How we show up matters

At the foundation, we have gone through an organisational evaluation and are, subsequently, following some of the recommendations of the evaluators, including to refine our strategy and way of working. As you can imagine, a lot of time is being spent by the team talking "about us" and there are voices that ask "when can we go back to doing our work?"

I totally get that. It can be frustrating to constantly look at ourselves and talk about us while we know that "out there" people could do a lot of good work with our funds. At least, we kept working with our current partners during this intense process of strategy refinement. There are foundations who totally shut down for months while working on their strategy.

Should we talk about hope? I believe we must.

After my last post and after a few weeks in which I was feeling despair and sometimes felt close to resignation, I now have had a week that was full of hope - not that I felt particularly hopeful, but rather in the sense that hope has come up as a topic in various discussions and also in what I read or talks I listened to. And I realised it has been a rather persistent topic for quite a while now.

For example, yesterday I listened to the TED talk by Lyla June, who talks about land management techniques of indigenous peoples in North America and that they have been able to live in a positive and generative relationship with the land. In essence, we know how to do it - humanity has a way of living as part of nature, not apart from. Most of us just forgot about it. This is also the hopeful message I'm getting from reading books like Sand Talk or Braiding Sweetgrass - in the latter, Robin Wall Kimmerer often describes how the way of life of indigenous peoples not only preserved nature, but was an active part in shaping nature in a healthy way, for example through harvesting techniques that did not only guarantee what we nowadays call sustainability (not to take more than can regrow), but that actively benefited the plant by, for example, thinning out growth and allowing for the remaining plants to be healthier.

Nothing to add ...

It's been a while since I have written on this channel. There are multiple reasons, including a holiday and a trip to Tanzania for work. But when I sat down today to write, I felt very unsure if I can and should add anything to the digital discussion. As so many of us, I have felt really heavy in the past few weeks, given what is going on in the world.

But one of the main reasons is this post by Raïsa M that showed up in my LinkedIn feed the other day:

An abductive approach to assessing success

Recent weeks I have been pondering how an abductive approach to evidence and success for a foundation like ours would look like. I was inspired to explore this thought by a few presentations by other foundations at a recent community of practice meeting at Philea.

In the relevant Wikipedia article, I found the following definition of abductive reasoning:

Transformational shifts

The approach described in this article by UNDP has some similarities with our thinking at Fondation Botnar. We also acknowledge complexity and the need for a systems lens to tackle some of the pressing problems of our time. We also work with a statement of intent (we call it strategic intent) that provides a sense of direction rather than an end point in the form of an objective.

At the same time, I tripped over the formulation of transformational shifts that the UNDP programme is using to describe what kind of change it is aiming for. And the shifts are described quite explicitly. From weak institutions to proactive institutions with strengthened capacities, for example, or from mounting tension and weak trust to an inclusive, equitable and peaceful society.

These statements seem so broad that one cannot really say anything against them. However, my bigger problem with this is that I do not believe we can actually clearly describe how a situation after a transformational shift could possibly look like. The reason for this is that we will change quite fundamentally ourselves and with this change also what we would consider to be good or better will shift. So if we describe a situation that is seen as better vis-a-vis our current standards and values, we might miss a large part of what is indeed possible but outside of what we can even imagine now.

Always striving …

This week we had a discussion about leadership with our leadership team that does not call itself a leadership team. Makes sense, right? Well, the background is that we organise ourselves in what we call 'a Teal way', building on work by Frederic Laloux. (Just as a disclaimer: I don't buy the spiral dynamics theory behind this work, but I am interested in the concept of self-organisation/self-management and distributed decision-making in organisations.) What this means is that we are organised in roles, circles of roles, and circles of circles. Decisions are whenever possible taken by a role that has the relevant accountabilities and only delegated up to a circle when the implications go beyond the individual role - essentially following a subsidiarity principle.

I could now write about whether this is a good way of organising or not and what the pros and cons are (e.g. why hierarchy still makes sense some time, which is the logic behind my first sentence above), but I'm not going to do that. Rather, I'm going to write about an observation I shared with my colleagues yesterday when discussing what leadership means in a self-managed organisation.

Systemic inquiries: an update

I am back in the office after quite a long break. Besides two relaxing weeks of holidaying in southern France and the Swiss mountains, I also spent a week moving two households to Basel, where we are now based. Visiting the North East of England, where we lived for almost 9 years, and packing up the house we owned there, was quite emotional. I am looking forward to this new chapter, though.

But I don't want to write holiday stories here, even though there would be a few. Rather, I would like to share a bit of an update about the process of establishing systemic inquiries on our priority themes at Fondation Botnar. I have written about the original idea of using a systemic inquiry logic here and here. Of course, the idea is evolving and will be evolving further. So the below is really a snapshot of where we are standing, in the spirit of learning-out-loud. I'd appreciate to hear your thoughts.

What do we mean?

I noticed that we often assume that other people understand the world in the same way we do - especially people who are close to us or people with the same cultural background. But I think I'm not wrong in saying that many people think their way of seeing the world is completely rational and if somebody does not agree then their reasoning is flawed. That does not mean that we would not consider other people's opinions and update our own thinking, but it is more that: there is an expectation that there is one right way of seeing things and, hence, of acting.

This might sound obvious but then again it isn't. I find myself every now and again in a situation where an assumption I made about how another person interprets something is totally wrong.

A process that creates itself

A few weeks ago I wrote about the idea to integrate strategic learning and evaluation in Fondation Botnar's philanthropic work through a systemic inquiry approach. I have been very inspired by Cathy Sharp's work on using an action inquiry approach to evaluation, which I mentioned in this post.

Why do we need a systemic inquiry approach?

Complex responsive processes of relating

Last week I had the pleasure to participate in the complexity and management conference at Roffey Park in the UK. The conference is the annual gathering of faculty, current candidates, and alumni of the Doctorate in Management (DMan) programme at the University of Hertfordshire Business School - which is open for other people like me to join and participate. And it is indeed a very participatory conference. Aside from the introductory day and the keynote lecture as good as no projector was used. The conference is largely about having conversations - starting at the bar before the inaugural dinner the night before the conference, continuing in groups throughout the conference, and culminating in a long, large-group conversation at the end.

Unstructured large group conversations are one of the methods used in the work of the group and also in the teaching and research in the DMan programme - and in the conference. Not surprisingly, then, is that one of the four pillars of theory behind the work is group analytic psychotherapy. These processes are quite unusual I would say - they are actually not too different from Warm Data Labs, as they do not give any instructions on how one has to behave - such as in many other methods that for example tell you how to listen to others (empathically) or how to feel (appreciative). Humans are taken as they are - messy, sometimes unpleasant, sometimes unhappy - and the group is given the task to engage with all of that in a reflective way. There is no moderator or facilitator or topic or question. What is interesting is that the group is invited to reflect on itself and what is happening in the group. Sometimes this can acquire some bizarr notions like when we talked about why there were so many empty chairs in the room (one group of people decided not to join the conversation) and then one person asked why we spend so much time talking about inanimate objects (the chairs.) It can induce quite a bit of anxiety if one is not used to engaging in this way with a large group of other people. I was at some points ready to leave the room. But at the same time it is extremely powerful as there are multiple dynamic reflective processes happening in parallel - the internal one inside each participant, the interaction between the participants, and the reflection of the participants about both what they experience inside and outside of themselves.

Reflections on a conversation

This week I had the privilege to co-host a conversation among a group of people who are all passionate about what one would colloquially call 'systems work' (I know, what does that even mean? But that is another reflection). They have all spent most of their careers thinking about and exploring different ways to act with a systems lens, be it from an evaluation perspective, from a facilitation perspective, from an organisational perspective, or from a consultant's perspective. Bringing all these experiences together led to a firework of thoughts building on each other, which made 90 minutes feel like the blink of an eye.

Among many things, one thing that stuck with me is that there is seemingly no time for reflection in most organisations. That is a sentiment that many shared including myself. But without reflection, there is no learning and, ultimately, no change. That reminds me of a piece of work a friend of mine did a few years ago in Gateshead, UK, which he aptly concluded with the statement that 'learning is a luxury.' I experience the same in my own organisation. Although I have to say that there is quite a lot of reflection compared to other places, it still always feels rushed and all spaces for reflections need to have a clear purpose and are time-bound. What I'm missing is a generous space for purposeless exploration and reflection. I know, that is a lot to ask, as there is work to do, lives to improve. But isn't the consequence of not taking the time to reflect that there is never any deep change happening? Aren't we then as a consequence just perpetuating a way of being and doing things that we are used to? If we don't reflect how we show up in the act of wanting to improve other people's lives, we perpetuate the situation that allows their lives to be miserable. Shouldn't we even question the aim for somebody to improve somebody else's live? And even more, somebody from the "Global North" to want to improve the lives of people from the "Global South"? As soon as you even take some minutes to reflect without a clear outcome in mind, as I do now, you might start to question actions and justifications for these actions that you just before thought were obvious.

Overwhelm and quick question

This week was intense. Two two-day workshops in a row. First two days on our strategic learning and evaluation, the next two days on general organisational and strategic issues. Somewhere in between a flight from Basel to Berlin. Not surprisingly, today I felt depleted, yet still went through a number of calls. Nothing creative however. The discussions, impressions and thoughts of the week need to percolate, mix, fragment, mix again. I need to sleep over it and spend some time in nature. Maybe go for a run. I cannot write anything intelligible today. Come back next week. But in general, thanks for sticking around.

Ah, and while you have two minutes free due to the short text, do you mind answering a few quick questions for me please? I have wanted to do this for a while. Please click here. Thanks!

The role(s) of evidence

The encounter with two of the people behind Tamkeen last week has stayed with me and reverberated. It has stimulated further thoughts, for example on the role(s) of evidence. It has gotten me to a point where I'm holding two seemingly contradictory truths around evidence.

There is the view that evidence is needed for us to show that we are spending our money well and that we are making a meaningful difference in the world together with our partners. This is the view of evaluation as a means of proving that change happened, of analysing our contribution to change, and of establishing value for money - are we doing those things that generate the greatest effect possible with the necessarily limited amount of money we have at our disposal? This is the thinking behind effective philanthropy. The field of evaluation has become really good at answering questions to this effect, and I'm particularly interested in how these relevant question can be answered while still seeing the world as complex and emergent rather than linear and predictable.

Meeting in our humanity

Could it be as easy as that? Could we shed all structures and conventions and simply meet each other in our humanity and engage in exploring each other's questions? Being a mirror to each other?

This week we spent a day with one of our partners, Tamkeen, exploring alternative ways of being in partnership beyond a traditional funder-grantee relationship. In particular, we wanted to explore how reporting could look like if it was not about a grantee reporting their progress to a funder, but about two equal partners coming together with an intent of joint learning.

On techno-optimism and techno-naivety

This week I participated in a webinar on artificial intelligence and its effects on philanthropy. I was stunned by two things: techno-optimism is still alive and kicking and I would even say is evolving into some sort of techno-naivety.

Particularly when I listened to the diverse proposals on how AI can support philanthropy I had to hold back not to send cynical comments in the chat. Alas, I still did, once or twice. The first comment I made when the speaker was talking about the cumbersome business of reading all these reports that come in from grantees and making sense of them. So, she contended, because that is so cumbersome, they often end up unread and the lessons in them unused. Hence, AI could help us to read and summarise reports and distil from them results of the activity and the most important lessons. My comment went along the lines of: why don't we rather get rid of reporting? It's a lot of work for the grantees and apparently of not much use to the funder.

We are liminal

At my organisation we currently have many meetings where we talk about our strategy and how we want to better define what we stand for and how we work. In those meetings, I often get a sense of utter confusion. And it is not only me being confused, but confusion is what I am sensing in the room. I was thinking a lot about why I was experiencing such a sensation. When observing what is going on in the meetings, I see that people seem to argue about a specific issue but somehow the arguments do not seem compatible, seem to use very different languages (while we all communicate in English most of the time). I struggle even to put this feeling in words, but it seems to me that we never come to a point where I have a sensation that we found each other and have been able to get to a felt consensus. It never really clicks. While I cannot see into the others and feel what the others feel, I often sense that nobody is really happy with what the outcome of these meetings are but given that we have to move forward we accept what's there. So we muddle our way forward.

As things go, I had a little epiphany of what is happening while running one morning (in my earlier life as a consultant I was sometimes wondering if I could put my runs on some clients' timesheets ...). The reason, I believe, for why the above phenomena are showing up, the reason for the confusion, is that the organisation is experiencing liminality. More specifically, the liminality of the threshold between a world that is linear, predictable, controllable and a world that is complex, non-linear, relational and largely unpredictable. (Of course these are not different worlds in a strict sense but rather a shift in our perception of how the world works - our beliefs and worldview.)

Strategy as action

This week at work we talked a lot about strategy. In particular we compared ‘Strategy as Planning’ with ‘Strategy as Action.’

‘Strategy as Planning,’ as suggested in this comparison developed by Zaid Hassan at the Complexity University, means that a strategy defines specific objectives, outcomes and measurable results that could then be used to decide if the objectives were achieved and the strategy was successful. Such an approach to strategy, we all agreed, would not do for the challenges we are aiming to tackle. As I mentioned before, our goal is to improve the wellbeing of young people in urban settings in low and middle-income countries. But what does wellbeing mean? And how can it be achieved? In our understanding, wellbeing is the result of many interacting factors and actors and might look very differently for young people in different parts of the world. So how should we define strategic objectives and results to be achieved in, say, five years time? Should we define how many young people’s “lives we improve” by 2030?

Self-care and instrumentalisation

It’s Friday afternoon and I have activated the out-of-office reply in my email (apparently one calls that OOO now). I’m going to be on holidays for two weeks. I will also pause my weekly reflections during this time.

The last few weeks have been very full. I would not say stressful just yet, but getting there. I started this job with a clear intent not to work like crazy but find a good balance of work and non-work time (to be clear, this is not about work-life-balance, work is a central part in my life and I’m enjoying it greatly). Working a lot is a thing in our organisation. Somebody described the situation as ‘heavy work overload.’ It’s really hard not to get sucked in, not to feel guilty to want to balance both work tasks and non work tasks and also within work, to balance reading, reflecting, meeting and production time. There is a huge lure to get into that space of busyness, with lots of things to do but not really making any progress.

Transforming philanthropy - some reflections

I just spent two days in Brussels to meet a group of people who also work for foundations to discuss our ideas on how foundations can become more transformative. The event was cryptically titled ‘Transformative Philanthropy in Transition’. I’m using this week’s email for a first reflection on these two days and share some observations.

Overall I enjoyed sharing experiences and hearing from other people who are in similar situations. It is encouraging to hear that we are not the only organisation struggling with the things we are struggling with. While this may sound obvious, it is still good to hear other people say it out loud. At the same time, others are more advanced in certain aspects while we might be more advanced in other aspects. In addition to the representatives from various foundations, Graham Leicester from the International Futures Forum and Indy Johar from Dark Matter Labs were also present for some of the discussions.

Systemic enquiries

One of the suggestions I brought into my organisation is to think of our work as a set of systemic enquiries through different, thematic portfolios. What is a systemic enquiry, though?

In simple words, I see it as a kind of 'learning by doing' approach, others simply call it adaptive management. Some might also call it action research. Each systemic enquiry would start with three simple questions:

Intelligence and adaptability

Last week on my long run I listened to two episodes of two different podcasts that somehow connected in a really interesting way for me. The first one was on AI and the second on evolution and adaptability. What connects the two for me is learning. Learning and adaptability are the same thing in my view, while intelligence is closely connected them.

The first podcast was titled “the AI Hoax” and featured Mazviita Chirimuuta, a philosopher of perception at the University of Edinburgh (here’s a link to the video, but it is also available as a podcast, the show is called Philosophy for our Times). Mazviita argues that human-like AI is and will remain a fantasy. I’m not going to try to reproduce her argument but she essentially argues that the connection between intelligence and life is stronger than previously believed and, hence, cannot be matched by any computer-based algorithm lacking life (there is something tautological in this argument now writing it down, but I cannot really put my finger on it - also not that important). Towards the end of her talk, she makes the point that while technologies like ChatGPT seem to outperform humans in analysing and synthesising vast amounts of data - while articulating themselves quite well - they are very very narrow in what they can do and not adaptable at all. She likens it to a car that is much better than a horse in transporting humans across long distances, but it requires a specific infrastructure to do so (roads, fuel stations or chargers, etc.) and is not very adaptable to that regard - it cannot adapt to a different terrain in the way a horse can or suddenly get a different type of fuel. And it will also not naturally evolve to be able to do so on its own.

Of indicators and experiences

As I sit with the topic of abstraction, I thought I'd reflect on it a bit more, now moving from the space of how we define our work internally to the space of 'evidence' on the difference we make. This is obviously a multi-faceted aspect, evidence. Yet I want to highlight one particular aspect of it connected to abstraction.

I recently read an article about indicators and how they have become the central tenet to evidence (Merry 2011). The article described the history of indicators and how they got to become as prominent as they are now. The main point Merry makes is that indicators are simplified numerical representations of complex phenomena that somehow imply objectivity. She contends that the political debate around observed changes is shifted to a technical definition of indicators that make progress auditable, seemingly objectively assessable, and comparable. Indicators are independent of context, i.e., can be used to compare different contexts and aggregated across contexts. The consequence, Merry finds, is that the deployment of such statistical measures replaces political debate with technical expertise. Merry makes the important point that "indicators typically conceal their political and theoretical origins and underlying theories of social change and activism. They rely on practices of measurement and counting that are themselves opaque" (p.84).

In the abstract

This week we had a meeting with a large part of our team where we discussed among other things how we want to work (our 'working principles') and how we want to engage with the world (what we for the moment call our 'modes of engagement') going forward. We had discussions with different contrasting opinions about individual formulations, words, or the number of principles. Each opinion was coherent and based on both the person's experience and often also explicitly on some literature. Yet what was striking for me was that the whole discussion was happening in a purely abstract and conceptual space.

The set up is that we are a foundation based in Switzerland while our activities are aiming at improving the conditions of children and young people in low and middle income countries in the Global South. Of course all of us have visited all or some of the countries we are funding activities in or have even lived in some of them. Yet I still feel we don't have common reference points, shared stories about the life of the young people we aim to 'serve' that underpin the discussions we are having in Switzerland and in a way legitimate our discussions.

What does success look like?

Last week I started writing about my ideas of how to capture the difference we make as a foundation. One of the things I have been thinking about this week was the question of how we define success. This is what I have come up with in a first draft version:

We could define success as tangible improvements in young people’s material, relational, and subjective wellbeing.

What difference do we make?

In the spirit of working-out-loud (and learning-out-loud), I will repurpose this weekly email and start sharing thoughts, reflections, ideas, sketches from my new job. Depending on whether this will lead to people unsubscribing en masse or, indeed, more people subscribing (please share with colleagues if you like what you read), I will then decide if I should move my writing to another platform or not.

Also, I’m trying to use as plain language as I can, trying not to use terms that carry the heaving baggage of being defined in different contradicting ways - this in itself is an experiment and I’m curious what you think of how well I’m doing with that. And how helpful or distracting it is.

A tension with intention - again

Here I am, back thinking about intention, intentionality, preferred direction of change, who is setting this direction, etc. A tension that is not going away and is worth pondering and writing about regularly. And I'm anew standing in the middle of that tension with the new job I just started.

But let me explain. I am talking a lot about Theories of Change with my colleagues, and how we at Fondation Botnar can formulate viable ToCs so that they are actually evaluable and we can at some point say that we are making a difference for the people we aim to make a difference for, and how we can learn and adjust to make that difference we make more significant. Now I am not an adherent of a very structured, linear-causal way of approaching theory of change. To start with, I tell people to write down what the current situation is, what they want to do, why or what for they want to do that, and how they know it worked or not. Based on that, we can then go and start to add detail and think about how to measure certain things. We do that on different levels (organisation, systemic arenas, thematic portfolios) and then weave these different levels together.

Organisations, roles and meadows

I had a beautiful conversation this morning about organisations and roles within organisations. Traditionally, roles have been defined by describing tasks, responsibilities, etc. These descriptions usually remain fairly stable and people who are hired into such roles often stay in these roles for quite a long time.

Organisations who aim to respond to the complexities they are dealing with by adjusting the way they organise tend to think differently about roles. Roles become more fluid, role descriptions less constraining. Roles are seen as enablers or scaffolds for people to meaningfully engage in an organisation. Within these organisations, more attention is given to the relationships between different roles and a role and the context. Roles can evolve over time, often driven by the person who holds the role themselves. Hence, there is a continuous clarification and negotiation between roles, roles are continuously recreated and evolving as a result of the interactions in the organisation.

On Causality

My brake from writing ended up to be longer than intended. As I'm going through quite a transformation in my life, both personally and professionally, it has been difficult to find some time to sit down and write. I also have less time to ruminate and hence fewer topics to write about … But let me stop finding excuses and jump into today's email. Just so much: I'm not sure I can keep up the weekly rhythm with my emails at the moment.

One topic I have been thinking about recently is causality – actually I have been thinking about it on and off for many years, but it feels like recently I have had a significant insight. And as it is with every insight, it feels so obvious now with hindsight that I am almost embarrassed to say that, while I have been aware of the idea on an intellectual level for a while, I have only really internalised its significance now.

Photos from my glacier trek

I spent the last few days trekking on the Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland, from the Jungfraujoch via the Konkordiaplatz to the Fiescher Alp. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience – it was my first glacier trekking experience although I have hiked a lot in the alps before.

So there are no deep musings or intellectual explorations happening this week. I’m just going to share some photos for you to enjoy. Also, I will be off for the next two weeks, exploring Scotland. So probably no emails, unless I’m struck by a particularly share-worthy insight.

The premises we re-enact

I had quite a few responses to my email last week and I want to pick up and respond to one in particular. Chris Corrigan has written a whole blog post in response and suggested to start a conversation. I want to take him up on this. So in order to follow the conversation it makes sense to first read Chris’s post and then come back here to read my response to it. I will also copy my response into his comment section (I don’t have a comment section, Chris, as this is a newsletter, not a blog!)

First I just want to say that I was a little bemused when he identified my reflections as similar to the patterns of people who are new to complexity work. After all, I have been studying systems and complexity for the better part of 20 years now. But giving it some further thought, I indeed know that there is still so much I don’t know. So, I take it and gladly see myself as a beginner.

Taking a stance

We can always question ourselves and ask if we are really sure enough about the validity of what we think. This can be paralysing. I have been there and still often find myself there. But what I also realised is that sometimes I need to pause questioning and take a stance to enable myself to take a step.

Too often, I fall into the trap of questioning every new insight I have and asking myself if that insight goes deep enough. Every insight is still biased through my cultural coding, my upbringing, my context, etc. Yet by the very nature of being human we will never reach a place of ‘pure’ unbiased understanding. So we need to strike a balance between self-critical reflection and believing that we found some ground that is solid enough to step on and move forward.

Sensing Change continued

I asked in my last weekly email and on social media how we know that living systems (societies, organisations, ecosystems) are changing on a level that Dana Meadows called ‘paradigm’ (Meadows 1999) and Gregory Bateson called ‘attitude’ (Bateson 1966). I received a quite a few interesting responses.

One thing that is clear is that in order to find some sort of answer to the question, we first need to find the right framing. We need to get some clarity about some terms. For example ‘know’ or ‘change’ or ‘effect’. Also we somehow need to decide what we mean when we say something is becoming ‘better’. The two aspects of ‘knowing’ and ‘change’ are linked through the idea of learning.

Sensing change

Last week I posted the following questions on LinkedIn and Twitter:

How can we know that living systems (societies, organisations, ecosystems) are changing on a level that Dana Meadows called ‘paradigm’ and Gregory Bateson called ‘attitude’? And how can we determine if they change to the ‘better’ or the ‘worse’ (whatever these words may mean)? 

On the outsider

I just spent some time in Georgia, talking with people in two municipalities to initiate a pilot Local Economic Development (LED) process. My colleagues and I have worked the last 16 months with organisations in Georgia to better understand how LED can be improved in the country. One activity that has come out of that deliberation is to run a pilot on municipal level.

So here we are, coming in as the outside 'experts', which is unfortunately often how we are perceived. But what is the value of external people like me coming into a system like a city and work with the local people like the local government, business representatives or associations?

On intentionality, continued

I got good feedback on my email last week about intention so I decided to stick with the topic for this week. Of course my friend Bhav is correct when he responded with "No, everything we do is systemic, whether with intention or not!!!" Everything we do has consequences in the system. Even the smallest stone that falls into the water creates ripples. And everything is connected to everything else. I guess when I said that "Everything we do with intention is not systemic," I meant it in a sense that if we want to achieve a specific systemic change our intention often leads us in the wrong direction, to rather unintended changes.

Michael asked in his reply if intention necessarily needs to be linked to a purpose. Or whether it is more a way of choosing between different options for action without necessarily having a specific outcome in mind. This made me curious about the origins of the word intention. On etymonline.com I found this:

On intentionality

I recently said: Everything we do with intention is not systemic. I can’t really remember in what context I said it but I remember that I was surprised myself when hearing me say that. So here a bit of an exploration of this statement.

If we do something intentionally, we do it on purpose, consciously. I think. We do it because we expect a certain reaction. We turn the light switch so the light turns on. Or we add sugar to a cake so it gets sweet. These are banal examples of course, as they are fairly obvious. Yet we generally use the same way of thinking for more complex problems. We buy electric cars to reduce our carbon footprints. We do it with one particular causal connection in mind, but often ignore all the other causal connections that are also attached to that decision.

Two Haikus

Something short this week. I spent most of the week in my second five-day retreat with Philip Shepherd for the 'the embodied present process' facilitator training I'm doing this year. Here are two haikus I wrote during the week, inspired by some of the sharings in the group.

Wander in wonder

A wondering in kinship

The trees as brothers

Ruminations on imagination

Just a few ruminations on imagination this week. It has come up a couple of times recently and I haven’t really made up my mind on it.

A friend of mine has sent me a piece called ‘Imagination is not creativity’, which I quite enjoyed, from a Substack account called “Applied Complexity Science” (not sure who is behind it, actually). The author contends that “not only is imagination not sufficient for creativity, it can indeed hamper it.” This is the main argument:

Finding closure with purpose

I was given this little book by Simon Sinek called Together is Better (Sinek 2016) and asked to choose a quote from the book. It’s a little story book that tells the story of three kids that meet because they get chased out of a playground by a nasty kid. At the same time, it’s intended to be a fable for leaders.

I struggled to choose a quote. They are all interesting and some jumped at me and I said, “yeah, nice!” But all of them left that sensation that not all has been said, that there was more to it, that if we take it like that, as a statement of truth, we are missing something. That reminded me of something Gregory Bateson, one of the intellectual giants on whose shoulders I find myself standing rather often, wrote:

Why systems work feels counter-intuitive

Some people told me that my last email I sent last week did end up in their Junk mail folder or did not arrive at all. I’m struggling with some technical issues, which is why this email comes from a different email address than the usual mj@systemic-insight.net. If you have not seen last week’s email, you can read it here (it’s worth it!): On knowing and understanding. You can access all previous emails in my archive.

On to this week’s reflections.

On knowing and understanding

I have read a very interesting article recently on a concept called Tamkeen that is practised in Marokko. The article is called Beyond the magic – growing our understanding of societal metamorphosis and was written by Karima Kadaoui (Tamkeen Community Foundation for Human Development) and Louis Klein (European School of Governance – EUSG).

In the article, they describe Tamkeen as follows:

What if ...?

I am spending this week with Philip Shepherd at a deep dive into his Embodied Present Process. I am enjoying the embodiment work that I started a year or so ago (I wrote about it earlier here and here). At the start of the event last night all participants introduced themselves and when it was my turn I shared that through my work on embodiment but also on Warm Data and by exploring other related fields I feel like waking up to a whole new part of the world I simply wasn't aware of before.

Later I reflected why this new awakening is happening now. I think it is largely because I adopted a new stance vis-a-vis new kinds of knowledge. Earlier, coming from a natural science background, things needed to be based on established science, ideally verified through some sort of peer-reviewed publications, etc. Everything else essentially did not exist, was pushed into the realm of the esoteric or worse, humbug. My new stance towards new (to me) fields of knowledge and experience (like embodiment or even things like astrology) is different. It is based on the questions, "What if it were true and just not provable / not yet proven in a traditionally accepted way?" and "What would I miss out on if I was just to dismiss this?" Based on these questions I'm more likely to plunge into new things like the embodiment work. And this does not mean that these bodies of knowledge (no pun intended) are in any way flaky. People like Philip Shepherd have spent their lives making experiences and systematically documenting them, exchanging with others and further develop the field. Just dismissing all this work as 'unscientific', as I would have done just a few years ago, would be such a waste, no? What would happen if we acted as if it were true? What is the risk? I'm doing that more and more and allowing myself to experience new things like a rather counter-cultural journey to explore my body's wisdom and this giving me a lot of new positive experiences.

On being right

What does it mean to be right? And what right does it give us over others if we think we are right? Is there a right? I have just been mulling over these questions for a bit. I grew up and was socialised in a system that values objectivity and scientific explanations of things. Indeed, I studied environmental sciences at one of the top natural science universities on the planet. So when science established something as ‘true’ I generally tend to believe that it is true.

In his book ‘The Matter with Things‘ (McGilchrist 2021), Iain McGilchrist asks: What is truth? Being McGilchrist, he thereby differentiates truth as seen by the left hemisphere and by the right hemisphere of the brain:

Can we play?

I realised that I am not a very playful person. Particularly, I find it hard to be playful in seemingly serious situations, like in workshops I am facilitating or meetings I am participating in. I can play within the rules but I am not very good in playing with the rules. I was seeing a personal trainer yesterday to help me with some workouts I was trying to get into that I found in a book. He basically said: you don’t need a book, just play with your body and you will feel what works – don’t limit yourself to prescribed workouts. I’m struggling with that as it would require me to imagine what I could try. I don’t feel very creative in that. Also, I often have this feeling that it might be awkward and I might fail. But then, what does failing mean if not an opportunity to learn? And what is the risk, really? What is the worst that could happen? I could embarrass myself in front of a group of people in a workshop. So what? We might just laugh and shrug it off.

Play and playfulness are very important in complex living systems.

Thinking about purpose

During a discussion with some Warm Data folks today I was exploring the idea of purpose as a constraint versus purpose as an attractor – something people in an organisation can attune to.

Purposes as constraints are often very well defined with lots of words. You find words like 'through' in there and often it describes who will 'benefit' from actions guided by the purpose. When people in an organisation with such a purpose work out possible activities you often hear the argument: "no, we cannot do that, because it is not part of our purpose."

Can we just go on?

Last week I was in a meeting with a high-ranking official of the Georgian government. We talked about local economic development (LED). The meeting was productive, even though there was quite a bit of scepticism from the official’s side about our approach to LED, which is different to how LED has been understood in Georgia so far. As we are getting towards the end of the meeting, the official suddenly stopped and said something along the lines of, “and we talk here about these things while not far away children are dying.” This statement was followed by a rather long silence as it came quite out of the blue. Nobody was sure how to respond and yet we all knew she was right.

Georgia was scarred by a similar conflict with Russia in 2008 that luckily ended more quickly. As a reaction to skirmishes in the Russian backed separatist region of South Ossetia between local separatist forces and the Georgian army, Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Georgia on 8 August 2008, capturing not only two separatist regions but also occupying non-disputed territory, including four cities. On 12 August, a ceasefire agreement between Georgia and Russia was negotiated by the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Where is the change?

Where is the change? I have stumbled over this question when I was thinking about monitoring and evaluation recently. How to evaluate the effect of an organisation or an action? Where to look? It is actually not so trivial. Traditionally one would just decide what change one wants to see and then build a causal chain from your actions to that change, applying an ‘if … then’ logic. Unfortunately, complex living systems do not follow this type of logic.

I cannot find the exact quote but Nora Bateson sometimes quotes her grandfather William Bateson who apparently said something like: in a living system, when one thing changes, everything else changes too. This makes intuitive sense if you believe that in these systems everything is connected with everything.

On learning

I have been thinking about learning quite a bit recently, partly because it is a constant presence in my own thinking and being, partly because I have been exploring Gregory Bateson’s different types of learning recently with friends in the Warm Data Community. Yesterday, I was in a webinar where three projects were presented and how they assess systemic change. For me this was an interesting case study on learning.

Of the three projects that presented, two were very similar. Their aim was to help farmers to sell their produce into higher value markets. In order to be able to do that, the farmers needed to get better inputs like seed, fertilisers and pesticides and they needed to be connected into global value chains for the higher value produce. So the projects analysed the situation and they found the bottlenecks, which they then tried to tackle by working with various actors in the market and for example putting in place new business models or working on regulations. The projects had a lot to learn as there very many problems showing up once they started to engage with the situation – so they had to keep an open mind, keep on top of what is happening, and keep adapting.

On being present

Being present in the moment is a topic that has been on my mind recently. In a way, it is connected to the question of how I can be happy in my life amidst all the difficulties and challenges we are facing as individuals, in our relationships, as families, as societies and as the human species as a whole.

As you might have guessed, I’m a very reflective person. I reflect a lot on what is going on, and on how I fit into and contribute to these larger going-ons. Also, I am a person who is quite keen on, both, ‘doing the right thing’ and ‘doing things right’. So my inner reflections are almost exclusively dominated by questions on how I should act or, conversely, why the way I behave is not the right way – as it never is. If driven to the extreme, the way I live life almost as a whole – grace to the circumstances I was born into – can be seen as wrong. To say it in a harsh way: my way of life is built on the suffering of others, historically. The question is how much I can change about this and how far this prevents me from living my own life in a fulfilling way.

Being part of a wider evolution

I am acutely aware that I have not yet written this week. I’m going through an intense time at work, which is really interesting and challenging. As always, the challenge is trying to integrate where I am at personally into work that has to happen within a system which does things in a way I might not necessarily agree with – in my case the system of international development.

Instead of a weekly email I would like to share a conversation that I was reading this morning. The conversation tackles the question, “How can we transform mindsets to address climate change?” It is between Laureline Simone, Founder of One Resilient Earth and Thomas Bruhn of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Study. I met Thomas last summer when I spent time in Potsdam and I have also written quite a bit about his book in some of my weekly emails.