Chris Corrigan

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...

It’s the opening day for our 2025 TSS Rovers season. Canada’s only supporter owned football club, playing in the newly rebranded BC Premier League take to the field tonight away to Burnaby FC. We are fielding a very new team of men’s players, moving on from the past four years where we were a destination for many players wanting to get in the shop window thanks to our record of participation in the Canadian Championship. We were pipped at the last minute for the league title last year when La...

Dave Snowden concluded his six-part series on the Channel and the Estuary this week. He used gangster movies and TV Series to illustrate the different kinds of contexts in which people are sense-making. The series contrasted the categorical ambiguity and gradients represented by the ecology of a tidal estuary with the managed and ordered passageway through uncertainty represented by the marked channel. The metaphors are meaningful for coastal people, and anyone who has had to navigate these k...

Earlier this month, Cynthia Kurtz announced that she was re-launching her Participatory Narrative Inquiry practicum courses.  This a really good opportunity to discover this set of practices and approach to working with stories.   I was part of her first deep dive cohort a few years ago and it really was good.It stretched me and grounded me in this approach.  Cynthia is intending to offer these course three times a year starting in May. If you are curious about PNI, the introductory course is...

San Diego Wave 3 – 1 Portland Thorns Whatever is happening on the San Diego training ground, it’s paying off. The Wave played a disciplined, relentless, smothering style against Portland all night, giving the visitors little time to think about what they were doing, while at the same time exploiting space and creating chance after chance. If it wasn’t for Messner in the Thorns goal, this score would have been far less flattering to Portland. The Wave led through excellent team play and indivi...

On the advice of several people I have been reading Vanessa Machado d’Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and I have reached the end of “The Most Important Chapter” which outlines the seven key tools that d’Oliveira invites the reader to use as they navigate the text. The seventh tool is an invitation to a kind of lectio divina (my framing) on a text called “Co-Sensing with Radical Tenderness.” I invite you to visit that link, read the text and follow the exercise there, which is different from th...

Vancouver Goldeneyes 0 – 2 Boston Fleet The Boston Fleet have made a remarkable turnaround this season. From missing the playoffs last year, they had a chance to go to the top of the standings tonight if they could pick up three points against the Vancouver Goldeneyes. With Aerin Frankl in net, recording her sixth shutout of the season, they won and went to the top of the table. Vancouver can’t beg for a win lately. They are on a dismal run of form right when they can’t afford to be losing ga...

Lots going on around here. Spring has sprung, we’ve prepared our beds for veggies and flowers. Bird song is changing in the morning, with creepers wheezing out their little songs and the first yellow-rumped warblers calling out to each other. (Birders sometimes refer to these birds as butter-butts!). I have a plumbing crew tearing apart one of my bathrooms because the old plumbing in this house fails from time to time and a leak has been discovered. It’s not the first and given the original m...

The cliffs at the end of the world, near Sagres, Portugal. Tottenham 0 – 3 Nottingham Forest I moved to Cheshunt, Herts, in England in 1978, just six weeks after the English football season ended. Under the guidance of Brian Clough, Nottingham Forest won the First Division that season, setting them up for an epic couple of years in which they were the dominant force in European football. Tottenham on the other hand had been dire. They were relegated to the second division in 1976-77, and won ...

I am so grateful that I can make music. It’s a language that allows me to speak in the pure vocabulary of emotion with people. It allows me to relate to people in a way that is totally different from every other form of social interaction, even sport, which comes closest.  And it allows me to connect with myself as well. A bunch of musicians have put together a short film that aims to tell you why they make music. If you are not a musician, it’s almost impossible for me to tell you WHY I make...

From Dave's post today on the relationship between anthro-complexity, Human System Dynamics and the OODA Loop.:  If orientation is constitutive of observation, and if the relevant unit of analysis in most complex situations is not the individual but the community of practice, the organisation, the institution, then the question becomes: where does collective orientation live? The answer is not inside any individual generative model. It is distributed across the epistemic landscape, the struct...

Tottenham 3 (5) v 2 (7) Athletico Madrid It might be the last Spurs match in Europe for a while. Having navigated the league stage of the Champions League with style, Spurs were dire in the round of 16 versus Atletico Madrid.  Last week in Madrid a series of goalkeeping mistakes from Kinsky and then defensive lapses from everyone else put us down 5-2 in the first leg.  Returning to London, the crowd was surprisingly loud at home. After a week in which we barely survived a tie against Liverpoo...

A screen cap from the video of Thibaut Garcia & Antoine Morinière playing Bach together with tremendous groove. Brian “Ponch” Rivera writes a lot about the OODA loop, learned from his experience as a fighter pilot. His latest post dives into the OODA Loop basketball and Constraints Led Approaches to coaching in sport. I like most of what he writes about but one thing kind of sticks in my craw is his use of the word “harmony.” I’ll quote him here: Before we go anywhere, we need to kill a commo...

Dave continues and concludes his posts on anthro-complexity, with an important post that captures my feelings exactly about the role of the facilitator-host-practitioner*: When the practitioner’s contribution is methodological rather than interpretive, the basis of their authority shifts. They are not authoritative because they can see what participants cannot; they are useful because they can design conditions that the system itself cannot easily design from within its existing patterns. Tha...