeply about injustice and about where the world was heading, but worrying never seemed to stop her from doing something about it. The hope was in the doing. She…

The 1987 McWhirter translation of Jose Emilio Pacheco’s selected poems is reviewed in the current issue of the Literary Review of Canada. I have been sitting this morning by the ocean with poems from his first book, The Elements of the Night. You can read these poems at the Internet Archive. Beautiful. Simple language, reflection on very few elements of his world but occasionally drilling deep into an undiscovered image. Poems worth sitting with.