Chris Corrigan

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.

A humpback whale called “Nova” that we saw the other day. She is about to dive deep. Over the past year I have been corralling my thinking on the Art of Hosting, complexity, dialogic containers and practice into a new shape. If you have been following along here since January, you have seen this thinking taking place in the open. At the heart of the matter is my desire to wrestle with questions of power, epistemic justice and humility, and a desire to become a better teacher and…

The current issue of the New Yorker has a poem by Adrienne Su called “Lament” which ends with the lines “the reasons to gather/have never been clearer/The dinner is gravy.” Reading the poem sent me down a little rabbit hole of her work and stumbled into her writing about food and culture. Her website offers me an essay called “The Last Bite: A Culinary Meditation on Arlene Schechet’s “Head on a Plate” Porcelains” which conjures up: A head on a plate initially evokes a stray Brussels sprout—the…

How do we do good work, when we don’t know what to do? The seventh cohort of this program launches on October 1. Registration is now open. Over the past 26 years we have worked with all kinds of organizations and communities facing change, conflict, growth, uncertainty and the need to make important decisions together. Increasingly, we find ourselves working with people who are facing situations where there is no obvious answer, even when there is plenty of expertise in the room. Sometimes the…

Over the last month I have been working with this diagram that depicts the architecture of held space. You can read much more detail about this at the post I wrote earlier in the month, including some of the comments that helped me to think it through a little more. One very helpful set of comments from Corina Enache came during a good discussion at LinkedIn. I’d like to quote them at length so they are preserved here. Her main point was clear. If I’m trying to get the facilitator out of the…

A technology professor in France provides an option for students to use chat bots in his exam and researches what happens. Here are the rules he set. # Use of Chatbots Tell the professor if you usually use chatbots (ChatGPT/LLM/whatever) when doing research and investigating a subject. You have the choice to use them or not during the exam, but you must decide in advance and inform the professor. Option A: I will not use any chatbot, only traditional web searches. Any use of them will be…

I love that people are writing on Substack, because it is almost a return to what blogging originally was: openly sharing connected and linked learning and insight with the world. A couple of things frustrate me about Substack though and these are things that really distinguish it from a proper blog: 1. It's really hard to comment. In order to comment on a Substack post, I have to be a subscriber to a person's substack and I have to log in to do it. That is a bit too much work for me. When I…

Simon Goland describes an experience of travel that seems very common these days: When my parents were finally able to travel and start seeing the world, their travel looked like checking off boxes of countries, places, cities, and museums. Arrive somewhere. Walk through a place without stopping much. Take some photos. Check off a mental box. On to the next place. And when I traveled with them, I too embraced that way of seeing the world. I got good at it, actually. I could “do” a European…

“Jet Kiss” a sculpture by Mike Ross at the Capital Hill metro station I’ve just returned from a week or work in Seattle. As I get older I am noticing how exhausting it is to be socializing a lot, and this week was full on BE VERY PRESENT WITH PEOPLE energy followed by a need to spend time alone in reflection and restoration. I slept deeply every night I was there. Sometimes when I do this work I find myself at a hotel on the outskirts of town, confined to the vast expanse of car-forward…

The view from my porch this morning, looking east to the line of storms that obscure the sunrise. It’s a very still and quiet morning here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island. A line of thunderstorms passed over the island a couple of hours ago, and as they have slowly made their way east, there are lingering rumbles coming from up the inlet. Lightening is striking the mountain tops of the Brittania Mountains. The ground at my house is a little wet, so at least some rain is falling in this little…

From volume IV of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle: The world is not a calm sea, where all you have to do is refrain from rocking the boat… The world is a rocking boat, a ship in a storm, and when you’re capsized, that’s why. Because the world is a place that throws you overboard.

August has arrived and while we seem to be still waiting for truly hot and dry weather to arrive on the south coast of British Columbia, the community calendar moves on. This is the season in which three particular community events happen. This August long weekend is a popular one for visitors to our island and that means traffic snarls in the Cove as people try to figure out our mysterious ferry marshalling procedures and village layout. The Cove is packed and bustling during the day but grows…

One of the abiding problems in working on strategy is that people like to set goals for complex problems. In my experience the hardest part about accepting complexity as a real thing to be wrestled with, is that one really, truly doesn’t get to set goals. What happens instead, is that one can decide on a direction of travel and then look for the different ways one might move in that direction. It’s deceptively simple, and the hardest part is stopping oneself from measuring progress against…

Chris Mowles reflects on the question of whether the consultant/leader is a healer or revealer and offers his thoughts that the second position is better: To take the second position is to work alongside the client/team in a way which is open to exploring what might be going on in the team, where the consultant/leader also considers themselves to be a part of the inquiry. This is an acknowledgement that the consultant/leader is unlikely to have special insight into the truth, may or may not…

You might have been following along as I have been playing with this triangle over the past few weeks. This is a version that I think I am happier with for now and it’s already helping me and others to understand a few things. First, what is the influence of a facilitator into the complex system of a group of people. Second, what is a dialogic container thought about in terms of anthro-complexity. And third, what is the role of a facilitator, and what are some of the capacities and moves one…

I’m on a mini quest this year to see if I can hear or see 365 different species of birds. Between trips to France, Costa Rica and Eastern North America I have logged 305 so far. I’m going to have to do some serious birding during the fall migrations to meet the target. But it’s not about the numbers. I love being in the world with birdsong everywhere. I’ve become a good bird-listener in recent years, being that my musical brain and my diminishing eyesight quality have shifted my senses. I’m…

During the Men’s World Cup I managed to watch 50 matches whole or in part. I found it a fantastic tournament and changed my mind about the 48 team format after seeing how many of the smaller nations showed up with such tactical sophistication. There were many highlights in this tournament for me, including Canada’s amazing advance to the round of 16 including our dismantling of Qatar, the late winner against South Africa and a first half against 6th rated Morocco that left me proud as I could…

A former student of Canadian history George Grant has written a very interesting review of a new book by Byron Williston called Ecological Nation: Toward Peace, Order and Good Government. The subtitle of that book echoes the constitutional purpose of Canada, often quoted in contrast to the United States’ life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The reviewer, Bruce K. Ward, contrasts Williston’s book against Grant’s classic Lament for a Nation and looks at both of these work in the context of…

This triad has turned out to be surprisingly helpful. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I posted it a few days ago, because it answers some questions that have been bothering me for a long time. So here’s an attempt to capture where the idea is leading. Think of this as watching it evolve in real time. I’ve already changed some of the labels. If I were to sum up my work on dialogic containers, I would say it’s driven by not having the physical metaphor sit well with me. In facilitation…

I continue to think through the ideas of containers in dialogic work. Thanks to some conversations with a couple of colleagues I had a thought today about the three-cornered nature of the container. Inspired by the idea of a trialectic, we can describe containers as occupying a space between three points, depending on what they are, what work they are doing and the nature of the substrate in which they sit. The thee points are Designed, Built, and Emergent. Each of these three has a particular…

Back in April at the most recent Art of Hosting we convened, someone asked me “does the Art of Hosting make good faith assumptions about people?” I’ve been thinking about that question ever since, and not satisfied by my answer which, came from a more defensive posture. I think the short answer is, yes, in my practice I make good faith assumptions about people. But let’s expand that. I found a blog post of mine from twenty years ago that lays this down: The essence of his argument is this: in…

The last line from a prose poem by Grace Yee called “Living Among Trees” From the latest issue of Heat: …I know that when lightning strikes a giant sequoia and burns out its heart, you can step inside the trunk, look up at the sky and hold it.

Another rainy day, perhaps the last before the summer high pressure system establishes itself in the Gulf of Alaska. Despite the call for showers for the rest of the day, a thin line of cloud edge appears this morning out over the Strait and a robin is singing plaintively in the tree tops. It's that moment when it isn't clear if it is still rain or if the sounds coming from the trees are the drippings of the canopy. For the forest floor, it doesn't matter. This morning I have been reading the…

The view from my house across the Terminal Creek valley to Apodaca Ridge, which is shrouded with cloud blowing in off the Strait of Georgia. From time to time we get strange weather days here on the west coast. Yesterday three dense tracks on thunderstorms flowed north from California bringing rain, thunder and lightning to our region. Summer thunderstorms are quite rare here; it is more common to get one or two in the winter when there is much more convection in the atmosphere. Nevertheless I…

Questions are the central preoccupation of my work. I ask them of clients, we ask them together, we ask questions about questions to be sure that we are asking good questions and when we aren’t we ask questions about what would be the better questions. In uncertain situations, the quality of our inquiry often matters far more than the quality of our answers. So much of my work deals with supporting groups and organizations as they explore uncertainty, ambiguity, and unknowable futures, that…