Chris Corrigan

I don’t shy away from the fact that diversity is essential to creating processes that are inclusive and give us as much situational awareness and access to distributed intelligence as possible. The current attacks on diversity from ideological perspectives are direct attacks on making groups of people smarter. If you narrow the opportunity and the resources to look at and understand situations you limit the scope of possible action, and you make yourself a lot less intelligent and responsive…

A baby barred owl seen last Wednesday by Terminal Creek, near our home. These owls breed every year in the same place and the babies sit in the trees and wheeze at passers-by until their hoot-makers come in. Today I turn 58 and In a couple of weeks I will have lived on this island for 25 years. Being here for that length of time – a duration that has long exceeded anywhere else I’ve lived – tunes one to the finer rhythms and changes of time and place. Today, the thing I’m noticing is the change…

The iron fence around the head office of the Canada Life Insurance Company in Toronto. I painted this fence twice during my summer jobs in 1987 and 1988. It was the required shit job of the summer students who came to work on the building maintenance crew, assigned to us by an authoritarian jerk of a boss who made sure the painting happened during the hottest and most humid week of the summer. This was also the company that cruelly fired downsized my father four years later, which I mention…

For a long time I’ve been trying to practice a kind of harm reduction to my addiction to digital devices. I love reading, books most of all, but when I’m travelling or when I just HAVE to get a hold of something that would otherwise take a while to arrive in physical form, ereaders are the way to go. The problems are of course increasingly down to both eshittification and the dopamine hits that come from how our digital devices lock our attention. Enshittification means that our devices are…

On May 1 we left for a month in France. When we returned we got the weekend at home which meant hastily harvesting spinach and making 15 spanakopitas for the freezer and a bunch of spinach pesto. Then it was off again on Tuesday morning and a few days of work in Toronto and then a lovely weekend with my brother and sister and nieces and nephew in Simcoeside, north of the city. And then yesterday home in time for a Carmena Bowena rehearsal. The less said about that the better. I was dirt tired…

Eroding democracy happens with a slow and persistent trickle of cynicism and mistrust of citizens by their governments. In this review of Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public by Peter MacLeod and Richard Johnson, Kyle Wyatt reflects: Democracy is not an idea, not a value, not a right; it’s a practice.” For far too long, citizens have been discouraged from that practice by duly elected governments on the left and the right?—?and by the civil servants and professional consultants…

In the absence of changes derived from time, how does a person find novelty in the horizontal changes of meaning and space? That seems to be one of the questions behind Solvej Balle’s series of books, On The Calculation of Volume, which explores a person’s experience of a date that perpetually repeats. I haven’t read the books yet, but on the strength of this review, I’m all in. If you have read these, let me know. On writing about what frightens you, Josh Weil says: “But all of the dangers…

I spent yesterday afternoon on a phone call with my friends and colleagues Jenn Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle talking about our next offering of Reimagining Education, to be held in Peterborough Ontario, near Toronto, October 16-18. Our conversation was very much about the role of the practitioner in fields and contexts of uncertainty and complexity and how our work aims to support the capacity of practitioners who shape those systems. This is an Art of Hosting, and its focus is one…

I’m still delightfully jet lagged from the France trip meaning, early nights and early mornings, which suits me fine. It gives me time to read and reflect and to walk, this morning taking time to make a detailed eBird list of the species around me (about 25 this morning, many new flycatchers on the scene), and sit by the sea and catch up with neighbours and their dogs. I was walking a bit this morning with Augusto Cugnotti’s post in my mind, “The Container is Borrowed” in which he reflects on a…

Dougald Lamont: Instead of addressing the economic crisis of the pandemic, monetary stimulus made it worse. It has contributed to a global affordability crisis in housing, a private insolvency crisis for tens of millions of people, provided the weathiest people in society with amounts ranging from hundreds of billions to trillions to buy more property and companies, all while increasing worker layoffs. It created the economic distortions and crisis that our countries are all living through,…

The Var River below the high village of Touët in France. This is going to continue the series of posts that began with The Inundated Delta, which was a response to Dave Snowden’s thoughtful position of the Art of Hosting in the context of anthro-complexity. I want to name the four most influential streams that have shaped my professional life. This is important because it names my intellectual and practitioner lineage so people understand where I am coming from and what questions have formed my…

Coming to the end of our holidays here in France and after a short day of walking some 13kms around Monaco, I made it back to our rental to watch Spurs battle Everton in the final Premier League match of the season. It should never have come to this, but a win or a draw was necessary to stave off relegation and with West Ham winning 3-0, we could not afford to lose. It was a match which offered mostly one way traffic from Spurs but this season has had enough counter attacking disappointments…

Walking and birdwatching on the Camargue, near Saintes Marie I have just finished reading Frederic Mistral‘s Mirèio in English through a florrid but free translation hosted at Project Gutenberg. I was slowly reading it during the two weeks we spent in Provence on this trip to the south of France. It’s amazing. It is an epic poem, about the silk maker Mirèio who comes from a a family that owns land and livestock, and who falls involve with an itinerant basket weaver called Vincen. It’s a classic…

Posting a link to Corina Enache’s LinkedIn post, because I don’t think she has a blog. This one on purpose, with a hat tip to David Graeber’s work, is important. I was ruminating on this post as I walked in the Dentelles Massif yesterday in Provence. Here is a long quote: Purpose-driven culture, under [Graeber’s] lens, is a moral vocabulary the organisation uses to manage its people not a gift of coherence, engagement and direction. It reframes compliance as meaning and it asks you not just to…

Above Calanque Port-Pin looking back to the Cap Canaille near Cassis. I’m in the south of France on the first leg of a holiday that combines a few days in Cassis, a seven day walk through the villages of Provence and then some travelling and visiting of places like Arles, Avignon and elsewhere in the region. While we are in Cassis we have been hiking on the sea cliffs, which is my very favourite form of walking. Around here the cliffs are limestone escarpments that rise up out of the…

Over the past several weeks, Dave Snowden has been writing a very extensive series of long blog posts that serve as a watershed declaration of the state of his work thus far in the field of anthro-complexity. The posts both define what the field is and make sharp distinctions about what it isn’t, especially in relation to practices, ontologies, and theories that sit adjacent or close to it. I believe this represents a moment where Snowden is making a strong declaration about what…

We are just about to begin Day Two of our bi-annual Art of Hosting here in Vancouver. Yesterday, we introduced participants to the four-fold practice of the art of hosting (presence, participation, hosting and co-creation) as a generative framework for designing participatory meeting and supporting participatory leadership, and we also taught the Chaordic Path, as a way into confronting the dynamics of self-organization in meetings. This teaching in particular is a bit of a gateway into…

The leadership candidates for the Conservative Party of BC vow to roll back indigenous rights and stop returning land to First Nations. and also object to being called colonizers, which begs the question about what they think colonization is. Billionaires are colonizing our skies. If you think this is bad, the night skies will soon be populated with a million Starlink satellites and thousands more from other companies and nations. And it gets worse as there are companies like Reflect Orbital…

TSS Rovers Men 0 – 1 Langley United Men TSS Rovers Women 1 – 2 Langley United Women Our BC Premier League season continues to rocket out of the gate with our fourth matches of 14, and the first ones at our iconic home, Swangard Stadium. This was always set to be a spicy battle, because the Langley men’s team pipped us to the title last year on the last kick of the season, a 90+5′ penalty against the Whitecaps Academy that saw them claim three points in the final game, beating us by one. As a…

The photo above is an astonishing reflection of the triple arch of the Milky Way and our solar system. I LOVE LOVE LOVE Hank Green’s gentle awe as he reflects on the photos returned from the Artemis crew. Enjoy this video. Remembering Norma Bailey’s floating store at Hot Springs Cove in Clayoquot Sound. I visited that place in 1989, the first time I ever came to this coast. Animals share signals across space. Just a few beautiful things from this little planet that is doing its best despite us…

The World Bank now thinks that nations should be setting industrial policy instead of just opening up their markets to whatever predatory investment comes along. Sorry about the last 50 years, I guess. The description on the video says “Here is an extremely rare shellac master “test pressing” of the unissued (on 78) take 2 of “Cross Road Blues” (a.k.a. “Crossroad Blues”) by delta blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson, recorded in 1936.” The sound has to be heard to be believed. There is…

I have been paying close attention to my sleep patterns, aided by my Apple Watch and a new CPAP machine which is helping sleep more deeply.  As a result I am becoming increasingly familiar with how sleep works, from the phases of REM, to the waves of light and deep sleep I go through. I've been surprised to learn that waking up is a normal and healthy part of sleep (although waking up because you can't breathe is not, hence the sleep therapy). So things catch my eye, and today's rabbit hole i...

Toronto Maple Leafs 1 – 3 Ottawa Senators The Leafs' season has been over for a while now and a six game losing streak coming into this game sealed their fate. The season has sputtered to a disappointing end. It seemed to just fall apart from the very beginning with lots of two goal leads surrendered early in the season. I blame the departure of Mitch Marner, but the late season injury to Auston Matthews did help. And then down the stretch, goalie Stolarz hurt his knee. So tonight Hildby was ...

The end of Viktor Orban’s reign had all the hallmarks of similar transitions from the authoritarian governments of Eastern Europe thirty years ago: a largely peaceful transition of power because the people finally decided that they would be ungovernable by this particular tyrant. Autocracy runs on fear—on the assumption that enough people, confronted with sufficient consequences, will decide that compliance is safer than truth. What dismantled Orbán’s operation was the accumulation of individ...

My buddy Tenneson, with whom I have been murmurating for a couple of decades, posted a quote today from Meg Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science that reminds me why I had walked a world of theory-informed practice for the past 30 years: Organizations are living systems (not machines). Living systems have a way of organizing themselves (Starlings as an example — don’t seem to have a boss or a planning committee). If we learned more about how living systems organize themselves, what would ...

Ann Linnea goes for a walk in the woods on her island home in the Salish Sea, 160km to the south of me. She loves spring, as do I. The sea lions have started to leave here and there are only a few left meaning that, for the first time since November, there is actually silence at night. And like Ann also observes, our two most common early warblers are back, the yellow-rumped and the orange-crowned. On top of that the dominant sparrow call is now the white crowned. Over the past week they have...

On the eve of a tyrant threatening to totally eliminate one of our planet’s civilizations, the astronauts returning home from the far side of the moon shared this photo of an earthset. These two events offer us a choice.

Five basic morning practices for your brain It’s a bit AI-y, but the linked studies are interesting.

Forge FC 2 -0 Athletico Ottawa. I grew up in Toronto. Everything west of Roncesvalles Road to me was the bleak untreed windy and cold suburbs. My mom grew up in Etobicoke where my grandparents lived their whole lives. We used to travel out along the 401 to Burnhamthorpe Road and down onto Shaver Drive to go visit them a few times a year. I enjoyed the times I spent with my grandparents, but, having grown up in the leafy streets of North Toronto, I never grew to like the big wide open skies, a...

You are making it work — your online profile is finally taking off. While others have been fumbling for the right brand, you have been quietly developing a presence. It’s not just an identity, it’s trust brought to life. If you just read that paragraph and thought “ChatGPT wrote that” you’d be wrong but I praise your ear and eye. I wrote it based on the Chat GPT cliches that are obvious to anyone who writes Kelly Notaras goes into more detail. If you are letting your chat bot write for you, t...